 Perfect. So we're delighted tonight to be joined by Ruth. Ruth is a member of the restarters community and an avid Linux user. Ruth has a long background in the tech industry and most relevant for tonight, used to work at the University College London, which was the first university in the UK to use Unix. And this part helps set up Unix user group back in the 80s. So Ruth's experience with Linux dates all the way back to kind of when it was first being created, basically. So it's really exciting to have her with us tonight. And without further ado, really, I'll hand it over to you, Ruth. Hello, everybody. I think I'm going to straight away share my screen because there we go. And then I say share. Okay, so I hope that's worked. So I hope everybody can now see rather than big picture of me, they can see my screen in the middle of which is a welcome window that says welcome to Linux Mint. So if you can't see that, then let Neil know straight away and he'll try and sort out any technical problems. So I'm going to give you a wee bit of background about Linux Linux. You'll see why I tend to call it Linux, but I know a lot of people call it Linux. So I hope it doesn't annoy you horribly if I use a different pronunciation. And then I've got a presentation for that, and then we'll put the presentation away and do some things on my machine. I've got a laptop that I'm using here, and that is running Mint Linux as it shows, which is one that we recommend. So let me get up. This is a familiar application, a file manager. And I'm going to go into the folder that I've prepared for this evening. And there's my workshop. So if I double click on that, it brings up an application called Libra Office. It should do. Here it comes. Impress. And I suppose before we go any further, I'm just going to get rid of my phone. So one thing to say about Linux Linux is that it is it's free open source software. And I'll say a bit about what that means. Let's get it going from the first slide. And so it runs a lot of applications that are themselves freely available. They're free open source. They're not proprietary. And so a lot of this evening, I think we'll be saying, look, this is the Linux version of something that you're probably familiar with in another operating system in Windows or Mac. So can I ask you, James, can you see images of people as well? Do I need to get rid of that? Actually, I can't. We can just see your slide. You can just see the slide. Thank you very much for that. Good. So this is our workshop. So let's go on to the next one. So the first big question, I suppose, is why on Earth are we all here tonight? Why use Linux at all? What's wrong with the ubiquitous windows that everybody knows and loves and knows how to use and so on? So well, the first thing is it is free. And the other bit of it is that it's open source software. And that means that there's no copyright on the material. But what it means in practice is that there is a whole community of volunteers of software engineers who work collaboratively to develop the software, to fix bugs in the software, and generally to maintain it and to answer questions about it and so on. And this is actually, you know, that there are papers and books written about this, but it's a very effective way of developing software. It gives you something that is very stable, very reliable and very flexible. If you come across a bug in Linux or an open source application, you can pretty much get in touch with the developers and tell them what the problem is, and they will fix it in a release that will come out within, you know, a couple of months. If you find a bug in something like Windows, it would take years before and you'd never know whether it was really fixed. Similarly, if there is functionality that you want to add to an open source piece of software, you're more likely to get that done if it's a useful addition. So I'm a huge fan of open source software and I've worked on some systems myself as well. It's a really good way to work. And the other thing, which I think is probably really important for the restart community, the repair community, and that is that it runs really well on old hardware. If you've got an old laptop or an old desktop that's no longer, Windows is no longer able to update on it, you know, famously, you have to go out and buy a new laptop every few years in order to keep up with the software. Linux is completely the opposite to that. It tries very much to run on old hardware. And it's also much more resilient to hardware problems. It doesn't crash in the middle of something if something small goes wrong. So it really enables us to reuse our old laptops, keep them going for much longer. There's lots of different versions of Linux, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, I suspect, but certainly Linux Mint is a lightweight to use as less space and less power. And so again, it gives it that flexibility. And another advantage of it being open source, in fact, is that arguably it's the most secure operating system because of its very design. There are ways in which the operating system itself is designed that separate for as an example, it has a big separation between ordinary users who just want to use the system for whatever it is, software development or doing their emails, and so-called super users or people with high privileges who can go on and really manage the system. So it makes it much more difficult for rogue software to be able to be installed on the system to take hold of the system and run it because it wouldn't have those rogue privileges. So the very design makes it more secure. And despite it being lightweight and seems very simple, it is a totally fully fledged multi-user multitasking operating system. And it's used a lot of servers, actually run Linux or Linux or even Unix as their operating system. Apparently super computers, those really big powerful things that quantum computers are going to take over from one day, but so far super computers are running Linux. And one can do everything on it. As I said, I'm a software development developer and I've been using it for a long time, but you can do graphics, you can do sound, I've edited videos, anything you want to do is possible. As I said, there are different versions. The one we're running today is Cinnamon Mint. And maybe at the end, if people have got experience of other versions of Linux, then it'll be interesting to see what those differences are. And that's one thing which is like, it's good and bad. It makes it confusing in a way. But the other thing about Linux, I think, in its applications, it's infinitely configurable. Well, maybe not infinitely, but it feels that way. And so it's much more difficult to compare what you're doing with other people sometimes. But I think it's a bonus. It's lovely. And the other thing is, again, I think because it's open source, there's a much greater willingness to help the whole community out there is there to help people with problems. And if anything doesn't work or you want to find a new application or you've got queries or just want to chat to other users, then putting searches out on the internet will get you lots of links with forums and help and so on. So a tiny bit of history, which we've kind of hinted at maybe. So there were two heroes in computer history, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, who in the 60s and 70s, I think were working at AT&T in