Is Linux completely virus free?

According to Wikipedia:

 A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another.

People working on Windows spend quite a money in buying and renewing anti-virus for their systems to remain protected. However, a not so sophisticated Linux user never really needs an anti-virus for the system. Why? What are the reasons that people consider Linux as virus free. Lets discuss.

Is Linux completely virus free? 

The answer is NO. Although there is no such threat as Microsoft Windows, but there are malwares found for Linux. There has been viruses, trojans, worms and other kinda malware like rootkit which has been detected and the number of these malwares has been rising in the past few years. 




Linux is Not Virus Free. Its more Immune to Viruses. 

• Small number of users. Linux is less widely used all across the world in comparison to windows. The groups or individuals behind the viruses and other malwares develops them with the aim of hitting maximum systems and causing maximum damages. Since, there are less Linux users and there are less Linux programmers, the number of such malwares is low. 

• Multi-user environment. Linux implements multi-user environment. That is, users are granted specific privileges only and to cause any serious damages to the system, malwares would have to get access to root account. 

• Open source. Linux is open source. The vulnerabilities are fixed very rapidly by programmers all over the world as soon as it is discovered. Chances are that when a virus is detected, it will be patched sooner than windows. 

Keeping all these in mind, we surely can say that "Lnux is more immune to virus and malwares". We cannot say that its completely virus free. However, an average user will never require any sort of anti-virus program to remain safe. There has been some attacks in the past like rootkit attacks, but they have been fixed. Enjoy your personal Linux experience without any worrying. Enjoy Linux. Enjoy open source. 

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Some basic Linux and Unix vi commands

The vi editor is a very powerful tool to edit text, programs in Linux / Unix. VI editor is the standard text editor for all the UNIX systems and is used extensively. Commands in vi editor are input from keyboard only and no switching to mouse is required. 

• Moving through the Text can be performed using Arrow keys. 

Basic Operation: Some Popular vi commands

• :q exits the editor
• :w saves the file
• :wq save the file and then exits
• :n moves to line n of a file
• x will delete the character on which the cursor is positioned
• n dw wil delete n characters to the right of the cursor
• n dd will delete n lines from the current position of the cursor
• :q! exits a file even if you have unsaved changes, can be referred as force exit
• :w newfile will save the text in editor to the newfile
• :wq! overrides read-only permission, only if you have access to change the read-only permission. Generally for root accounts. 
• yy will copy a block of text
• n p will paste it for n number of times
• :recover recovers a file from any unexpected interruption

Switching the editor to insert mode. 

• i to insert
• a to append
• o insert a blank line next to the cursor position and moves the cursor to that line

Learning all these commands is an easy job and any one using vi editor has to go through these all the times. If you are a Linux/UNIX newbie, these are must to get used to. 

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Some interesting facts about Linux

Well, if you are a Linux user, you must be familiar with these points. These interesting facts about Linux may seem obvious to you but for beginner these must be known. 

• All files are case sensitive. In Linux unlike windows, all files are case sensitive. File, FILE, FiLe or file are completely different things in Linux. 
• etc/folder and etc/Folder are different too. Don't get messed with these case sensitive things. 

• Everything is a file. In Linux, everything is a file. A directory is a special kind of file which stores more files, but its still a file. Anything from a terminal windows to a hard disk partition, everything in Linux is represented as a file in file system. 

• file types. The file utility determines the file type. Linux doesn't care about the extension to determine the file types. The editor will treat a file of either a .doc or .txt extension as same and don't even care about it. As a system administrator, you can use the file command to determine the file type. 
• file pic33.png
• pic33.png: PNG image data, 3840 x 1200, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
• file /etc/pass
• /etc/pass: ASCII text

If you have any other basic yet useful Linux thing in your mind, just share it up in comments. They will be our next posts with your name as contributor. :) 

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Drupal: Open source Content Management

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

According to wikipedia: Drupal is a free and open-source content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

Standard Release and its Features.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration. The Drupal core installation can be used as a brochureware website, a single- or multi user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated content.

Drupal Core's main feature includes:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search
• Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance
• Descriptive URLs
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• OpenID support
• RSS feed and feed aggregator
• Security and new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (triggers and actions)

Drupal is now developed by a community, and its popularity is growing rapidly. From July 2007 to June 2008, Drupal was downloaded from the Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year. As of December 2012, more than 808 000 sites are using Drupal. These include hundreds of well-known organizations, including corporations, media & publishing companies, governments, non-profits, schools, and individuals. Drupal also won several Packt Open Source CMS Awards and won the Webware 100 three times in a row.

                          

Future of Drupal

Drupal is playing an important role beyond its traditional base of small companies, government and non-profit organizations. It has also hit — and hit hard — with the larger organizations of the world. Drupal growth is clear, along with the disruption it is causing for Enterprise CMS. That could be one of the reasons for the growth in its activity.

                             

                                  

         

Conclusion

Drupal’s growth is steady, well-sustained and on the right track to continue disrupting the small, medium and Enterprise CMS world, its future is potentially bright to a good extent.

