Linux Survival Guide #1: Distros & Drives

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining explainingcomputers.com this time it's the first episode in a series called the linux survival guide a series i'm making here on explaining computers for people who wish to transition from windows to linux and in this first episode i'm going to address some fundamental questions which are what is a linux distro which distro should you choose and what's happened to all the drive letters how do you deal with drives in linux linux is available in hundreds of different versions called distributions or distros all of these are based on the linux kernel which is the core component of the operating system the linux kernel interfaces directly with a computer's processor memory and other hardware and is technically the only thing that is actually called linux in addition to the linux kernel all distros include many other open source software components without getting too detailed or overly technical these typically include a bootloader to start up the computer an init or initialization system that takes over when the bootloader has completed background services known as daemons that handle things like task scheduling sound and printing gnu shell utilities to provide a terminal interface a display server to display graphics and a desktop environment also known as a graphical user interface in addition all linux distros contain some end user applications such as file managers text editors web browsers media players and other common accessories and utilities most modern distros now also have some kind of graphical package manager or app store to make it easy to install further applications for the average user the most obvious difference between distros is their desktop environment as this is what makes different versions of linux look and feel different to each other however as even our simple graphic hopefully makes clear there are a lot of software components to be chosen when building a distro for this reason many distros are derivatives that use another distro as their foundation so for example the popular distro linux mint is based on ubuntu which is itself based on a distro called debian all of the different components of a linux distro are assembled in a modular fashion from freely available open source code they are then compiled into a single operating system image that can be downloaded as an iso file and written to a bootable usb drive or optical disk using a program such as bolena etcher or rufus usually this results in a live media that can be used both to test out the distro as well as to install it on your computer so if you want to get into linux the first thing to do is to get used to downloading distro images writing them to live media and booting them up this will allow you to get a feel of different distros before you install anything or make any other changes to your computer alternatively you can browse to distrotest.net where it's possible to try out hundreds of different distros online whilst there are hundreds of versions of linux available most users run one of around 20 mainstream distros i would also advise new users to choose a popular distro as they tend to be more stable and have better support communities here we're running linux mint which is a very good choice for beginners and is also register i run myself as my daily driver in linux the bar at the base of the screen is called the panel rather than the taskbar but what we have here in the looks mint will be pretty familiar to windows users with a fairly similar menu this said i find the menu in the looks mint and indeed in most linux distros to be better than what we get in windows 10 or windows 11 because although we can view all applications in one go we can also look at programs in different application categories if we launch firefox the web browser by default in linux mint we go to the linux mint home page and click on download you will see there are three versions of linux mint first of all there is the cinnamon edition secondly there is the mate edition and yes it's pronounced mate and finally we have the xfce edition each of these includes a different desktop environment and if in doubt go for cinnamon which is the most popular another good distro for those who want an easy transition to linux is zorin os this has a similar default panel and menu configuration to linux mint and even includes different layouts here under zorin appearance which try to mimic the look and feel of different versions of windows and mac os and this may help you to get comfortable using linux as quickly as possible if you're feeling a bit more adventurous you may also want to consider ubuntu as your distro of choice by default this has its panel at the top of the screen as well as a dock on its left edge that includes icons for commonly used applications at the bottom of the dock there's done a show applications icon for accessing all of the programs installed on your computer it's also worth noting that if you want to use linux for creative work with a distro called ubuntu studio this comes pre-installed with lots of audio photo and video editing applications and so is a good choice for beginners if this is your focus other distros well worth considering are manjaro popos open souza and pc linux os these and the other four distros i've mentioned so far are all detailed in an explaining computer's video in which i go through their installation and so i won't delve into that side of things here other great distros you may want to consider but which i've yet to dedicate a video to include elementary os q4 os debian fedora and mx linux there are as i've said already many many more but i know that the more distros i mention the more overwhelming the whole getting into linux thing may become and so here i'll simply restate that my top three recommended distros for those migrating to linux are linux mint cinnamon edition zorin os and ubuntu all of which i run myself on a regular basis greetings here we are back in zorin os where we're going to take a look at how linux handles drives so if we click on the home icon we'll open up the file manager where there's not a drive letter in site rather we can see a listing of the default folders or places contained in the home folder for the current user so what we're seeing is pretty much identical to what we get in windows 10 if we open up this pc except within windows we also see an entry for the c drive below the current use of folders here in windows if i plug in a usb thumb drive it appears in the list of drives mapped as drive d on this computer back in linux if we do the same thing our usb drive mounts in a similar fashion below the user folders we can see it down there it's also coming up here in case we want to have a look at it but we'll get rid of that and