the States. And they were a bit fed up with the offering of the operating system that was available to them. So they actually sat down and designed an operating system, which they called UNIX. And at the same time, the C language was developed. So AT&T released the source code and the operating system to the university community. And that's how we ended up in London running it up at UCL and one or two other UK universities. But I think there was a big court case. But in the end, AT&T refused to release it to the commercial world. They wanted a charge for it. And there are some commercial versions of it that were bought from AT&T. So engineering Finland, Linus Torvalds, said, well, I won't say what he said. He sat down and he really wanted to have a UNIX-like operating system. And he reverse engineered a new operating system, which he called Linux. You can see the pun there. And by reverse engineering, he looked at the way UNIX worked. And he had access to the source code to the programs within UNIX. And what he did was write completely new code to work in exactly the same way as UNIX did. So that there wasn't a single line, original line of code in Linux, that AT&T, sorry, there wasn't an original line of code in Linux that had come from UNIX. So AT&T couldn't sue him for copyright or anything. So a huge amount of work, although the operating system is much smaller then and simpler. And to prove that if you're interested, you can actually go to the link there and see the current version of Linux, the source code that he is still maintaining. And as I said, there are lots of different distros based on this. I actually run sues, open sues on my desktop. And this is Linux Mint. So I'm just going to say it's easy to install it if you want to. There's a very good wiki that a restarter colleague, Philip LaRitch has written. And I think we'll put the links up that are in the slides for you to access. But have a look at that and he talks about different distros. Choose your distro, download it onto a USB stick, put the USB stick in your laptop or desktop and boot from there and follow the instructions and hey presto, you will be able to run Linux pretty easily. The important thing to know, which is really useful, is that you can dual boot. So you can actually choose to have both your old operating system and the new Linux on your device. So that means if you don't like it or there might well be occasions when a piece of proprietary software only runs on Windows or Mac OS, then you can boot that up and you still have access to it. One thing it will do as well, it will keep, and I think it doesn't matter if you dual boot or just have Linux on, but it will keep your old Windows files on a virtual disk so that you have access to those as well once you're running your new operating system, which is really useful. Anyway, we're not going to do it today, it would take too long, but I'm sure we can run workshops on that we have done in the past. So enough of the talking, I'm now going to get rid of my presentation and start playing with it. I'll just get rid of that altogether. Okay, cool. And now I'm going to get rid of that for my screen. Now what you can see here is pretty much what it looks like when you very first boot up and log in to your Linux system. The background image will be different because I changed it and I couldn't get back to the old one, but otherwise you'll get this welcome message and you'll get a couple of applications on the desktop and you'll see a number of icons along the bottom of the screen here, which we'll talk about in a minute. So, sorry, I've got to, I don't know what I wanted to talk about. Good. So as a newbie, you can go through the welcome tutorial or you can hide it away and come back to it another time. You don't need to go through it in order to run Linux. So I think there are similarities to Windows, but I'm going to stop saying this because I don't know and I don't want to and it gets boring to keep saying the same thing anyway, but I think you will find that a lot of the applications look quite familiar. So there's a lot of applications that have a graphical interface, graphical user interface that use a window and mouse and so on for you to use them. And a lot of the functionality is also available through a command line. I'm just starting it up here. It's a console or a terminal or whatever you like to call it and there you can just type commands at Linux and it will respond and hopefully we'll have time to look at this a bit more later. But this is probably, although this system does exist on Windows, it is very powerful and a lot of people do like it. For some people it's one of the reasons that they run Linux. So yeah and as we've said today we haven't got a huge amount of time. There's an awful lot we could say about Linux, but this is really going to be a quick tour. So I'm just going to show you the main menu which I think again is similar. If you come down to the bottom left hand side of the screen you'll see some kind of icon there. For Linux Mint it's their icon, it'll be slightly different if you've got a different version. If you left click on that it will bring up a list of all of the applications that are available to you. There's also a search bar at the top so if you can't see something you can search for it. Maybe Firefox, there it comes up so that's very simple. Just get rid of the search. The top one is all applications but there are categories here to make it easier to find things. On the panel on the left hand side here these are just put anything on here and these are frequently used programs. But more usefully probably is that you can put your frequently used programs either on the desktop or along the bar at the bottom of the screen. So let's indeed go into the internet applications and get the Firefox web browser because that's something that other other web browsers are available but Firefox is very popular and it does run on other other operating systems. So if I right click, if I click the right hand button on my mouse it brings up a few options. One of which is add to desktop so if I left click there there it is appearing on my desktop and now I can run it from there. Let's just pop back into that menu again. Right click on Firefox web browser. The other thing I can do if I click add to panel then that puts it at the bottom here. It was already there so you don't see anything different and finally right click on that and now you'll see that I already have it in my favourites on the left hand side here. So the option is to remove it from there. If it wasn't there already then the option would be to add it there. And finally this is the software manager so you have the option to uninstall an application. Obviously I'm not going to do that now. So this is your main access to applications. But there are other ways to get to applications obviously as well. Now this is the file manager. I'm just going to start that up again. We had it earlier. And again I feel it's fairly intuitively, fairly intuitive to use. There are different file managers. This is one called Nemo which is quite popular and let me just give you a quick tour of it. So the icons up here on the right hand side will give you a different format. You can have just a simple list. These green things, these are all folders or in old Unix speak they're called directories. So sometimes it's just useful to remember that that term does get used. If