Ubuntu Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. What Is Ubuntu?

Answer :

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software, using its own desktop environment. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu ("humanity towards others").Ubuntu is designed primarily for use own personal computers, although a server edition also exists.

Question 2. Is There A Company Behind Ubuntu? Canonical Is The Company Behind Ubuntu?

Answer :

• We work with the open-source community to deliver Ubuntu. Our related enterprise services are also used by businesses and large enterprises worldwide to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• We also work with hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell, ARM and Intel, along with a range of external agencies and suppliers to ensure the work we’re doing on product and brand development reaches the audiences it deserves in business and in retail.
• We’ve come a long way since our launch in 2004. We now have over 600 staff in more than 30 countries, and offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal and Shanghai.

Question 3. How To Enable Root Login In Ubuntu-12.04?

Answer :

Login as normal user and enter below command in the terminal

# Sudo sh -c ‘echo “greeter-show-manual-login=true” >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf’

Question 4. How Do I Reset My Unity Configuration?

Answer :

The simplest way to do this is to hit open a Terminal or hit Alt-F2 and run the command: # unity –reset

Question 5. How Is Ubuntu Not Affected By Viruses?

Answer :

Almost all viruses and malware are coded to take advantage of weaknesses in Windows. They simply won’t run on Ubuntu, immediately decimating the amount of time, resource and expense you invest in protecting your desktops (not to mention cleaning them up if something nasty does strike).

For a more detailed answer, we’d recommend this article; it goes through some interesting facts on why Linux in general is more secure than Windows.

Question 6. If Ubuntu Is Free, What’s In Ubuntu Advantage?

Answer :

Ubuntu Advantage is Canonical enterprise services offering: it includes our systems management tool – Landscape – and support (access to the Canonical Support Services team) to help enterprises make the most of their Ubuntu experience. This offering was specifically designed to make your IT more efficient and reduce costs for large deployments.

Question 7. How Do I Know If My Video Card Can Run Unity?

Answer :

/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

Which should give you some detailed output about Unity's requirements and if they are met, e.g.:

OpenGL vendor string:   NVIDIA Corporation

OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 6600 GT/PCI/SSE2/3DNOW!

OpenGL version string:  2.1.2 NVIDIA 270.30

Not software rendered:    yes

Not blacklisted:          yes

GLX fbconfig:             yes

GLX texture from pixmap:  yes

GL npot or rect textures: yes

GL vertex program:        yes

GL fragment program:      yes

GL vertex buffer object:  yes

GL frame buffer object:    yes

GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity supported:          yes

Question 8. What’s The Largest Desktop Migration To Ubuntu So Far?

Answer :

85,000 desktops. La Gendarmerie National, part of the French police force, faced growing IT infrastructure costs and decided to review its existing Microsoft-based environment. After switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org and from Internet Explorer to Firefox, the police force decided to upgrade 85,000 desktop PCs to Ubuntu, removing its reliance on the Microsoft operating system almost completely. As well as simplifying maintenance and improving ease of use, Ubuntu is saving the police force €2 million a year in licence fees alone. By repurposing 4,500 machines to act as local servers, it has also dramatically reduced its hardware expenditure. The police force’s IT team tested a number of operating systems but found Ubuntu to be the best fit for the organisation.

Question 9. How Can I Create Launchers On My Desktop?

Answer :

The old GUI dialog is still available if you still want to use this:

Using ALT+F2 type gnome-desktop-item-edit –create-new ~/Desktop

This will launch the old GUI Dialog and create a launcher on your Desktop:

Take the image from   http://askubuntu.com/questions/64222/how-can-i-create-launchers-on-my-desktop.

Gnome-desktop-item-edit is installed automatically if you have installed gnome-shell/gnome-fallback. It is also installed automatically if you have previously installed gnome-tweak-tool.

Alternatively, you can install the old gnome-panel without much of the bulk:

Sudo apt-get install –no-install-recommends gnome-panel.

Question 10. How Can I Run Unity In A Virtual Machine?

Answer :

Install the virtual box and In Virtual Box >= 4.0 Unity is supported and runs nice when Guest Additions are installed.

XServer 1.10 from 11.04 is supported in Virtual Box >= 4.0.6 when Guest Additions are installed.

Question 11. How Do We Do Compliance For Ubuntu?

Answer :

As any IT manager knows, compliance is about more than reporting. It starts with the implementation of compliance policies and processes.

The latest version of Landscape, Canonicals’ systems management tool, introduces extensive access-control extensions, enabling you to implement the access policies you need.

Roles such as ‘Auditor’ (with read access to everything but write access to nothing) or ‘Security Analyst’ (with authentication to execute scripts but not modify them or create new ones) can be defined, right up to the restriction-free ’Full Administrator’ level. Fine-grained control over these credentials is provided, with a default configuration included to ensure that these features can be used without customization. Meanwhile, CIOs will appreciate the ability to define independent security administrator roles when needed.

Question 12. What’s Canonicals’ Role In Open Stack?

Answer :

Ubuntu is the reference operating system for Open Stack, the world’s number one open source cloud infrastructure platform.

The relationship between Ubuntu and Open Stack is a deep one. The release schedules of the two projects are synchronized, ensuring that Open Stack updates and releases are immediately available on widely deployed releases of Ubuntu. But most important is Ubuntu’s status as the reference OS. This means Ubuntu is the preferred base operating system, the one that most developers of Open Stack use every day. No other operating system is as therefore as tightly integrated with Open Stack – or as stringent tested with the cloud software. In short, if you want to run Open Stack (and if you’re interested in open cloud infrastructure, you definitely should be) then the best advice is to do so on Ubuntu.

Question 13. Why Is Ubuntu The Most Popular Operating System For Cloud?

Answer :

Large enterprises such as HP, Microsoft, Rackspace, IBM and Dream Host provide Ubuntu images in their public cloud infrastructure, or run it for their own private and public clouds.

Ubuntu is the number one operating system on Amazon Web Services and has been closely involved with Open Stack since the very beginning of the project. We can therefore provide engineering, consultancy and support expertise to help with any cloud project, whether you want to run your services on a major public cloud (Open Stack-based or otherwise) or build private cloud infrastructure on your own hardware.

Question 14. Can Ubuntu Be Integrated With Microsoft Infrastructure?

Answer :

Yes it can. You can do the work yourself, or you can work with Canonical consultants. Another solution would be to use a third-party technology designed to do just this: you can either migrate your MS servers to Ubuntu-based products such as Zentyal Enterprise Edition or connect your Ubuntu environment to your legacy Microsoft infrastructure using products like Centrify.

Question 15. What Does Ubuntu Mean?

Answer :

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It can also be interpreted as ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computing. And one last extra question for the road…