How to Prevent Becoming a Victim of Computer Fraud

You can easily run Linux! There are no viruses that are going to get installed on your Linux computer without you knowing. You would have to physically install the virus yourself and give the virus your root (administrator) password. Linux is also a lot more secure than Windows. So you won’t have to worry about someone cracking your passwords and getting into your computer’s information.

If you are not wanting to install Linux on your computer for free. You can always run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick or a cdrom. When you use a live Linux distribution anything that is stored in cache, temporary files, etc. anything that may contain information someone can steal and use to steal your money or identity is erased as soon as your turn off your computer. So if someone steals your USB stick or cdrom and boots it up on their computer, there will be no information of you logging into your bank accounts or purchasing products online. Best of all you can download Linux for free. You will just have to buy a cd-r, dvd-r, or a USB stick. Which I’m sure most of you will probably have laying around your home somewhere.

Where Can I Download Linux

This depends on if you want to install Linux onto your hard drive or if you want to run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, CD-R, or DVD-R.

Install Linux to Hard Drive

If you are wanting to install Linux to your hard drive you will need to partition your hard drive so you don’t erase Windows, unless you don’t care. When installing Linux on your hard drive you can install almost any Linux distribution. Here are the Linux distributions I recommend using.

• Fedora Linux
• Debian Linux
• Ubuntu Linux
• Slackware Linux
• Gentoo Linux

The first 4 are pretty easy to install and use. Gentoo can be a little complicated to install if you’ve never done any kind of hard drive partitioning or have worked in a CLI. The rest have a guided wizard type install that walk you through the steps. Gentoo does have an install guide on their website you can read and follow if you do want to go that route. There are also tons more Linux distributions you can use as well. You can see a whole list of Linux distributions on distrowatch.

Use a Live Linux Distribution

If you are wanting to run a live Linux distribution you have fewer choices as not every Linux distribution comes as a live Linux distribution. With some Linux knowledge and tweaking you can install any Linux distribution to a USB stick, but this really wouldn’t be a live Linux distribution anymore. It would be like installing to your hard drive, but instead installing to a USB stick, but that’s going to be another Linux topic. Here are the live Linux distributions I recommend to make your banking and online purchases secure.

• Fedora Live Linux
• Ubuntu Live Linux
• MacPup Live Linux
• Damn Small Linux Live
• Damn Small Linux Not
• Slax Live Linux
• Pentoo Live Linux

Some of the live Linux distributions may not support your wireless card out of the box. Like Damn Small Linux since it is such a small distribution you are limited to the more popular wireless drivers. So if you are wanting to run this live Linux on a laptop, you may want to choose a different live distribution unless you want to try it and see if your wireless card is supported. There are also tons more live Linux distributions out there. These are just the ones I recommend using.

What to do After Downloading Linux

Linux on CD-R or DVD-R

After you have downloaded the Linux you want to run, you need to burn it to a CD-R, DVD-R, or set it up on a USB flash drive. So open your favorite burning software like Nero, Roxio, etc. and select burn an image, insert your CD-R or DVD-R, click burn, and you’re done! Now reboot your computer leaving the CD or DVD in your computer and your computer should boot from the CD or DVD drive. If not you may have to go into your BIOS setup by hitting F1, DEL, ESC, F10, etc. depending on how you computer is setup, then go to boot options and make sure your CD or DVD drive is 1st on the boot list.

Linux on USB Flash Drive

If you are wanting to put your live Linux distribution on a USB flash drive, you can either follow the directions on the live Linux distribution’s website, or you can download Linux Live USB (LiLi). This is a software that runs in Windows, you open it, select the live Linux distribution file you downloaded and continue to follow on screen instructions, which will copy all the files to your USB flash drive and make it bootable.

Now after you have downloaded and installed your Linux distribution or live Linux distribution you can boot up your computer to your new Linux operating system and be secure from viruses, trojans, key loggers, and security holes so you can make online purchases and online banking with confidence.