I click on the icon view then it's an icon view as indicated and files will try and have a bit of an icon depending on what kind of files they are. So if it's an example I go into my demo files, double left click there. You'll see I've actually got a Windows format document here, a .docx. So the icon for that is a Microsoft Windows icon. Now as well as getting applications up from the menu at the bottom left you can get to various applications through the files and so on. So if I double click on this document as an example, click there we go, that brings up the Libra Office. Libra Office is the open source version of Windows Office. I think it has a slightly more primitive menu layout. I think later versions of Windows Office look a bit more sophisticated than this but everything that you can do on Office you can do here. So I don't think I need to go through any of these things but if later on if there's anything special that anybody wanted to look at. But just one thing I will show you and that is that when you do a save as for the format of the file you'll see that it comes up. Mind you I think Microsoft Office does this now as well. If we come down here on the bottom right hand side and look at all the options you'll see that as well as the Windows format .docx there's, oh no sorry it's at the top where it should be of course there's ODF so that the Libra Office has an open document format and you can save your documents in that. So if I click that and then save at the bottom right hand side there click on that it will save the document as an ODF. So that is fairly okay I think so the Libra Office will read in all of the formats all the formats from Microsoft Office so if you've got it's got a spreadsheet it's got a database it's we've already seen that it's got a PowerPoint equivalent so if you've got any files that have got the the extensions that Microsoft use no worries Libra Office will open it and similarly nowadays I think might the later versions of Office will open the open format files from formats from Libra Office. The only thing I've ever had trouble with is complicated tables and things in in a in a doc in a .docx or something they don't always render very well if I read in a that in into a Libra Office but that's quite complicated. The other thing if we've got a file here instead you can double click to get up the default application but the other thing you can do is right click so for example I've got an image here if I press the right mouse button it brings up a menu again I think this is familiar and you can either it tells you what the default application is Gwenview or you can open with and you can choose other applications and if you click on other applications then it gives you some suggestions and if you can't see what you want but you you think it might be around then at the bottom you can do a search for the application and the other thing you can do in this window is you can set the the system defaults so if I if I chose to open it with image viewer instead of Gwenview then I can I can select it here and then I can click here with the left hand mouse button on reset to sorry set as default this middle button here and then that would automatically if I clicked on an image it would automatically bring up image viewer instead of Gwenview so that's quite useful to see. Now we were looking I got a bit sidetracked we were looking at the file manager the Nemo so I just go through some of the other options here it's got a powerful change and you can search for files on file names or dates or or content in the in the in the hierarchy that you're at this button here that changes the way this is formatted which tells you which folder you're in personally I prefer having a full path name and this is this is the full path name on the system so if I go up the hierarchy and up one more and I get to slash this is the root of of the whole Linux system the root of all evil you might like to say it's really the root of all good and amongst the folders here for example bin which stands for short for binary if you go in there you'll find lots of applications are stored in their libraries temporary folder and somewhere here is home there we go at the top right here so home contains the folders for each of the users on the system and I've got three users on the system here so that's cool okay I'll come back here but while we're looking at file structures and so on I just wanted to show you further down under devices you've got windows now as I mentioned earlier what happens is if you've got a hard disk or in the system it can be partitioned into virtual disks and each of those virtual disks looks to the software as though it's a completely separate external disk and that's why it appears to be a device if I plug in a USB stick that will show up in devices in a minute there it goes there under devices and it it brings the folders on there as well it brings up the the USB stick so let's just have a quick look in windows some of you will be familiar with the with the file structure in windows but in particular if you go into windows itself I think oh okay okay I've not seen that before but I think maybe I'm wrong actually maybe it's users I need to go to here yeah so so if you if you go into the users folder then these are users that I had registered with windows when I was running it on this laptop so that's me again yeah these are a couple of other users so I can get to my files and copy them over into into my Linux file system if I want you can have as you can see you can have more than one window displaying the file stores so you can easily copy from one window into another in order to move files or copy files from one folder into another or from one disk or device into another so we'll close that now and the other thing while we're here is I just want to show you the format for display that we hadn't looked at yet was this and this you can display here all the items or all the bits of data that exist for a given file or folder these green ones are all folders or directories if we scroll down then we find the files if you right click at the top here you can ask it to display data that you're interested in information about the the items that you're interested in but one particular item I just want to talk about let's move these over a bit and that is sorry about that okay and that is permissions and I think this is quite integral to the way Linux works again I'm afraid I don't know I think there must be something similar in windows but I'm not sure exactly how it works so this is the permissions for each of the items here now if it starts with a D that's because it's a folder or a directory if that is a dash then it means it's an ordinary file and those are the only two kinds of pretty much the only the two kinds of items that you will see and then there are three sets of permissions and these permissions can have the values read write and execute x stands for execute if it's an application then if the x if there's an x in the appropriate place then you can you can run that application you can execute the application if it's a directory that has an exit means you can go into that directory and you can write files in there and do whatever you need to do now there's three groups because unix has linux has this concept of users who don't have any privileges and super users or sometimes called root who have privileges to do absolutely anything