Week 10: Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

·         Ubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the “enterprise edition”, we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.

·         Ubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Ubuntu usable by as many people as possible.

·         Ubuntu is shipped in stable and regular release cycles; a new release will be shipped every six months. You can use the current stable release or the current development release. A release will be supported for 18 months.

·         Ubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of open source software development; we encourage people to use open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Ubuntu is suitable for both desktop and server use. The current Ubuntu release supports Intel x86 (IBM-compatible PC), AMD64 (Hammer) and PowerPC (Apple iBook and Powerbook, G4 and G5) architectures.

Ubuntu includes more than 1000 pieces of software, starting with the Linux kernel version 2.6 and GNOME 2.30, and covering every standard desktop application from word processing and spreadsheet applications to internet access applications, web server software, email software, programming languages and tools and of course several games.

Click link below to see where my information was obtained from:
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.10/installation-guide/i386/what-is-ubuntu.html.

Week 9: Virtual Machines

A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software implementation of a computing environment in which an operating system (OS) or program can be installed and run.

The virtual machine typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for CPU, memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware.

VMs are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. This operating system is known as the host OS. The virtualization layer can be used to create many individual, isolated VM environments.





Typically, guest operating systems and programs are not aware that they are running on a virtual platform and, as long as the VM's virtual platform is supported, this software can be installed in the same way it would be deployed to physical server hardware. For example, the guest OS might appear to have a physical hard disk attached to it, but actual I/O requests are translated by the virtualization layer so they actually occur against a file that is accessible by the host OS.

Virtual machines can provide numerous advantages over the installation of OS's and software directly on physical hardware. Isolation ensures that applications and services that run within a VM cannot interfere with the host OS or other VMs. VMs can also be easily moved, copied, and reassigned between host servers to optimize hardware resource utilization. Administrators can also take advantage of virtual environments to simply backups, disaster recovery, new deployments and basic system administration tasks. The use of virtual machines also comes with several important management considerations, many of which can be addressed through general systems administration best practices and tools that are designed to manage VMs.

A Virtual Box Screenshot allow you to take a screenshot of the guest, only showing the guests screen, as if you took the screenshot from the guest and then saving the screenshot on the host.

Here is a screenshot of Virtualbox for Windows.  Within Virtualbox Ubuntu 11.10 is running.

Here is a screenshot of me using the internet on my Windows operating systems.  Within Virtualbox Ubuntu 11.10 is running.

The link below is where I obtained my information:

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-machine.