I use windows ME i had a version of suse linux on my computer last spring i toke it off and now i wonder why is linux better than windows if there is some feature that is so great i haven't seen it if you have any comments not just "cause it is" and stuflike that answer please

First off, I must be truthful. I'm learning this as I go. I'm by no means an expert in Unix or Linux. But even with the limited amount of Linux Knowledge I possess, there are some things I like better about linux. Here's my partial list: *Linux lets me view files on just about any type of file system. I can view floppies formatted by DOS and even macintosh disks just to name a few. *Linux let's me mount (basically like saying connect) a harddrive in my removeable drive bay, pull it out, put in in another linux computer, and use it without rebooting or even worrying about drive letters changing. I didn't even have to purchase a special removeable drivebay with some proprietary software. Nor did I have to upgrade to some ultra expensive hotswappable SCSI drive. Just a simple IDE drive. *Linux lets me mount hard drives as "read only" This is great when you are backing up files or worried about screwing things up in your directories. *Only one "Virus" to be worried about. The "Raeman" virus is actually only a worm, but it's not destructive and only affects certain systems Running Red Hat Linux. Viruses are difficult to write for linux systems because of the permissions alotted to each user. If I log into my account as ~brad3378, and I execute a virus, the worst I could do is lose all the files in my ~brad3378 directory. I suppose you could execute a virus as super user, but not many people are stupid enough to go out of their way to execute a virus. In windows 3.1/95/98 you're basically "logged in as superuser" all the time. Dangerous in my honest opinion. *In linux, I can type "shutdown -h +60" if I want to have my computer shutdown in 60 minutes. This is really cool when you're burning a CD before you go to bed, and you don't feel like waiting for the computer to finish. Very cool for me because I only have a 2x burner. *shell programming. Shell programming is VERY cool. You can write very simple programs to automate tasks. I'm currently attempting to build a robot that will change CDs in my burner immediately after a disk is done burning. I'll soon be able to burn disks 24/7 (assuming I can afford to keep buying disks). * "eject" & "eject -t" pretty silly I guess, but I get a real kick out of being able to eject my CDrom from across the room with my wireless keyboard. *remote logins I can telnet (insecure), ssh, or rlogin to another computer. If I forget to bring some really important file with me to work, I can simply connect to my home computer (assuming it's turned on), and quickly grab the file. I usually ssh into my school's computer to check my e-mail. All the e-mail is stored in one place and is accessable anywhere with an internet connection. * NFS - Network File systems. This is sorta like mapping a network drive on windows, but a little more cool. with NFS, you can seamlessly connect to other computers and add their directories as a subdirectory on your (local) computer. *Because it's fun! there's always something new to learn. One of the best tricks I've ever learned was to be able to log onto somebody elses computer at work without their knowledge, and execute a soundbyte called "toilet_flush.wav" For this reason, I tend to keep the volume on my own speakers turned down a little. ;-) *man pages I can get almost all the info I need all by doing a quick search of the man pages. Some things are a little trickier than others, but with the man pages I can do a lot. *pipes one of the most commonly used commands I use is "ls -l | more" with that command I can see all the files/directories and their permissions in a directory one screen at a time. (equivilent to "dir /p" in DOS except it shows permissions). "ps -ef |grep foobar.exe" lets me see all the processes on my computer named "foobar.exe" without searching through hundreds of processes. After this command I can kill the process. *top Usually a little faster than typing "ps -ef|grep foobar.exe" With top, I can instantly see what programs are using my processor the most. It's a neat program that displays stuff like memory used, processor % used, swap used, number of users, uptime, and process numbers for when I need to kill a certain program. *nice another very cool program. nice lets you decide on the priority of the programs you want to run. Lets suppose you want to compress some MP3 files while you're doing something very important. Nice would let you compress your MP3 files in "idle mode" while letting you use most of your processor cycles for your more important stuff. very cool for hard-core multitaskers like myself. *compression tools No need to download winrar or winzip. you can compress files and directories right out of the box with linux. *wget download webpages automatically. can also be used for other files. I'm sure there's more than what I listed. Like I said earier, I'm still new to this stuff, but I get a real kick out of all the really cool tricks you can do. If somebody else has more things to add to this list, please do so. I'm always willing to hear about another cool trick you can do on linux.

brad3378 Sounds like you know more about linux than you let on,Never knew about -h +60.Do you have a book or series of books you could recommend.I have red hat linux bible but 1/2 of it I cant understad and sometimes the commands change from distro to distro..I have md 7.2 now thanks ..mark

Thanks Mark. I'll take that as a compliment since I'm only a Mechanical Engineer. Mandrake has some really cool tutorials for free on their website. Try this link: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/ there's also some good programming tutorials (for free ) at : http://www.free-ed.net/catalog/ As far as books go, I tend to stick with the man pages mostly, but if you feel that you need a book, try to stick with a smaller (less intimidating ) book to start with. The larger books can get quite technical for a non programmer, while smaller books tend to get right to the point. 2 more cool things to add to my list. *faster way to copy & paste Just highlight what you want to copy with your mouse, and hit your middle mouse button to paste. If you only have 2 mouse buttons, then hit both at once. *Clusters Use multiple computers to execute a program over a network. Very similar to the way Dual Processor computers execute certain programs on windows NT/2000 or Unix/Linux. Surprisingly, not many companies take advantage of the existing computer power they already own. It seems silly to me for a company to purchase MultiMillion Dollar Cray/SGI supercomputers when you've got hundreds if not thousands of computers idling 23+ hours out of the day. Why not use the secretary's computer to do some number crunching while her screensaver is running? More later..... ~brad3378