it's also mounted on the desktop and if i plug in an external ssd like that it also mounts down here next to our usb drive note that the names that appear down here are those that were given to the partitions on the drives when they were last formatted now if you're used to working on a computer with a single internal drive and you're happy to store your files in the default user folders up here and maybe on external media then this is probably all you need to know about drives in linux however people used to more complex storage arrangements in windows or who have a curious mind will probably want and need to know more so here goes and inevitably this next part of the video is going to get a bit more technical before we proceed it's a good idea to define some terms so far i've been talking fairly generically about drives including things like the c drive in windows but technically windows actually has a c volume this is because a drive is a physical storage device meanwhile a partition is a section of a drive that's been allocated for storage purposes and a volume is a partition that's been mounted so it can be accessed by a user now in practice many of us use the word drive to refer to both physical storage devices as well as the mounted partitions on them and indeed volumes can be called logical drives however as we delve into how linux handles storage devices it's sensible to be a bit more accurate and so from this point forward when i use the term drive i'll be referring to a physical storage device or what linux and indeed windows still label as a disk and i'll also be making specific reference to partitions and mounted volumes returning to the task in hand the most fundamental concept to understand is that linux maps the partitions on all of its drives within a single file system the partition on which linux is installed is mounted at the root of this file system with all other partitions mounted somewhere else inside it for example most distros mount the partitions contained on external storage devices within a folder called media rather than relying on volume labels for its own internal purposes linux does allocate a name to each drive and partition thereof many drive names begin with sd followed by a b c and so on for each subsequent device here sd is short for scussy mass storage driver although today most drives allocated an sd prefix are ssds or hard drives connected via sata or usb meanwhile sd cards onboard emmc flash storage and similar devices are given a name beginning mmc blk which stands for multimedia card block device which is then followed by a number finally drives connected via a pcie nvme interface are labeled nvme followed by a controller number and then a letter n and drive number back in the file manager if we hover over the usb thumb drive and also the external ssd we can see how the partitions on them are mounted in media in the subfolder for user ec however to give you a picture of all of the drives and mounted partitions on this computer i've opened up a terminal here it is down here where i'm going to enter the command ls blk this stands for list block devices with block devices being the generic term for hard drives and other hardware that store data in blocks so if i press enter here we get a list of all drives along with the partitions on them and where they are mounted as volumes as we can see the computer we're working on has got an nvme ssd which is called nvme 0n1 as it's the first nvme drive on the first nvme controller as we can also see the partitions on this drive are the same name suffixed with p1 and then p2 with the first partition here being a hidden boot partition and p2 being the partition where linux is installed the same partition naming convention of the letter p followed by a number is also used for mmc storage devices however the partitions on drive's prefixed sd are just suffixed with a number so as we can see at the top here our thumb drive has been labeled sda and it's got a single partition called sda1 and our external ssd has been labeled sdb and it's got a single partition called a sdb1 if we take a look at the mount locations over here the mount point as they're labeled we can see that sda1 and sdb1 are mounted in media as we noted a moment ago we can also see that the nvme partition on which linux is installed down here has its mount point listed as a forward slash which represents the root of the file system now before i get accused of spending too much time mucking about in a terminal i will close it down although if you want to know more about using the terminal of a video called linux terminal introduction that you might find useful but for now we're back in the file manager where we're going to pay a visit to the root of the file system one way to do this here in zorin os is to click on other locations and then on computer which indeed takes us to the root of the file system so giving us a listing of every folder on the partition on which linux is installed most of these folders here are used by linux itself to actually operate the operating system all its files are stored in these folders but we've also here got the home folder that contains user directories which we can see like that there are the folders we saw previously for ec and we've also here if we just go down a little bit we've got the folder called media which as you may remember is where the partitions on our two external drives are mounted so if we open up media and then ec you will see oh look there are mounted partitions the volumes linked to our external drives and if i click on the extreme ssd like that we see all the files it contains and hopefully this is now all starting to make some kind of sense if you've always done all of your computing in windows then the idea of transitioning to linux may be a daunting prospect this said most of the people i know who have actually made the transition have reported it was easier than they thought it was going to be once they got started and the main thing is to pick a distro to load it up to try it out and once you've done that things start to fall into place and i hope that this video has started to help you in that process in my next video in this series i'm going to answer a question that many people ask which is can i run some of my windows programs in linux and the answer is you can in various ways and so we'll cover that but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 115,552

Rating: 4.9755497 out of 5

Keywords: Migrating to Linux, What is a Linux distro, parts of a Linux distro, best Linux distro, choosing a Linux distro, drives in Linux, Linux drive names, Linux partitions, Linux partition names, where are drive letters in Linux, Linux drives, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: FeDYxBulZ6c

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021