in the system um if I was if I was logged on as root or I got hold of my root privileges and I go all the way up to slash at this point I could start a terminal and I could say rm that means remove star dot star and that means every file in the system in which case at which point linux would break and I'd have to reinstall the whole system so what I'm trying to say is as root as a root user super user I've got too much power um so uh linux separates that out so on the whole you're not in danger of using your super user powers even if you're allowed to so let's go back and just finish looking at that um so there's three sets here so um the first set is for um the owner of the file so the owner here is my is me I'm logged on as root so I'm allowed to um that let's have a look at a file rather than um a folder but so for example this dot dmrc I've got I can read it and I can write it that means I can display the file um and I can change it I can make changes to it write data into it delete it and so on um now I the other concept in linux is that we work in groups as well so I can have a group membership other members of my group can read the file but they can't change it and the the right hand most um set of permissions are for other users so if I was logged on as Emma one of the other users on this system I could get to this file by using um this file manager and I could in fact open that file for reading but I couldn't uh write into it and if um this file further down the dot dot x authority you'll see that um the only permissions that are set are written right for the owner of the file so um uh it I I just think that the concept is really important because it's one of the things that makes uh linux really secure and it also it's important to understand it if you're trying to manage the system um so I won't go on further unless there's any burning questions on this I will leave this topic for now um okay so um probably actually the first thing you want to do when you boot boot linux is get on to a network and um if you look at the bottom right hand set of icons on the screen you'll see the familiar network icon there if you left click with that it will bring it up and it will show you the the local all the wireless networks that it can see locally and the one that it's logged into which is my own one um a lot of these things you can get to with going down to the left hand side and bringing bringing up the menu and searching for network or finding the network application but it's much easier if you've got the icons here um another important icon down here is this one the shield which tells you um whether there are updates of the software that are available you can see that it's got a little yellow dot on it and that means that there are um software updates that are available at the moment so if I get sorry single click if I get that up um I get a list of all of the uh bits of software in the system that could be updated that have got new versions um now the the nice thing about linux is it's totally under your control you'll never um accidentally get to the situation where you you you boot up windows because you you want to join a zoom call in five minutes and the thing starts to update its software and you have to wait half an hour and then reboot none of that sort of thing um it's totally under your control and the other thing is that um it's a much more resilient system so it very rarely crashes simply because you have updated software so you can go on working um I'm not going to do it now it does tend to slow the system down obviously because it's very disk bound but um that's how you do it and at any time you can get this um application up you can it will tell you if your system is up to date and there's nothing to do uh you can select what you want to do and you can click install updates to do that and I again I recommend doing that um as often as you can if you notice there's stuff that needs doing it's a good idea to keep the system as up to date as possible because apart from anything else there is that the security fixes that might be being updated and you want to stay on top of those it has its own inbuilt firewall as an example so um I think that's all I wanted to show you at the bottom here good so let's uh have a look at some of the things that you can do some of the applications that you might want to use and I'll just go through them very quickly again if anybody wants more information about an application just put it in the chat and we'll see if we can do it if not this evening then uh then it's on future or in chat in the future so just really head into this bit Ruth just yes we're almost halfway through just a quick get up okay I'll try and speed up a little bit we've had a few questions but not loads so um yeah okay just to let you know that's brilliant thank you um so uh good so I've I've already shown shown you how to get um Firefox up I've shown you Firefox we don't need to go through there again um another popular application if we go into the internet applications is Thunderbird now I don't know um whether anybody whether you've used Outlook or Thunderbird and Thunderbird runs on different operating systems but um it's an email client that allows you to download all of your emails from your server uh Gmail or um Yahoo wherever you get your email you can get it all read down on on to locally on into into Thunderbird um and then you can you can manage it you can read your emails answer them and so on and you're not once you've downloaded your messages you're not dependent on having uh an internet connections an example um but the other thing you can do is you can have more than one account so if you've got a Gmail account and the Yahoo account maybe you've got um an account that you use for a volunteer group that you work with and you've got your own personal email and you've got a work account you can have all of those different sets of emails um downloaded and you can manage them all in one place so Thunderbird's brilliant uh Thunderbird and Firefox come from the same stable which is um Mozilla um and they're very big in in the open source uh arena um so uh just show you those two now um as I said the other way to get to applications is via the file store this machine isn't the fastest partly because I've just got too much stuff on everything here we go um and I'm just uh going to use uh okay the icon version of the file store so um let me see let me show you some a couple of graphics uh things as well so now if I um uh I'll double click on this image and it will bring up Gwen view now there are um I suppose this is both a pro and con but there are probably you know half a dozen different applications that will manage images that will do anything that we're talking about today um this is the one that I'm used to which is why I'm showing it to you it um it allows you to do um simple manipulations of images you can rotate it uh the important thing from my point of view is that you can um you can uh you can um crop the image and that's mainly what I do when I take photos I I try and crop them before I give them to my loved ones so that they're a bit more interesting to look at um and that's pretty much the only um ways that you can manipulate it will it will allow you to do side shows and and so on and it will also allow you to come out um uh uh to to put the image into another application if if you want to do that um but I'll close