The great thing about using a live Linux distribution for secure banking is you can use it on anyone’s computer. If you are using someone else’s computer, you have no idea what is on their computer, they may have all kinds of viruses on their computer as well, so don’t log in to your bank from a friend’s computer. Plug your USB flash drive into their computer, reboot into your live Linux distribution and feel confident no one will steal your information! Tell your friend’s about Linux as well. Help them setup a USB flash drive so they can use while doing their online banking or online purchases to keep them secure!

What is atime Attribute

In Linux your file system will record the time and date a file was created, modified, and last accessed for every file on your Linux computer. Every time you access a file it writes to your disk letting the Linux file system know when it was last accessed. If you edit the file it will keep track of the last time you modified the file. Back to the last access time, just imaging how many files are opened on your computer just at boot time. There are files being accessed that you may not be directly opening, such as libs, configuration files, services, etc. Now your Linux computer will write to the disk for each of those files when they were last accessed. So you could imagine how much processor and disk resources are being used to write all this information.

Do I Need atime Attribute

You do not need atime attribute to run Linux. Nothing is going to fail, crash, or die if you disable the atime attribute. There are no programs that depend on the atime attribute. You may want to use atime attribute yourself if you want to be able to look up a file that you just looked at and don’t remember what it was or maybe even some other reason. For probably 98% of Linux users out there, you can disable atime attribute without any problems.

What File Systems Does this Speed Tweak Work on

I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think that this speed tweak only works on ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems.  If I am wrong, someone please correct me. I rarely use any other file system besides ext type file systems on my Linux computers.

How to Increase Linux System Performance

You can disable the atime attribute. To disable the atime attribute you need to be root or super user (su|sudo). You need to edit /etc/fstab with your favorite text editor. You can use gedit, vi, nano or which ever text editor you prefer to use. In your /etc/fstab file you want to change the options for your mounts. So in your /etc/fstab file you should see a few lines like this:


/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/sda2 / ext4 noatime 0 1
/dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/md0 /home ext4 noatime 1 2
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0


As you can see in my /etc/fstab I replaced the defaults option with noatime for my /, /boot, and /home partitions. With this option in your /etc/fstab after the partition is mounted again with the noatime attribute you should notice a difference in your Linux computer’s performance. Mainly in disk usage but some processor resources as well.

This Linux speed tweak is very easy to do as you can see. Just remember to apply this Linux speed tweak to all of your Linux laptops and Linux desktops! Continue reading about more Linux speed tweaks to get the most out of your Linux computer.

Some lightweight Linux distributions are not full blown Linux distributions and only have a set number of Linux programs that can be installed easily without having to install the software manually. There are also some Linux distributions that are full blown Linux distributions yet still are lightweight as they run lightweight Linux software, you can still install any of the non-lightweight Linux programs as well. I will have some of each listed below and you can make the choice as which one you would like to try out on your PC.

If you do not want to install these lightweight Linux distributions to your hard drive right away you can always install them onto a USB flash drive and run them from the USB thumb drive to try the lightweight Linux distribution out before you install it to your hard drive. Remember that running them from a USB thumb drive will be slightly slower than installing the lightweight Linux distro to your hard drive. If you use a USB hard drive or a eSATA hard drive instead of a USB stick you will get a better feel of the speed when installed onto your internal hard drive.

The boot times below were tested on a T7500 2.2GHz with 4GB of RAM from USB flash drive created with unetbootin. I know this isn’t the best machine to give you boot times from since the laptop has a decent CPU and RAM, but all my other slower machines do not boot from USB and they don’t have a CD-ROM drive. They are running Linux, but had to take hard drive out, toss it in another machine, install, then put the drive back in the laptop. So I can’t test boot times with them.

Damn Small Linux is a very small lightweight Linux distribution that can run from a USB flash drive, business card cd, regular cd, hard drive, and SD card if your PC supports booting from SD! It is only 50MB! So you can store it on just about any media. Damn Small Linux is light enough that it can be powered by a 486DX with only 16MB of RAM! You can also run DSL fully in RAM with only 128MB of RAM! DSL comes with easy to use lightweight setup programs to setup internet, printers, etc.

