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Radically
Simple Linux for the non-geek! |
Part Four:Stability and Security in PCLinuxOS |
Is Linux stable? Well, can any program/system put together by humans ever be 100% free of errors? If you are thinking in absolute terms, the answer, as with Windows, Mac, and any other system you care to name, is NO. Is it more stable than Windows? On the vast majority of hardware, YES. This is due in part to the heroic efforts of many people to produce Linux drivers for those hardware vendors who do not support Linux or release details of their hardware. I can't guarantee that your hardware is supported in Linux. What I can say is that, at the cost of a download and a CD, you've little to lose, and the chances are hugely in favour of your hardware being supported.
But that does not mean that individual programs don't have bugs. So what happens when a program decides to crash?
Well in many cases, it freezes or exits. Clicking persistently on the "X" at the top right of the window will eventually bring up a dialog that will enable you to close the window if it has frozen. But here's the beauty, often you can just run the program again and it runs. Try that in Windows, you always have to reboot! In a few cases where it won't, there is a program called KSysGuard which gives you a Graphical display of running programs and enables you to "kill" any remaining "bits" of crashed programs that are still in memory causing problems.
For example if Firefox had crashed and wouldn't start again, you could click on the "higher level" of the mozilla-firefox entries above (because that takes out all below it), click "Kill", and your memory would be clear of Firefox enabling you to run it again without rebooting. Try that in Windows!
So: Crashes are rare compared to Windows, and you can normally recover from them and even run the program again without restarting.
Security in Linux
We've already discussed how Viruses and Spyware don't work in Linux. And how Linux has a firewall right there in the kernel. But there's more than that. Linux is secure by design. Every file has an owner, a group, and a set of permissions, it's right there in the filesystem itself. And in setting up your computer to run Linux, you set up yourself as a "user", but you also have to set up and remember the password for the "root" user, ie, the system administrator, so that you can add users, install software, and carry out certain housekeeping functions.
The executable files on your computer are generally owned by "root". The permission is usually that the file is executable, that anyone can execute it, but that only the owner "root" can delete or amend the file. Straight away, here is a security boost compared to Windows. Many Windows viruses spread by "infecting" other files, ie, they would amend another file on the disk so that when you ran that, the virus would work in the background. Well unless you are running as root, the program you are running can't!
Another source of viruses in Windows is where "dll" files are replaced with infected ones. Or completely new dll files that "hook" into parts of the system. Well a normal user cannot overwrite the infected file, nor can he/she write files to the parts of the system that contain executable files and libraries. Only root can do that.
So, provided you only install programs from trusted sources (PCLinuxOS repositories, accessed via Synaptic) and don't run as root except when you need to, you cannot infect your executable files. This makes the virus writer's job very hard in Linux. You don't even need to log in as root to do stuff as root, if you want to add software through Synaptic, you are asked for the root password on starting Synaptic, and it opens. Everything else is being run safely as your ordinary user. So even when acting as root, safety is maximised.
OK that's enough about all the boring stuff. Why would you want to use Linux anyway? What can you do? That's where we're going next!
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