that I'll come back in here and right click this time I've I've used my right mouse button and I'm going to have a look at open whiz um and I just wanted to show you another quite powerful uh application which is used instead of ah what's the graphics manipulation um help I can't remember the one in the sorry Photoshop Photoshop yeah thank you yes so let's go for that and um I've no idea how it compares in terms of its um commands and so on um it is rather a large bit of software which is why it's taking a while to load it stands for GNU image manipulation program um GNU is is again a set of open source communities um here's the image um you can add text uh oh yeah there it is the back color for green um you can paint on it you can choose your paint brush you can paint stars on it uh again I think I need to set the colors um you can see there's there's a whole complicated set of um of tools uh you can have layers you can have colors you can uh you know read in different images and so on um when you finish manipulating your image you can um if you want to uh share your image with other people you probably want to um save as um am I right about uh yeah you want to no I think I will cancel that I think that's the wrong command let me go back in there it's export as I apologize export as and if you use thank you yeah and then you can export as a png or a jpeg if you save it then it saves it as um gyms internal file store and it's much quicker for it to uh to read it in also it will lose a lot of information in the jpeg so if I'm doing this I'll save save it and say and export it as a jpeg um and just as I don't know if I showed you that on the Libre Office you can export to a pdf as well go away uh that's all right uh discard changes good so um I got a pdf here um no okay so I'm going to have to go into here the um document viewer or ocular is the um Libre is the open source version of um um uh uh uh sorry brain um adobe acrobat so oh I tell a lie that's okay ah there's too many options there's too many options um there we go here we go so um this allows you to read in um hopefully I've got a recent one yep there we go um you can read in pdf documents this is one I made I was just missing about yesterday you can do the usual things you can um it's um it will give you the the things that you can do with the free version of adobe um I you can't edit pdf files through through this but um uh you can you can select areas and so on um there is um also um a um sorry I was just seeing if I had a far no um there is um a desktop publishing um application as well called scribus and I've been able to kind of extract stuff from a pdf and and put it back together again with scribus so it's quite there that's quite a good one to know um I think um probably an important um thing to talk about is uh backups so if we come back into the um application into the uh application store application manager and I ask for backups and you'll see here that there's a backup tool if I click on that it will um come up and lead you through lead you through what you need to do to do a backup of your data and you can either backup your your own files or you or you can add in some of the system files or if you've downloaded a new piece of software for example you might might want to add in so there's a lot of flexibility there um if if you don't already do it I do recommend backing up your data onto an external um file store a USB or um an external disk that's plugged in and do it regularly the the uh the format that it does that it backs stuff up in is a tar gz so that's like uh zip in in windows so it's um it's the single file that if you look inside you can see that it's got other files in there and um the the zippinus um is um uh no sorry my brain is going a bit at the moment I do apologize um the word I want isn't there um so um so it's good to know how to do that yeah um good so oh finally just one other application I would like to show you and um that is uh vlc um again it runs on other systems so you may be uh familiar with it already um but uh going to music um it this this may be a bit loud if I uh if I do start it up but um you can see that I can open it with vlc if I do that it will start playing straight away um there we go I do like sea shanties so um vlc um it's a really good application it manages music you can um you can play uh sets of music and albums and so on but the other big thing that it does is um uh okay oh sorry it's because I've come into bring it up again there we go this is the vlc window you'll see the other thing that allows you to do is manage videos and you can play videos but you can edit videos as well so um and you can edit your audio so you can do quite a lot of of media stuff using vlc um it's very popular good so I think um I'm just going to say a quick word about um finding other applications if you want to um find find new applications um it is the software manager here we go if I bring this up this is a bit like the app store on on android as an example um it will show you um there we go it will show you some of the applications that are available some of them are already on here like uh gimp um or audacity so there's lots of things there dropbox as an example if you're looking for something in particular you can do a search for it here and it will um bring up um so um I don't know if I wanted a work processor it'd be interesting it should bring up okay all sorts of things here so um you can find other applications and you can install them um so it's just to show you that you can do that really um so yes okay um oh yeah there is one other application that I do want to tell you about and that is um so I should have showed you on on the software manager again this application doesn't come with um Linux automatically you have to you have to install it it's called wine um and it it's a windows interface so if you find that you've got programs applications that you can't find an open source version that will run on Linux then you can you can run them under wine um so if I type wine up here it will come up with um there it is and it's ticked because I've already downloaded I've already got it installed on the system but that's a really useful thing to um uh to know to know about you can download it get it running and then um if you've got dot exe files um as I have here I've got uh um signal here we go this this is a version of signal um that it's an exe um that I took from from the windows um folder actually and I can run it here so and it runs under wine so uh those are all the applications that uh I wanted to tell you about um I want to just say a little word about security just to um I mean I think this is this is a plus side of of Linux really but it has built-in security in a way that other operating systems don't necessarily I've talked a bit about super users and uh and root and um uh let me just show you the the uh the user manager as well so if we run up the okay now in order to manage users I do have to be a super user I have to use I have to be a privileged user or an administrator so um it's just asking me to type in my password again in order to confirm that I am me and here we are now we've got the users so these are the three users who are um registered on the system uh Emma is just a standard user she has absolutely no privileges so if she was trying to do this she wouldn't be able to uh I've got two other users the Ruth and Ruth Toby which