Boot Time: Window Manager: JWM, FluxBox Web Browser: Nettrik, Dillo, FireFox File Manager: emelFM Email: Sylpheed

Slitaz is another very small lightweight Linux distribution! This lightweight Linux distro can be a fully functional desktop or server with only a tiny size of just 30MB! Slitaz is not based on any other distro as it was built from the ground up. If installed to a hard drive it will utilize 80MB.	Boot Time: Window Manager: LXDE, OpenBox, JWM Web Browser: Midori File Manager: PCman Email: Claws-Mail

Xubuntu is a lightweight Linux distribution that is based off of Ubuntu of course. This lightweight distro has access to the full access to the Canonical’s repositories. Can run on 256MB of RAM although 512MB is recommended. ISO image is 664MB and requires 4.4GB to install on hard drive.	Boot Time: Window Manager: XFCE Web Browser: Firefox File Manager: Thunar Email: Thunderbird

Macpup is a lightweight Linux distribution with a 164MB ISO image. Macpup is based on Puppy Linux. I find the menu a bit busy, unorganized, and a little hard to use. Not sure if it’s the colors of the menu, but I find it hard to find what I’m looking for. Some think the name Macpup is a Puppy Linux designed to run on Mac computers, not true, this is for PC.	Boot Time: Window Manager: Enlightenment Web Browser: Firefox File Manager: Rox-Filer Email: Sylpheed

Linux chmod Command Usage Syntax

You can change permissions of files and folders by using the Linux chmod command. The usage of the Linux chmod command is easy after you get the hang of it and know the chmod command’s usage syntax. The usage syntax for the Linux chmod command is chmod [OPTION] MODE[,MODE] FILE and each MODE is in the form [ugoa]*([-+=]([rwxXst]*|[ugo]))+.

The mode form for chmod is broke down by who you are setting the permissions for.

u – is for setting permissions on the user owning the file or folder.
g – is for setting permissions on the group owning the file or folder.
o – is for setting permissions for everyone else that does not own the file or folder.
a – is for setting all three of the above.

Then you can specify if you are taking away permissions or adding permissions by using – to remove permissions or + to add permissions.

Next in the Linux chmod syntax is what permissions you want to add or remove.

r – add or remove the read permissions, this allows a user or group to view a file.
w – is to add or remove write permissions to a file or folder, this allows a user or group to make changes to a file or folder.
x – is to add or remove execution permissions to a file or folder.

Linux chmod Command Examples

Now for some chmod command examples. If you have a folder called private-photos that you don’t want any other user on your Linux system to access you can remove the permissions of all other users and groups and then add permissions just for the user owning the directory. You can do this using these commands:

Remove all permissions:
chmod -R a-rwx private-photos
In the above command we are using -R for recursive since we are using the chmod command on a directory. Then using a to specify all users, groups, and others. We then use - to specify we are removing permissions. Then we use rwx to specify read, write, and execute permissions to be removed. Finally private-photos which is the directory we are changing permissions for.

Now we need to give the user that owns the directory permissions again since we just removed all permissions. We can do this with the chmod command by using the following syntax:

chmod -R u+rwx private-photos
Now the above command is giving the owner permissions again. -R is telling the chmod command we are going recursive since this is a directory. u is the syntax for user. + is the syntax for adding permissions. rwx is the chmod syntax for specifying read, write, and execute permissions. Finally private-photos is the directory we are changing permissions of.

Now what if you have a directory called family-photos and you wanted all the users that are part of the group family to be able to have permissions to the directory you would first make sure that family-photos is owned by the family group, by using the chown command. Then add permissions using the chmod command.

chown -R Your-Username:family family-photos

Now that family owns the family-photos directory we need to change the permissions on family-photos

chmod -R a-rwx family-photos
That will remove all permissions. Now we need to add permissions for the user and group.

chmod -R ug+rwx family-photos
Now you’re done, but if you wanted your username to be the only one that can edit photos, add or remove photos, etc. but everyone else in the family group can only view them, you could have done these commands instead:

chmod -R u+rwx family-photos
chmod -R g+rx family-photos

I hope this Linux tutorial on the Linux chmod command has helped you understand how Linux permissions work and how to change Linux permissions.

