Probably the best class I have ever talken, as in I learned a whole bunch of stuff from, was a UNIX class. We used the book Guide to UNIX using Linux and installed Fedora Core 4 to learn all the amazing things about Linux/UNIX or *NIX. This book has a lot of bad reviews on Amazon, but for getting your feet wet with Linux/UNIX this is a really great book. The book was required by the department and we had to read the book on our own time. In class the teacher, typical UNIX guy, would bring lots of print-out from other books. Truly, I can say this was one of my most educational experiences in school and has stayed with me till this day. I’m running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 at home and couldn’t be happier!

Overall in the class I developed a much greater appreciation for the command line, GUI is nice, but the command line is more powerful. So here is my list of helpful command line… commands…

CAL

Displays a simple calendar of the current month of the screen. Great for a quick lookup for dates. I usually go into the clock on the desktop, which requires a few clicks. Simply type, cal
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Oh yes Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has been released and it is quite a good release. I installed Feisty Fawn on my old box, not a beast, but it can still move. The Linux Kernel has come along way since I first installed Warty Warthog a few years ago. Every release gets smoother and smoother and the ease of installing software is amazing. The entire Open Source Community is maturing more and more every year. The piece of software I am most impressed with is VirtualBox, a free open source virtualization tool by Innotek. It is like VMWare Workstation, but FREE and it is quite good. Though I still dig VMPlayer, it’s also free, without all the bell and whistles.

Since I got Windows Vista from School for free I decided to install it in VirtualBox. Installation was uneventful, VirtualBox said support for Vista was experimental, but it went off without a hitch. Vista ran very smoothly which was surprising, but it is Windows Vista Business, so it doesn’t have all the eye candy. Vista is very strange, Microsoft made some weird choices for UI presentation. I mean I guess it’s cool, but it is such a departure from Windows 95-XP. I guess that is what they were going for but I think it is going to confuse a lot of people. It is scrolling menus and such, but I will give it a try and see how it works. The default Windows icons and wallpapers are nice though? Quit tugging on my heart Microsoft, *END SARCASM* hehe.

Oh yeah back to VirtualBox. The UI face is easy and intuitive and there are no surprises – straight forward. Such a great concept. I love virtualization it makes moving things much easier when everything is combined into one image. Also it helps make systems less hardware dependent, Linux will run on anything, but Windows will not and that is life.

My next project is to VMware convert my main XP box and install feisty on it. I can’t wait for the semester to be over! 2 weeks to go woo.