                                   

The Drupal mantra, “Come for the software, stay for the community,” is really true in all senses. Once you join a Drupal camp or conference you can really see what is underneath that software — an unbelievable ecosystem.

Startups, small and medium companies deploying a few or several sites using Drupal are excellent situations for this platform success. Large deployments of Drupal sites by global corporations, up to hundreds of websites for a single company, are the key to bringing Drupal to the next level and establishing it, once and for all, as the leader in the enterprise world. Future is RestFull. Future is Bright.

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Python Application Domain areas

You may like to read  Python: Introduction and features first.

Python as a programming language is clean and fast. It is new enough to be well designed and high-level. It is mature enough to be very useful and well-behaved. Coding in Python is easy, fun and going fast. The code volume you need to get something done is usually much less than in other programming languages (and this is not just about typing stuff, having less code means also less bugs, less maintenance costs). You can easily debug code. You can try code in the interactive interpreter. No need to compile the code, just run it. However, there are some lacking features in python like Python lacks popular high-level concurrency support. There is no high level interprocess communication library, no lightweight processes, no transactional memory etc. Python also lacks a macro or similar facility. Despite these flaws, python is an practical language for getting work done in a timely manner and having a maintainable codebase when finished.


Application Domains

Serving the Web using Python

Python offers a wide range of choices for web development:

• Writing basic CGI scripts.
• Frameworks such as Django and TurboGears.
• High-end solutions such as Zope.
• Advanced content management systems such as Plone.

For custom web solutions and other internet-based applications:

• Extensive support for HTML and XML.
• E-mail processing.
• Processing RSS feeds.
• Support for many other Internet protocols.

Database Access

• Custom and ODBC interfaces to MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SybODBC, and others are available for free download.
• Standard Database API.
• Object databases such as ZODB and Durus.

Desktop GUIs

• The Tk GUI development library is included with most binary distributions for Python.
• wxWidgets
• GTK+
• Qt via pyqt or pyside
• Microsoft Foundation Classes through the win32 extensions
• Delphi

Scientific and Numeric

• Python is widely used in scientific and numeric computing:

Bioinformatics

• Python course in Bioinformatics
• Physics

Network Programming

• In addition to the web and internet support described above, Python also provides support for lower level network programming:

Easy-to-use socket interface.

• Twisted Python, a framework for asynchronous network programming.

Python is often used as a support language for software developers, for build control and management, testing, and in many other ways.

SCons for build control.

• Buildbot and Apache Gump for automated continuous compilation and testing.
• Roundup or Trac for bug tracking and project management.
• Roster of Integrated Development Environments.

Game Development

• PyGame and PyKyra are two of the game frameworks available for Python.

References: 

• Python official website
• Wikipedia

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Python Open source programming language

Introduction 

Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. Learning to use Python can result in immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs.

Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and has been ported to the Java and .NET virtual machines.

Python is free to use, even for commercial products, because of its OSI-approved open source license.

Python is a remarkably powerful dynamic programming language that is used in a wide variety of application domains. Python is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Ruby, Scheme or Java. Some of its key distinguishing features include:

• clear and easy to read syntax
• easier debugging
• object oriented programming language 
• modular programming language
• supports exception handling
• very high level dynamic data types 
• extensive standard libraries and third party modules for virtually every task 
• extensions and modules easily written in C, C++ (or Java for Jython, or .NET languages for IronPython) 
• embeddable within applications as a scripting interface 

Python is powerful... and fast

Python lets you write the code you need, quickly. And, thanks to a highly optimized byte compiler and support libraries, Python code runs more than fast enough for most applications. The traditional implementation of CPython uses a bytecode virtual machine; PyPy supports just-in-time (JIT) compilation to machine code. Also, Jython and IronPython (see below) support JIT compilation on their respective virtual machine implementations.

Python plays well with others

• Python can integrate with COM, .NET, and CORBA objects. 

• For Java libraries, use Jython, an implementation of Python for the Java Virtual Machine. 

• For .NET, try IronPython , Microsoft's new implementation of Python for .NET, or Python for .NET. 

• Python is also supported for the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) and many other integration technologies. 

Python runs everywhere 

Python is available for all major operating systems: Windows, Linux/Unix, OS/2, Mac, Amiga, among others. There are even versions that run on .NET and the Java virtual machine.


Python is friendly... and easy to learn

Python comes with complete documentation, both integrated into the language and as separate web pages. Online tutorials target both the seasoned programmer and the newcomer. All are designed to make you productive quickly. The availability of first-rate books completes the learning package.

Python is Open

The Python implementation is under an open source license that makes it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use. The Python license is administered by the Python Software Foundation.


Development environments

Most Python implementations (including CPython) can function as a command line interpreter, for which the user enters statements sequentially and receives the results immediately. In short, Python acts as a shell.

Other shells add capabilities beyond those in the basic interpreter, including IDLE and IPython. While generally following the visual style of the Python shell, they implement features like auto-completion, retention of session state, and syntax highlighting.

In addition to standard desktop Python IDEs (integrated development environments), there are also browser-based IDEs, Sage, (intended for developing science and math-related Python programs), and a hosted IDE, pythonAnywhere.