I have a few slower Linux computers myself. Here are some of the slower computers I have in use:

• Transmeta Crusoe 867MHz/384MB
• Dual Intel Pentium Pro 200MHz/256MB
• Dual DEC Alpha 533MHz/512MB
• Intel P4 3.2GHz/4GB
• Intel Atom Z520 1.3GHz/1GB

So you can see I have some slow Linux computers laying around. So I always try to tweak my Linux systems the best I can to make them faster. Whether I customize configurations, compile with custom flags, disable bells and whistles, or just finding fast lightweight applications! Which is what this article is about, I’ve found all kinds of Linux programs that work very well, that don’t hog down your resources like a lot of the main full feature eye candy programs. Some of these lightweight Linux applications are very basic and stripped down, but they still get the job done. You may choose to install the non-lightweight applications as well, for those just in case times, unless you don’t have the hard drive space. You may also want to look at lightweight Linux distributions.

There are also lightweight Linux distributions out there as well that come packaged with all the lightweight apps. I’ll discuss those lightweight Linux distributions in a different article though. Anyways below is a list of types of applications with the lightweight Linux program next to it. I hope this list of lightweight Linux apps helps you speed up your Linux computers.

I will continue adding to the list of lightweight Linux programs as I find more or you tell me about more fast lightweight apps! So if you know of a lightweight Linux application, let me know!

Everytime you login to your Linux system, open a terminal, execute a script, etc. you are opening up another Linux shell. Most of you Linux users are thinking it’s just a Linux shell, it doesn’t take up much resources, that’s true, but just think if you had 10 shells running. The system memory usage would increase a bit. Plus for those of you that don’t have faster computer hardware with tons of resources, we want to conserve as much RAM as possible.

So what can we do about all these Linux shells running eating up our system resources? We can install a lightweight shell and set it to be your default Linux shell. Let’s install dash which is a replacement of ash (Almquist Shell) which was a BSD-licensed replacement for the Bourne Shell that was used in low resource systems.

Depending on what Linux distro you are running, you may need to install dash slightly differently. First lets install dash.

• Gentoo: emerge --sync && emerge dash
• Debain: apt-get update && apt-get install dash
• Fedora: yum install dash

Now that you have dash installed, we want to make dash your default Linux shell. To do this first we want to open a terminal. Type chsh and hit enter, now you should be asked what shell you want to use. Type /bin/dash and hit enter. Any username you want to use the dash shell, repeat the chsh command and change your shell to /bin/dash.

Now we want to change the symlink of /bin/sh to point to /bin/dash instead of /bin/bash. To do this we must first delete the current symlink /bin/sh. In your terminal, type rm -f /bin/sh now we need to create a new symlink to /bin/dash. To do this in your terminal type ln -s /bin/dash /bin/sh and now you are done. Logout and log back in and all of your terminals and shells will be using dash.

NOTE: dash is a very lightweight Linux shell and does not have many features that bash and some other Linux shells have. dash does not support tab complete, so you can’t type cd /us(TAB)sr(TAB)lin(TAB) and be taken to /usr/src/linux. dash does not support history either, so if you were just doing a bunch of long commands in a shell and didn’t want to retype them, just hit up a couple times and then hit enter, well you can’t with dash, but you will notice your scripts running faster, terminals opening faster, less ram being used, etc.

I hope this Linux speed tweak has helped you tweak your Linux computer to make it even more faster! For more Linux tutorials and speed tweaks continue reading through Beginner Linux Tutorial!

Some of you may get a lot of permission denied errors while trying to open files or folders, this may be caused by improper ownership or owner permissions. If it is a ownership problem, chown will fix your problem. If it is a permission problem, then you will want to look into chmod.

