RE: Free copy of Lindows

[Gordon JC Pearce <gordon@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 10:56, Dean Barrett wrote:

>
> It was a sort of serious question in that does Linux lose files in the
same
> manner as XP did - i always thought that NTFS was sort of fault
proof...
>

As I said, apart from user stupidity (my own) and hard drive meltdowns,
I've not really lost anything.  One should be aware that you can't
undelete files in most of the filesystems used in Unix generally (not
just Linux).  Being able to undelete files in Windows is a hangover from
the hairy old origins of DOS.  AFAIK you can't actually undelete files
>from
gone.  Just like ext2, ufs, or whatever.

Most desktop environments provide a "trashcan" of some sort. 
This
usually just moves the file into a ~/.trash directory (for the
uninitiated, ~ means your home directory, usually /home/<username>,
and
a dot in front of a filename or directory name hides it) where you can
either finally delete them, or get them back.

Where you *will* find a difference is in how mail is handled.  Outlook
appears to use some magic secret file format that no-one but itself can
handle (clearly a bad thing).  In Unix you might either use an mbox
file, which is a big long file with all your emails in it in plain text,
or a Maildir, which is a directory with each email saved as a separate
file (again, in plain text).  The good thing about these is that lots of
different programs can handle them in a standard way, so if you have two
computers you can mount your home directory across the network, and
either machine can deal with your mail.  If you use a laptop, you can
use rsync to keep your maildirs in sync.

HTH
Gordon.