Wanting to "practise" on Linux?

[SummerRain]

Heya I hope this is in the right place, I am going to be doing some work using Linux soon and I wanted to practise/get familiar with it, to make it easier and also so I don't look like an idiot! Someone mentioned to me I can download something to open it up in a window on Windows, to see what it is like, but I didn't understand it well enough to be able to work out how to do this via searching the internet. Does anybody know what I am on about (I'm not sure I do!) and can point me in the right direction?

 

[Second Summer]

You may be thinking of some flavours of Linux that can be booted from a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or USB disk. Here's a page describing the Ubuntu Live CD:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

There is also a way to install Ubuntu from Windows so that the two operating systems exist side by side on the same hard drive partition. I believe from Windows the Ubuntu Linux OS then basically just looks like a big file, and you can use the usual Windows functionality to uninstall it in the event that you don't want it any more:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wubi

Hope that helps!

 

[SummerRain]

Ah that's perfect. I made a CD with Ubuntu and booted it from that and it worked Thanks a lot!

 

[sleepydvdr]

Slightly off topic, but still Linux related... What I love about Linux is it does not hide things from you like Windows does.

Just last week, someone at my job had a virus I couldn't get rid of it while the computer was booted up and running an AV scan. When I hooked the drive up as a slave to another computer, the files would not show up even though I had "show hidden files" and "show system files" enabled. I think that because they were in a user account, they refused to show. I booted to a Linux disk, found the virus files and deleted them. Virus was gone for good!

Also, Linux shows hidden Windows shares and hidden SSIDs from wireless networks.

 

[Joe]

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Heya I hope this is in the right place, I am going to be doing some work using Linux soon and I wanted to practise/get familiar with it, to make it easier and also so I don't look like an idiot! Someone mentioned to me I can download something to open it up in a window on Windows, to see what it is like, but I didn't understand it well enough to be able to work out how to do this via searching the internet. Does anybody know what I am on about (I'm not sure I do!) and can point me in the right direction?

I think you may have been thinking of Cygwin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin

I don't know that much about it.

(Booting from Linux/Unix live cds/dvds should work, too. But that would actually be using Linux/Unix.)

 

[Second Summer]

Yes, I thought of Cygwin as well. I didn't like it very much when I used it many years ago, but I suppose it may have improved since.

Another possibility is to install a Virtual Machine software such as VMWare which will allow you to install and try out several flavours of Linux.

 

[das_nut]

VMs are good. Just be sure to enable hardware VM support in the bios first.

 

[Joe]

If all you want to do is use some Linux/Unix utilities while in Windows, SourceForge has ported them to the Windows environment. You can download them here:

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/