The usage of chown is chown [OPTIONS] [OWNER]:[GROUP] [FILE]. There are many options for chown, but I only use 2 of them on a regular basis. I use chown -R | --recursive and also chown --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP. Basically chown -R is used on directories and all files in that directory. chown --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP is used if you want to only change files that are currently owned by CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP.

For some examples of the Linux chown command. Say I have a desktop computer with Linux on it, and my username on the desktop computer is BrandonStimmel, and I buy a new laptop and install Linux on it, and this time I made my username Brandon. I also want to get rid of my desktop because it is slow and uses a lot of electricity. So I want to copy all of my files and folders from the desktop’s /home/BrandonStimmel to the laptop’s /home/Brandon. I simply use rsync, cp, or scp to copy the files and folders from the desktop computer to the laptop computer. Trouble is, I can only read files, I can’t write to them. I keep getting permission denied errors, and you don’t have permission to write to the file $FILE. So I login to the laptop as my user, then su to root, since root has permissions to read and write to the files/folders. Then I run chown -R --from=BrandonStimmel:users Brandon:users /home/Brandon/* Some may ask why I used chown --from= in this example. Well I have a ton of files in my home folder from my desktop and I may have some files that were meant to be owned by root, or some other user as backups. I didn’t want to change all of them to my new username unless I owned them before.

If you use the same example but don’t care who previously owned the files/folders, you can run chown -R Brandon:users /home/Brandon/* and you will change all files/folders in /home/Brandon to be owned by the username Brandon and the group users.

I hope this Linux tutorial on the Linux chown command has helped you fix your permission issues. If you have any questions please feel free to contact Beginner Linux Tutorial by leaving a comment or sending an email. Have a great day and remember to read more Linux tutorials! Knowledge is power, especially with Linux!

I would suggest using less more often than more as the Linux less command can load files to the screen faster. If you do more somefile.txt the entire file must be read before it will start displaying on your screen. If you use less somefile.txt the contents of somefile.txt will be displayed as they are read from the file, so you don’t have to wait until the entire contents are read before you can see it!

Another reason I would suggest using the Linux command less more than the Linux command more is because with less command you can scroll up in the file as well as down, where with the Linux command more you can only scroll down the file. If you pass something with more you have to quit, run the more command again, and hope you don’t pass what you were looking for again.

The syntax for more is like most Linux commands: more [OPTIONS] [filename]. The sytax for less is the same: less [OPTIONS] [FILENAME].

The only options I use normally with less is less -N [FILENAME] which will print line numbers before each line. The only options I use on more is more +[number] [FILENAME] which will start you on line [number].

Now for some examples of more.

If I wanted to view file phone-numbers.txt to write them down on paper, or enter into my cellphone, I could run more phone-numbers.txt and hit enter to scroll down after I have already entered the information on my cellphone or wrote them down on paper.

If I was working on a php/mysql website and I click on Login which takes me to login.php and I get something like: PHP parse error : syntax error, unexpected T-STRING on line 130 in file /home/user/www/login.php I can then run more +130 /home/user/www/login.php which will start me on line 130 where the error is so I can look for what is wrong and then fix it.

Now for some examples of less.

If I was working on a php/mysql website and I was writing a foreach() loop on my php script and needed a little help from someone that has a copy of my script, I could do less -N some-script.php and tell him or her what lines I was having problems with.

Well that’s it for the Linux more and less commands. As always I hope this Linux tutorial on the Linux less and more commands has helped you understand more and less a bit more! Thank you for reading my Linux tutorials on Beginner Linux Tutorial, I hope you have a great day! Any questions of problems with more or less can be asked below in the comment section.

The Linux operating system is more stable! This means that the computer that is serving your website to people every day, will not crash as often as Windows. If you are making money from your website selling products or services, you don’t want your website down at all. If your web site goes down, you can’t make any sales!

