If you want all the specifics, I suggest familiarising yourself with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). There’s a lot of detail there; the most important thing for you to understand is that, when coming from a Windows to a Linux environment, you don’t have “drive names”. There’s no “C:” or whatever. Everything starts at “/”. (That’s the root of the filesystem.)

To see what’s available from the root, drop into a command line (terminal) and type the commands:

cd /
ls

The results will look something like this (this is my default Ubuntu 21.04 install):

Everything in dark blue is a directory. Everything in white is a text file. Everything in green (nothing in the shot above) is exceutable. The directories you’ll find yourself fiddling with the most include /etc, /home, /media, and /var.

/etc

/etc (pronounced et-see) has all the configuration files. Again default configuration of Ubuntu 21.04, here’s what I’ve got:

Obviously there’s a lot in there. Again, anything in white is a text file; anything in dark blue is a directory. Notice the commands I’ve used: ls and cd.

“ls” gives you a directory “listing”.

“cd” changes to a directory.

“more”, “less”, and “cat” will show you the contents of text files; it’s useful to read up on how these commands work. My tendency is to use “less”, as it presents an easily-navigable, paged display of a file’s contents.

Note: when in doubt, RTFM. (You don’t want anyone to tell you “RTFM” when you ask a dumb question (there are dumb questions)). Read. The. Fucking. Manual. This means to read the manual page for whatever command is in question. For example, if you want to know how “less” works, don’t ask someone “hey, how does ‘less’ work?” They will be within their rights to tell you to RTFM.) To read the (fucking) manual, type this at a command prompt:

man less

As an example, you’ll see something like this:

Follow the on-screen instructions to learn how to navigate a paged viewer like this. (That is, RTFM; I’m not going to re-invent the manual here because FTN.)

It is well worth your time to get to know how these common, basic commands work; they’re extremely powerful and will help you navigate and administer your computer like a fucking boss.

Anyway. Have a cruise around /etc and see what’s in there. Don’t worry: unless you’re the administrator, you can’t break anything.

/home

Linux, like all UNIX-oriented operating systems, is a multi-user system. If you installed fresh and created one user, there will be only one sub-directory in /home. It will be named after you. Mine is /home/brian/.

There are lots of other users on the system. You can view them in the file /etc/passwd:

You’ll never interact with most of them. It’s mostly just you and root, assuming you are your own administrator.

You might be thinking: what’s the freaking point to all this complication? Well, if, in principle, the administrator and users are separated, it’s much more difficult for malware to affect the system. Notice some of the user names in that file: www-data, mail, lp, and so on. They all have different jobs, and those jobs are logically separated from both users and the administrator. In a well-maintained system, even if www-data is compromised, that user cannot affect things like the printer, or you! If you’re compromised, you can’t affect the printer, or the web server, or whatever.

Notice, there are no subdirectories in /home for any of these utility users. That’s what we expect; they never log in; they never use the system, as you do. Sub-directories in /home are legitimate users set up by the administrator.

/media

If you plug in a USB drive, or pop a camera card in a slot, or whatever, that “device” will be “mounted” in a subdirectory of /media.

/media is reserved for removeable devices.

This is important: a device is anything attached to the computer. This includes the keyboard, the wifi controller, the screen, a printer, the hard drive, anything. All of those things are represented somewhere in the filesystem — as a “file”. This simplifies everything. If a printer can be treated like a file, then I can control access to the printer the same way I control access to a file. Easy peasy.

Briefly: the very concept of a file, in the UNIX world, includes the very concept of permission (more on this in a separate article). This is very important: the very idea of security is built in to the very concept of what it’s like to exist in a UNIX-style environment. (For ages, the idea of security was separate from the idea of a file, in a Microsoft environment. This made everything quite vulnerable, and this structural concern is among the reasons why there were so many ways to infect a Microsoft environment with malware. But I digress — and I guess Microsoft has changed its ways by now, I hear. I dunno. I don’t pay attention to those billionaire fuckers.)

So anyway, when you plug in a new device, the system recognises the presence of the new device and “mounts” it. This means that it gets its own spot in the filesystem. (Ages ago, this was all a manual process; nowadays, it’s all very simple, so lucky you!) When the system mounts something new, it will be mounted to a subdirectory of /media corresponding to the user’s name. In my case, anything I mount will live in /media/brian/.

/var

This is a directory where “variable” things go — things that we expect will change as the operating system operates. A specially useful example are the files in /var/log/. These are the log files, where the system tracks the things that happen — depending on how you’ve configured it to keep track of such things. When errors occur, they’ll be in here somewhere. When services restart, you’ll find logs of that as well. Have a bounce around in here and view some of the files. It’s good fun.

