Linux & Virtulization For You Mate ...

Formatting USB or Partition with "vfat" and "ext3" file system.

2010-12-21T11:09:00.000+05:30

A. How to format USB or other partitions, so that we can access them in to Windows.

Steps :

Here I am using my 4GB USB drive for demo which is detected by “fdisk –l” command as “/dev/sdb” device file. Note that the device USB or the partition to be formatted should be unmounted. You can check it by “mount” command, if mounted use “umount <mount point OR device file name>”.

Now with the help of below command we are going to format this USB with a “vFat” partition, because windows supports either FAT32 or NTFS .

After the above command executed successfully, your USB or any partition will be ready to use with Windows compatibility.

B. How to format USB or other partitions with "ext3" filesysystem.

“ext3” is the main file system type in the Linux systems. So to format USB or a partition with “ext3”, follow below steps.

Steps:

Here I am using my 4GB USB drive for demo which is detected by “fdisk –l” command as “/dev/sdb” device file. Note that the device USB or the partition to be formatted should be unmounted. You can check it by “mount” command, if mounted use “umount <mount point OR device file name>”.
Follow the below command with care as in your system the device file name “/dev/sdb” can be different. After execution it’ll ask for confirmation, so press “y” + Enter. Note that, before unmounting any partition or USB you have to come out of the mounted directory.

Here your USB is ready to mount & use.

You can mount “ext3” partition or USB with command,

To unmount partition or USB device,

Done :)

Linux Boot Process up to Login Screen.

2010-12-21T10:22:00.000+05:30

Steps:

As we start our PC, BIOS loads & checks for all the available hardware’s.
It points out to available Boot device like HDD, CD or USB drive, then invokes MBR (Master Boot Record) & loads GRUB (Grand Unified Boot Loader) stage 1 file from the “/boot” directory.
After loading GRUB Stage 1, it loads Stage 1.5 file and initialize all the file system types (like ext2, ext3, fat32, swap, NTFS, LVM, RAID, JFS, XFS etc.) if booting from USB or HDD. Note if its booting from Live CD it will load ISO9660 file system.
Mounts all the partitions to the respected available mount points from “/etc/fstab” file in RW (Read Write) mode.
Now it will load the kernel as well as its initrd.img (Initial RAM Disk image) in memory.
Then it goes to /etc/inittab file & invokes the default runlevel.
Loads mingetty (6 tty consoles on CLI) e.g. Ctrl + Alt +F1 etc.
If default run level is 5 (Multi user + GUI), then it’ll runs the preferred X Window manager (GNOME or KDE).
Now it executes “login” command with the login console.

Working with compression utilities Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, Zip ...

2010-12-20T14:44:00.000+05:30

## Use of Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, Zip ##

========================

gzip & gunzip:

----------------

gzip - compresses files

gunzip - decompresses gzip files

How to compress 'seq.txt' file using gzip,

#gzip <source file> <Sourcefile.gz>

#gzip seq.txt seq.txt.gz OR

#gzip -c seq.txt > seq.txt.gz (gzip will redirect this file to seq.txt.gz file)

How to uncompress 'seq.txt' file using gunzip,

#gunzip seq.txt.gz - dumps to file, and removes compressed version

bzip2 & bunzip2:

------------------

bzip2 - compresses files

bunzip2 - decompresses .bz2 files

How to compress 'seq.txt' file using bzip2,

#bzip2 <source file> <Sourcefile.bz2>

#bzip2 seq.txt seq.txt.bz2 OR

#bzip2 -c seq.txt > seq.txt.bz2 (bzip2 will redirect this file to seq.txt.bz2 file)

How to uncompress 'seq.txt' file using bunzip2,

#bunzip2 seq.txt.bz2 - dumps to file, and removes compressed version

zip & unzip:

-------------

#zip seq.zip <Folder name to compress>

#zip seq.txt.zip seq.txt

To unzip a file or folder,

#unzip seq.txt.zip

tar with gzip/bzip2:

---------------------

To compress:

#tar -cvf filename.tar /root/test/ (creates a non-compressed archive of a folder /root/test)

#tar -cvf seq.txt.tar seq.txt (Creates tar file)

#tar -czvf seq.txt.tar.gz seq.txt (creates tar/gzip file)

#tar -cjvf seq.txt.tar.bz2 seq.txt (creates tar/bzip2 file)

#tar -cjvf seq.txt.tar.bz2 seq.txt /root (creates tar/bzip2 file for the text file and '/root' directory tree)

To extract files:

#tar -xvf filename.tar

#tar -zxvf filename.tar (To uncompress file tarred with gzip or bzip2)