You can read the next part Python application domains in real world.

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Best Multiple Chat Network Instant Messenger

You may separately have installed Yahoo, Google or MSN messenger if you have account on these and use them to connect to your friends. Don't you want a single chat client for all your accounts? 

Pidgin. Pidgin is a instant messaging software which lets you use multiple account at the same time from one place. A single messenger is enough to have all your accounts being placed at the same place. It is cross platform and is available for all leading operating systems. 

Feature. 

• Free and open source. Its is Licensed under GNU GPL 2.0 and is free to use and distribute. It is open source and its source code is available to read, modify and re-compile You can download its source code here.
• Language support. Supports more than 100 different languages thanks to the developers all across the world. 
• Supports different chat networks like:
• AIM
• ICQ
• Google Talk
• Yahoo!
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• IRC
• MXit
• Novell GroupWise Messenger
• Lotus Sametime
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• MySpaceIM
• Zephyr
• Jabber/XMPP
• MSN 

Download: Pidgin is a cross platform chat client and is available for all leading operating system. Here are links to download.: 

• Pidgin for Windows
• Pdigin for LINUX is not pre-packaged and you will have to download source code and install package. You can read the steps here with the link for download of necessary codes. 
• Pidgin for ubuntu.
• Pidgin for other Linux
• Adium for Mac which uses Pidgin as its core. 

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Portable C++ IDE : DEV C++ software

DEV C++ is an open source free C/C++ IDE for both 32/64 bit systems and is portable. 


Features: 

MinGW GCC 4.7.2 32bit / TDM-GCC 4.7.1 32/64bit : It is available for both 32bit or 64 bit systems. Choosing a 64 bit system is particularly good since it incorporates all the existing features of 32 bit along with addition features. 

Syntax highlighting : DEV C++ has the basic feature of syntax highlighiting providing a smoother way way of tracking syntactical errors and defining the scope of the programs. Most of the earlier IDE do not have this feature including Turbo C C++.

Code completion : Auto code completion ensures that you donot have to manually type everything. There are hints for auto completion. 

Shows information about code when hovering above code : Hovering mouse pointer over the codes and information regarding the codes will be shown up to you. 

Provides user-editable shortcuts and tools : Different shortcuts and tools to make working easy in DEV IDE. These shortcuts can be edited according to your suiting and preferences.

GPROF profiling

GDB debugging

Devpak IDE extensions

Download: 

Official website of Orwell DEV- C++ is http://orwelldevcpp.blogspot.com/. 

• MinGW32 4.7.2 can be downloaded here (25MB).
• TDM-GCC x64 4.7.1 can be downloaded here (44MB).
• The portable version MinGW32 4.7.2 can be downloaded here (17MB).
• The portable version TDM-GCC x64 4.7.1 can be downloaded here (32MB).
• Lastly, the source code can be found here (1MB).

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Free C / C++ IDE for Windows, Linux and Mac OS

Most of the C C++ IDE are for older version of Windows and Linux and they hardly run on newer Operating Environment. To cop up with this problem, CodeLite was developed in Open source world. 

CodeLite is open source software IDE for C/C++ development and is available for different platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac OS. It
is Open source, free and is licensed under GPLv2 license. 

This new version of CodeLite has fixed its earlier bugs and is now performing great. CodeLite inherits features of Open Source Licensing such as 

• Free to use, download and distribute.
• Source code is available. 

CodeLite, free C/C++ software has been tested to work on operating systems like 

• Windows XP SP3
• Windows 7 and 8
• Debian / Ubuntu
• Fedora / OpenSUSE
• Mac OSX 10.5.8
• FreeBSD

You can download CodeLite from http://sourceforge.net/projects/codelite/files/latest/download?source=dlp . 

Its hosted on sourceforge website to download. 

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DropIt : A tool for organizing files and folders

When it comes to managing a large number of files and folders, it really becomes a tough job. Huge time taking and sometimes even frustrating. Just imagine you have to compress 5000 files. You will have to compress each files separately one by one wasting a huge lot of time and your resources. Here is tool which can automate all the processing realted to files and folders and it really works great. It might seem to you a small software but as you get familiar with it, you will know the power of it. 

DropIt is a free and open source tool for organizing different files and folders related process automatically. It can automate tasks like opening folders moving files from one folder to another and other. 
Some of the automated tasks it can perform are

• Move
• Copy
• Compress
• Extract
• Rename
• Delete
• Open With
• Upload
• Send by Mail
• Create list
• Create playlist
• Shortcut
• and some more. 

DropIt is surely a useful app for thse who works with files and folders more often and don't want to waste time doing manually all the work. Every process is automatic. Drop the bunch of files or folders on DropIt and it will guide you to provide the destination folder and to what operation you need to perform on it. 

Since the project is open source, you have the rights to use, modify, distribute and share with anyone you know without any need of payment. 

Platform. Currently its for Windows platform and comes both with an installer and portable format. 

Download

You can download DropIt from the link Download DropIt. 

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