Summary

You’ve entered a different world. There’s a lot to learn at first, but everything is very deliberately designed — especially for security — and has been operating successfully for fifty years. It’s worth spending a little time getting to know how the filesystem works, and how it contributes to both the security and stability of a UNIX-oriented system like Linux. This is best done through the command line, and the manual.

When in doubt, indeed, RTFM.

sudo vim /etc/hostname

(Note: hostnames must start with a letter and can contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens.)

Next, change any occurrence of the original hostname to the new one in /etc/hosts. Like this:

sudo vim /etc/hosts

Now, to make the change take effect, either reboot (guh!) or — in my Ubuntu 21.04 case — use hostnamectl. (Other distributions and older versions of Ubuntu use different mechanisms; look up “what service do I use to reset hostname in [your Linux distribution]”.) Here’s what I did:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname Yo-Yo-Yoga

Where “Yo-Yo-Yoga”, as we all know by now, is my new, preferred hostname. Yours will likely be different, like “Hacker-Station-Delta” or “Party-Machine”.

Note that if you use hostnamectl without changing those files, then the next time you reboot, your computer will be named whatever is still in those files.

You can test the new hostname with the command “hostname”, like this:

I hope that was a lot of fun for all of you. I sure got a laugh out of it. In fact, I’m going to keep my hostname like this for a while. See you on the network!

For technical reasons, there are a few laptops out there that actually can’t run Linux; it’s to do with how their hard drives are configured; it’s to do with RAID, and your eyes are already glazing over. Fair enough.

Your best bet is to use a popular search engine and enter a term along the lines of “[some random laptop] linux”. There will be information about someone out there in the world who has tried Linux on this machine. It’s a big world; you will not be the first to wonder.

The big players these days (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and so on) have all the drivers you can imagine bundled up in their distributions. Generally, you’ll never have to install a driver; that’s a problem of the past — and it was a hell of a problem when it was a problem, back in the day.

A good idea is to try running Linux from a USB stick (or some other medium) and see that everything works. For example, Ubuntu offers instructions for creating a bootable medium and going for a test drive. I won’t reinvent the wheel they invented, but the basics are: download a thing, write that thing to a medium that is bootable, boot from that medium, have fun!

If you’re trying to see whether Linux will run on an old laptop, then you might want to try a minimal “Live Linux”. There are several options, with the most popular teeny tiny Linux being Puppy. (It can be good fun to just hack around with tiny distributions if you want to learn some of the basics and some of the non-mainstream software options.)

Assuming that everything is working from the live distribution, use whatever graphical installer they offer and go for it!

If you want to, you can install Linux along side some other operating system, like Windows. To do so, you’ll need to create partitions — scary! But the installer will help you along, and again, assuming you’re following along with someone who has done this before on your laptop of choice, you’ll have a model to follow. In a case like this, you’ll be creating a “dual boot” system, and the world is full of instructions of how to set this up. (I can’t really help because I’ve never done this because Windows: yuck.)

Long story short: yes you can run Linux on your laptop, with very few exceptions. And these days, installation is as easy as booting from a removeable drive and following basic instructions.

Have a go. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom.

(Actually, you can do most things without the command line these days, but you really should use the command line whenever possible.)

Linux is a UNIX-oriented operating system (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s all you need to be able to say at parties), and UNIX is a keyboard-oriented operating system. (There was no concept of a window when it was developed.) So, it’s best that you have a crack at the command line and take a little time to learn a few things. In fact, you can get things done a lot quicker with the command line than you can through a window.

Advantages of using the command line

Power. In Linux, anything you can do in a window, you can do from the command line. But not everything you can do from the command line can be done in a window. This means that the command line is more powerful. (Of course, you can accidentally delete your entire system if you’re not careful. But you could spill coffee all over the machine and fry the main board, but you still keep a cup of coffee next to you am-i-right?)

Speed. Navigating the filesystem, moving things, backing things up, renaming things, all that business — much easier from the command line. Commands such as mv and cp are super awesome and you don’t have to drag and drop icons all over the place. (mv for ‘move’ and cp for ‘copy’.) Once you have a sense of the filesystem, which is set up like a tree, plus a few basic commands, everything falls into place. Trust me.

Knowledge. If you try to run something graphically and it fails, what happened? Well, you can browse the system logs, look around for messages, and so forth. Or, if you try to run the same thing from the command line, any errors will be reported there. So much simpler for troubleshooting.

Disadvantages of using the command line

Nope.