Toby is one I'm logged in at the moment and they both have administrator powers so um I think it it's uh you have to have at least one user who is an administrator otherwise you won't be able to update the system and you'll have to reinstall basically um I think it's probably not a bad idea to have two users uh with administrator powers and then if something goes horribly wrong with one of them then you should be able to log in uh as the other one and um and sort things out um so this is a level of security that other operating systems don't do this separation of powers and I think it's quite it's important it's important to know how to manage it um the other way in which it's it's more um secure is it has a built-in firewall although I think Windows does nowadays as well and the kernel doesn't have any open ports so um it it's it's impossible for um external systems to come in and put viruses on on on the machine and so on you still have to be very cautious when you're opening emails and so on but because Linux is used less frequently the hackers tend not to um target it and the other thing that makes it really difficult for hackers is the fact that there are so many different versions of Linux they would have to have uh different versions of their viruses in order to get in but also there are um the way the kernel is written it is also um quite robust against viruses being able to be installed um so you know I think you can have some confidence a great site is um which I will give you the link to it later on um but there's a a website called linuxsecurity.com and that has got tons of information um the I mentioned that there is a firewall um you do have to um uh configure it and actually get it going and linuxsecurity.com will tell you how to do that how to find it and how to get it going um it's just one of the applications in here just type firewall um so I highly recommend that website it's absolutely brilliant and that really is all I want to say the only the only other place to go now the other place I'd like to go if there's time but I don't know if we have um I don't know what you think James but um the only other thing to talk about is the uh command line interface um can I have a couple of minutes to show it or yeah if we have a couple of what we've got so far yeah I think it's okay to touch on it um okay if we keep it to five minutes or so then we'll have lots of time for questions after that okay cool lovely so down here I've um you can get it through the menus but it's called terminal or console it's down here on the left um and uh I mean people who know it love it you get complete affectionados and there'll be forums and groups and so on that that we'll talk about it endlessly but it is very very powerful um so um I don't know just as a small example here's um uh here's a list of of my files uh here's a list of uh the files with all the details that we saw earlier and that's a that's quite difficult but I might want to um find and see whether I've got a folder called documents as an example so I can uh one of the powers is that you can run a program and then you can pipe it's called piping you use this uh this character here which you'll find on the keyboard and that sends the output from one command into the input of another command and a favorite command of uh of uh lines affectionados is grep which is uh that just looks inside a file and for a string and tells you whether it's there so if I grep um document sorry doc you meant and press enter you'll see that it's run the ls it's piped it's piped it through grep and indeed I did have a dot a folder called document and it's documents but it still brings it up because it it does the matching so there's all sorts of wonderful things like that you can do um and there's all sorts of programs you can run um one of the things I was playing with was um a python um a python interpreter by the way when you're in the um when you're in the terminal when you're in the command line interface there's this notion of of sitting inside the folder so rather than looking at folders you are in a folder so um you can see uh when I ask which folder I'm in I'm in Ruth Tobi so now I can go into um the um uh folder if I do um a regular expression on it that gets me into the demos one and here we've got some files that I prepared earlier and there it is so now um hello world you can see hello world at the bottom here that is a python program that I did for an earlier workshop so I can run python the program is actually called python 3 here and again I can do all of the file names in the commands use regular expressions so I can just do that since it's the only one there and there it goes it's running it it says hello world and hello rosie the restarters because that was the workshop that I designed it for that I wrote it for it's asking me my name and I type in my name toby and it says hi toby hope you're enjoying the workshop so um it's just the sort of thing you can play around with if you'd like to I won't um show you anything else unless anybody would like me to in particular there's a lot of very powerful stuff you can do here um including um using things like git and for software development and indeed um taking part in in the open source communities developing software if any of you are software engineers I highly recommend that you have a go at uh but actually taking part in some of that okay that's all I wanted to say I think um there's loads of help out there um I think we're going to um put some links to a couple of websites in the chat there is a linux forum a linux mint forum all the all the different linuxes um have got their own forums that you and you can log on and you can chat to people in that the the best thing I find is if if I'm trying to find something that something's not working or uh I'm trying to find something how to do it then um I'll go into Firefox and I'll do a search um and as long as it's important to remember to put in the terms linux and mint and then you'll get linux mint specific help as well um and I think uh yeah we'll we'll we'll give you the we'll give you a couple of links but go out and explore and have fun okay do we have time for questions brilliant thanks so much Ruth for giving us that whistle stock tour through linux mint it was really really helpful really informative um we do have some questions that have accumulated throughout your demonstration so uh we'll start working through those if that's okay promise to be able to answer them let's see how we go I I spot that there are some fellow linux kind of uh users in the in the session you know I'm sure can chip in in case we run into trouble but let's start let's start with the first question which is from Carol who unfortunately had to had to leave early but she asked do you need to download the software manager or is that going to build into this oh no that's built in yes so um everything that we've looked at today came I think everything came with um the the distribution so it was all when I downloaded mint and onto the USB and and put it on the system everything was there the only exception was wine I had to download that I I mean this is from memory I think even VLC was there but definitely the software manager is there yeah perfect can you also stop sharing a screen so we can see you a bit better okay I can always come back in if we need to yeah if we need to demonstrate something we can yeah can do that