Got to like the shell. I would like to piggy back this through a file system some time as well as have a delete option but ... #!/bin/sh # this will find matching files and display them by group # in the current directory # large directories with same file size may take a long time so be advised # # If file names have a space in them such as "New Folder " the default # folder on Win32 "ls" will not find the file and produce an error # If a file exists with a space it will not appear in the data # hint: -don't do that. Too lazy to find work around if [ ! -d tmp_$$ ] then mkdir tmp_$$ else echo "This script needs to create tmp_$$" echo "and it appears this file exits already" exit 1 fi if [ ! -d tmp_$$ ] then tput setaf 1 echo "You need write permissions for this directory" tput sgr0 exit 1 fi dir=`ls -S | tr " " "-"` tput bold; echo "processing";tput sgr0 trap "rm -r ./tmp_$$;clear;exit 0" 1 2 3 14 15 # loop one for token in $dir do if [ ! -d `echo "$token"` ] then # output feedback echo -n '#' one=`ls -l $token | sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d" " -f5` if [ "$one" = "$two" ] then echo "${token}" >> ./tmp_$$/list_$$ echo "${oldtoken}" >> ./tmp_$$/list_$$ fi two=`echo $one` oldtoken=`echo $token` fi done # loop one if [ -e ./tmp_$$/list_$$ ] then list=`cat ./tmp_$$/list_$$` else rmdir tmp_$$ echo echo "No duplicates found" exit 0 fi wait=`echo "$list" | wc -w` while [ "$wait" -gt 0 ] do arg=$(($arg+$wait)) wait=$(($wait-1)) done if [ "$arg" -gt 200 ] then tput setaf 1 echo echo "many same size files and must be compared as binary" echo "this will take awhile" tput sgr0 fi # advance a line echo for comp in $list do listtwo=`cat ./tmp_$$/list_$$` # loop two for compt in $listtwo do # output feedback echo "$arg" tput cuu1 arg=$(($arg-1)) # write duplicates to file # diff will return empty if there is a match if [ ! `echo -n "$compt"` = `echo -n $comp` ] then # if diff is confused do not write it to hits_$$ either # sending stderr to stdout # this should only write if diff keeps quiet hits=`diff "$comp" "$compt" 2>&1` if [ -z "$hits" ] then echo "$comp" >> ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ echo "$compt" >> ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ fi fi done # diminish inner loop to prevent redundant comparisons cat ./tmp_$$/list_$$ | grep -v "$comp" > ./tmp_$$/tmp_$$ mv ./tmp_$$/tmp_$$ ./tmp_$$/list_$$ done # remove duplicates, it will occur if there are three identical files if [ -e ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ ] then cat ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ | sort | uniq > ./tmp_$$/tmp_$$ mv ./tmp_$$/tmp_$$ ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ fi clear # do we have any, if so put them in listing if [ -e ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ ] ;then listing=`cat ./tmp_$$/hits_$$` else rm -r tmp_$$ echo echo "No duplicates found" tput sgr0 exit 0 fi oldout=`echo "./tmp_$$/hits_$$"` # so we do not change on first loop flag=off # clean file for a sorted file by size > ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ for out in $listing do ls -l $out >> ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ done # in order to remove duplicates sort was called but arrangements were # made to resort according to size listing=`cat ./tmp_$$/hits_$$ | sort +4n | sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d" " -f9` # this toggles display and it is tripped by a change in file size # the array must be sorted by size or format will be nominal tput setab 4 echo " " tput sgr0 for output in $listing do if [ ! `ls -l "$output" | sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d" " -f5` = \ `ls -l "$oldout" | sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d" " -f5 ` ] then if [ -n "$on" ] ; then if [ "$flag" = "on" ] ;then flag=off else flag=on fi fi fi if [ "$flag" = "on" ] then tput setaf 2 else tput setaf 3 fi ls -l ${output} oldout=`ls "${output}"` on=on done # put terminal back the way it was tput sgr0 # clean temps if [ -e ./tmp_$$ ] then rm -r ./tmp_$$ fi exit 0

The question is a great one, because Linux is Unix and comes out of the box with so many features, and so inexpensive. So I will add some: I like to be able to write my resume for example, using StarOffice, print it as a .ps file (Postcript), and then using the utility ps2pdf create a pdf file of my resume, for example. PDF files are great because can be read at a click on most todays's machines. I am a bit surprised that no one said Linux was great among other things because it counterbalance Microsoft corporation which has been acting very, very unethically... and still does. Because of its open source and system whose protection you may control, the likelyhood of the browser or some other program to do something you do not want (to your system) is less, especially if none of them can run with the s attribute. Well there is much more...It would take days!

another cool one to add to the list: *setenv Suppose I need to run a program on a certain computer, perhaps for licence issues. It's very easy to execute stuff on another machine (as shown above), but sometimes you'd like to see a window pop up on your monitor. after you log onto another machine, try this: setenv DISPLAY thismachine:0.0 where "thismachine" is the name of the computer you're sitting behind. Unix / Linux are also both very good at handling computers with multiple displays. Macs could do this about 10-15 years ago, and I believe win98 can also do this now. I may be wrong, but I believe that Unix could do this 30 years ago! More later -~brad3378