The First Touch
In this chapter, you will learn the basics in order to work on a Unix-based computer: login, execute commands, logout. It also explains how to set up and maintain an Ubuntu Linux-based virtual machine on top of any operating system (e.g. Windows or MacOS
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The First Touch
In this chapter, you will learn the basics in order to work on a Unix-based computer: login, execute commands, logout. Everything you are going to do is happening at the command line level. This means, the look and feel will be like in good old DOS times. It will look like stone-age computing. However, you should remember that although a graphical interface is often nice and comfortable, it consumes a lot of power and only hinders us from learning what is really important. Furthermore, the Linux command line is extremely powerful. You will soon get accustomed to it and never want to miss it again. Let us face it ...
4.1 Just Before the First Touch Oh. Wait. If you are not working on a Linux or MacOSX computer and if you do not have access to such a machine via the network, then it is a good time now to think about how to gain access ... I described some possibilities in Sect. 3.8 on p. 30. Here, I focus on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux and was released in 2004. Since then, Ubuntu became very popular and you will most probably find somebody who runs it and may help you if you face problems.
4.1.1 Running Linux from USB or CDROM If you are not yet sure about installing Ubuntu on your computer, you can try it out without affecting your current system. In any case, you have to download a Linux distribution as an ISO-image file. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com and download Ubuntu Desktop (I used version 12.04 LTS 32 bit; file ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso).
R. Wünschiers, Computational Biology, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34749-8_4, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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4 The First Touch
Ubuntu provides very well-written instructions on how to burn the ISO-image on a CDROM or prepare a bootable USB-stick. Take a look at their website. You are now able to boot Ubuntu Linux from the CDROM or USB-stick, respectively, without any changes to your hard disk drive, i.e., installed operating system (see also Sect. 3.9 on p. 31). Enjoy. The disadvantage of running Linux from a bootable device is that you have no access to your original operating system, hmm. The solution brings a virtual machine. With a virtual machine, you can run almost any operating system on any operating system— you can even run several operating systems in parallel, if your computer has the power. There are many different virtualization solutions available and even more different Linux distributions. In this section, I will show how to set up free Ubuntu Linux on a free Oracle virtual machine.
4.1.2 Running Linux as a Virtual Machine 4.1.2.1 Installing Oracle VM VirtualBox Oracle Corporation is a big player when it comes to software. Since its foundation in 1970 in the Silicon Valley in California/USA, Oracle is best known for its Oracle database system. Due to a clever acquisition in 2010, it owns Sun Microsystems and with it MySQL (Chap. 16 on p. 295), Solaris Unix, OpenOffice, the programming platform Java and ... and ... and VirtualBox. Go to https://www.virtualbox.org and download the VirtualB
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