perfect oh I have to do that don't you yeah I think so excellent cool uh perfect the next question is from Mario Mario asked does linux mint automatically encrypt pictures or files would it be possible to open drives that previously had uh mint without booting up the actual machine for example that felt like a couple of questions in in one go so it doesn't I'm sorry Mario hi and hello hi yeah I was just uh wondering if uh when we install linux you know when we have to log in with a user in password and does it does encrypt automatically the the hard drive so does it um yeah just is it the encryption automatically or is something that we it doesn't encrypt the the hard drive automatically one can encrypt but um it it doesn't happen automatically no I mean one of the problems with it of course if you have got encrypted files is it takes longer to use them so yeah so yeah in the case we had with windows uh drive you had installed and you opened that and you we could search file through the linux mint in the windows uh if um if it's not encrypted we we could of course doing doing the same uh process right yeah okay that was the only questions yeah okay yeah and if so if you had a file store on you a linux file store that you'd copied onto a usb stick or something you'd be able to open it within linux yeah or in fact a windows file store there yeah it's um it's very forgiving that way but they just wouldn't be encrypted yeah for sure and um James if you allow me I'll do just an extra question uh it's not written in the comment there um are the other flavors of linux mint limited of uh all the same like the scene number one I think is the main one is it uh uh I've I've used mint here because it's uh it's a lightweight one it's a smaller one and it's very good for old laptops which this is and um it's also one of the reasons that restarters are interested that's why I'm using it but there are other uh other distros that are much fuller and have more you know greater facilities and so on I actually use something called open so open sues on my desktop which is where I do my work my development perfect yeah the mint specifically linux mint as I think has three full flavors like um the mint itself but of course linux has so many but I think oh yeah mint yes mint itself has flavors as well but I think they they're gonna work I think they're lighter than the main which is uh scene one again but then uh I was I was just curious if there was any difference between them uh yeah I can't answer that really I don't know but um and they're always bringing out I notice there's a new one that's come out now as well so um but that's the kind of the linux forum would be the perfect place to go in and and ask people about that as well yeah the mint forum particularly fantastic thank you brilliant no thank you and just to clarify as well so Stuart in the chat did mention that it's possible to use full disc encryption um or just encrypt your home directory and linux as well that's true actually thank you yes yeah and um as Neil has just put in the chat I think that it's also there are different user interfaces that you can use as well even mint comes with two um uh and uh so I'm using the the cinnamon one here but there is another one that I could have used I won't log out or I'll use my it is my collection but his kde is is a is quite a popular one and that's the other one that comes uh with this version of mint anyway yeah perfect okay the next question comes from mark you asked earlier uh he's tried a mint installation and it seems to suggest time shift for backup is that useful um and Stuart added that doing a backup is a kind of a session in and of itself um but suggested that the application just creates a copy of your files and you have to work out where to store those copies uh I don't know if it's something you've come across or not but I think time shift is an application that does backups yes yeah yes you definitely have to decide even with the the backup um applications that I showed you there you have to decide where you're going to store the files um and and I recommend on an external device really because if you know if something goes wrong with with the uh the device that you're backing up then you lose your backup as well if you've just put it on a different area of the disc I'm not mistaken the rule is three two one right so have three copies two different formats and at least one off site is that correct yeah if you're being yes if you've got really precious stuff definitely one off site and um yeah I've got yes I have three or four disc but I yeah I rotate them so at any one time I've got the last three backups and that's a really uh a good idea yeah it depends how yeah how precious your data is yeah okay uh the next question is from Mike um Mike asked um for an old-ish PC is mint better than libuntu um I probably on at the outset I would say yes but um because you can dual boot these things you couldn't try both of them and see which you prefer but mint is based on Ubuntu anyway but it is particularly tailored for um for older hardware so depending on how old your your um desktop is then yes yeah but uh yeah I mean I'm how old is my desktop must be about 10 years old now and I'm running sous linux on it but it's a heftier machine as well it depends how much capacity we've got um so I think linux doesn't doesn't really mind about the age it's much more about the speed and the the the disc capacity and that sort of thing um the lighter versions do better on smaller systems makes sense um and I think Mike was asking about libuntu with an L but I don't know if that's just a typo or a different flavor that I don't know um sorry what was that libuntu libuntu is a very there's a very lightweight uh linux uh it's it's it's based it's a it's a Ubuntu flavor so it is um similar you know it's similar to uses a lot of the features of the bantu but it's a very lightweight desktop okay so that's l l for light ub u n okay so that's a direct ubuntu distro that's uh that's very is it better than mint would you say well is it more tolerant older and you know even older machines you know sort of um 386 and you know ah 32 bit machines remember them I do so that's probably where you go whereas I think ubuntu and mint support 32 bit machines anymore probably not no that's really um we've really limited hardware like thanks like stuff with um that my sister had a um a laptop a samsung one it had an intel cellar on and we all know they're rubbish but it was a cellar on from like 2011 two gigs of ram it couldn't even on windows 7 but I put lubuntu on it and that worked for another six months then the motherboard died I could have fixed it but it was kind of pointless it's just I mean I've got I've got 90 odd laptops in my possession and each of them were about 14 pounds a piece or something they're all considerably newer and better so even though we are restarters and repairs at some point we just have to get stuff in the bin don't we although yeah that's all I've got that's really useful to know I don't know whether phillips um wiki mentions lubuntu but if it doesn't we should add it in there I think so um thank you very much for that yeah um it's uh it is also handy as well just for um if you've got like a really really old printer from like 2002 or three or something that hasn't got some windows drivers if you just want the machine to run the printing and get some really tired old