Linux operating system is free! So the web hosting company that owns all these web servers don’t have to pay another $300 to put Windows on each server. Which in turn will pass a slight savings onto you!

Linux is also built for networking and multitasking. So it can handle more people using the server at the same time without any problems. So if I had a server running Linux I could have 1,000 different customers using this same server. If I take this same exact server and I put Windows on it, I may only be able to have about 500 different customers using the same server. So again it’s cheaper for the Linux web hosting service so they don’t have to buy as many servers. Remember more servers is more money they have to spend on the servers themselves and also the electric to run that server. So again, you get a little bit of these saving passed onto you!

Linux servers are also more secure! There are many ways Linux is more secure, but the main reasons here, is account security! Your account is safer from hackers if your web hosting service is using Linux. Your customers credit cards and such are safer from attacks. Also your website is safer, so attackers don’t break your website, change your website, or even steal your files!

Linux can not get computer viruses! So your account will be safe from computer viruses ruining your data, stealing customer username, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

So if you are wanting to check out some Linux web hosting services, below are some Linux web hosts that Beginner Linux Tutorial recommends:
NOTE: If you want full details of each Linux web host please check out our Linux Web Hosting section!

• JustHost
• HostGator
• BlueHost
• HostMonster

There are many different grep options you can use in the grep syntax. I myself only use a few options with grep on a regular basis. The basic grep syntax is grep [options] [pattern] [file|files].

grep quick reference guide:

You can use grep -R, grep -r, grep --recursive, which will allow you to have grep parse files recursivley into other directories.

If you are working with code, or just want the output lines to be numbered you can use grep -n or grep --line-number.

Another option I use on a daily basis with grep is grep -i or grep --ignore-case, which will ignore case on both the input file, and the pattern. by default grep is case sensitive, so you have to use this option if you do not want it case sensitive.

If you are wanting to extract multiple patterns from your file, you can use grep -e which can be used multiple times to extract multiple patterns from your file. So if you are wanting to grep two different strings from one file in Linux, you could do grep -e firstpattern -e secondpattern /home/$USER/file.txt.

Here are some grep examples of using the Linux grep command:

If I had a plain text file called phone-book.txt, that had phone numbers listed in this order: First Name Last Name - Street Address - Phone Number
Now I want to get Brandon Stimmel’s phone number. I could run grep Brandon\ Stimmel phone-book.txt and grep would print Brandon Stimmel - 100101 Digital Ave. Tech, Ohio 44333 (330) 222-7222. Notice I used Brandon\ Stimmel, I did this because you can not use a space on the command line, or it will be parsed as the next section of the command, which grep Brandon Stimmel phone-book.txt without the \ would try to extract Brandon from the file Stimmel, which doesn’t exist. So remember to escape your spaces with a \ if you are using them in your pattern/search string.

For another example, if I want to bring up who owns the phone number (330) 222-7222 as it showed up on my caller ID, but I forgot who’s phone number it was, I can do grep \(330\)\ 222-7222 phone-book.txt which would again display: Brandon Stimmel - 100101 Digital Ave. Tech, Ohio 44333 (330) 222-7222.

You can also grep for just the last name, say if you are having a family reunion and you want to bring up all of the people with the last name of Stimmel. grep Stimmel phone-book.txt this will bring up every person in phone-book.txt that has the last name of Stimmel.

You can also pipe data to grep or pipe data from grep to use it in a bash script. Say if you are wanting to do the above example that you found a phone number and forgot who’s it was, but you don’t want to show the entire line with name, address, and number, you just want the name and only the name. grep \(330\)\ 222-7222 phone-book.txt|awk '{print $1" "$2}' which will output Brandon Stimmel. The grep part of this code will output the full string, then we pass that data onto awk which we used it to print only the first and second fields.

Well that’s it for the grep tutorial, for now anyways. As always, thank you for reading our Linux Tutorials and I hope you find these Linux Tutorials very helpful! Remember to bookmark Beginner Linux Tutorial so you can always come back and find more helpful Linux Tutorials!