otherwise worthless desktop and you can just chuck that in the corner and then when you need to use the printer you know if you're not printing all that often turn it on and there you go instead of having um some really really old outdated vulnerable driver on your windows 10 machine or whatever that's yeah that's uh that's a good idea as well yes yeah yeah yeah all right yucky yeah you can actually get rid of me now no no I think you're asking Ruth what what think pad you're using oh yeah because I've got a decade old t430 here okay i'm just curious because i can't remember what this one is actually t480 that's e for every e480 that's not even remotely old that's like well it's maybe four or five years but no it's my desktop that's that's older oh yeah which yeah but the laptop was yeah it's younger yeah all right uh yeah all right thanks Callum then uh one more question was from Neil Wade uh have more than one Neil in the in the session tonight uh who asked um does Libra Office run VBA macros does anyone know uh yes absolutely uh it will it will run macros and things like that in um certainly in the spreadsheet all of the um uh Microsoft functions are supported but you can also run uh python uh you can write python scripts to run in in the calc in the Libra Office calc application as well but yes uh there may be really complicated up um uh scripts and VBA scripts and things like that but it may struggle with or whatever but you've they've done a lot of work in making sure that scripts work um based on experience what usually breaks is windows dependencies like it's using file names for windows or stuff like that yeah you know like if you have a spreadsheet with loads data out of a csv file and it's using c column backstage blah blah that's just not going to work yeah that's the usual practical problem yeah that makes sense thanks Dave um I think Neil's also put some info uh a link to some more info in the chat if anyone is curious um thanks so that link should provide a bit more information as well brilliant um okay I think we've had a couple of questions recently from uh Elias um first one at least you asked is linux setup available on the web um I'm not sure I quite understand the question so the idea of linux is it replaces mac os or windows um so you would install it on your computer um but are you asking if there's help available online um can you clarify your question for us uh maybe in the chat if you want to write um I know English can be complicated hello good evening James good evening hi I'm fine and you for it thanks for your presentation okay I just want to know if I can get a linux setup online yes not um no as as uh James explained so it's it's an operating system it's designed to um an operating system is the software that enables you to use your hardware so it enables the it connects to the mouse it enables you to use your mouse it organizes the file stores um it it connects with a keyboard allows you to type in it manages devices like usb's and so on so um it isn't a piece of software that would run in actually I mean so I'm saying this of course there are virtual machines that do run in the cloud and you could set up a virtual machine that had linux running on it in fact that's quite common uh to have virtual servers um so yes definitely you can do that but but a virtual machine is what it says I suppose but so you need a machine of some kind be it physical or virtual and then you can run linux and then that linux software will enable you to use that machine to do whatever it is you want to do does that make sense Elias okay which I get so if someone here can help me to have a set up and install it on my my computer it will be very nice yes yes indeed I'm sure um you hopefully you'd be able to find some local help yes definitely Elias if you post um a topic on the forum uh saying that you want to install linux I'm sure a lot of the people in the chat in the session tonight will be able to help you via the forum to set up linux okay no no problem cool we also have an article on the wiki about setting up linux as well I've just put a link in the chat so that's a good place to start okay thank thank thank you ask for help for sure okay cool okay I think we're officially out of questions um amazing right we got through all of them does anyone else have any other aspects of linux that they'd like to talk about tonight any other questions about how it works or questions about distros or anything else that yeah anything to add to what I said or corrections if if needed or anything one thing I would suggest is a certain amount of caution with the idea that open source means everything gets fixed there are people who've been waiting 10 years for bugs to get fixed in open office that's one of the reasons a Libre office exists is because yeah so it's nice to think that yes you just put a call out and the bug gets fixed and in some cases it does but in other cases nobody cares to fix it and he just gets left well this is true yeah and how long does it take to get something fixed in Microsoft office um well in one of the next three weeks okay yeah depends on how much money and influence you've got um if you work for a large investment bank and you complain to Microsoft based on experience you get things fixed right okay yeah but similarly actually I mean there is a there are quite a few open source sort of bounty systems now where you can pay to get things fixed yeah yeah yeah which is you know one thing to think about is you've got a really serious need you know it's just pay somebody to fix it you know it's software but the nice thing is if you pay to get it fixed everybody benefits exactly yeah and not only that I mean it is just software but it's available software um whereas proprietary software isn't available your only way to get things done is to go through the the the company that runs it but anybody and any anybody can have a go at fixing the open source software and um if the uh the the people who manage the software like what you've done then they'll incorporate it and then and they'll um distribute it out to everybody excuse me but if it works for you and you like it then you can run your own version of the software indeed yeah and it's it's it's quite a powerful yeah thing to do I think so um yeah yeah so if you know anybody who codes or you code yourself then get in there and try it out yeah okay brilliant um so we've got about five minutes to go so I think um it might unless there are any kind of last minute burning questions it might be time to wrap up uh any last minute some questions that you want to get in um if not then uh I'd just like to extend again a huge thanks to Ruth for talking us through the next minute this evening and sharing her knowledge and expertise as well as to everyone else in the session tonight um so yeah Stuart Callum and Mariah others who've shared their experiences um and David with with Linux thank you all so much for coming uh and for asking questions uh sharing your knowledge um I hope it's been a really interesting session um and if you have any other questions about Linux after the session feel free to go to the ReStatus forum where Ruth I'm sure uh and other people in the chat will be more than happy to help so Elias if you need help please do post in the forum and we'll be there to support um in the meantime have a great rest of the evening everybody and see you soon take care thanks for coming