Users of closed source operating systems must report the bug to the manufacturer and wait for the manufacturer to develop, test, and release a solution to the problem, known as a hot fix. Unlike the MINIX filesystem before it, ext could address up to 2GB of storage and handle 255-character …

This might be a bit of a controversial statement, but I've not seen any Linux GUIs that are quite as good as Windows. In 1978, Kernighan and Ritchie wrote, "The C Programming Language," a book that is today as it was 20 years ago: THE book on C programming. Like …

Linux and other open source projects built on top of it have helped to drive the a standardization of IT, allowing for more interoperability across the world's business environment. Many of the devices you own probably, such as Android phones, digital storage devices, personal video recorders, cameras, wearables, and more …

Dynamically loading code as it is needed is attractive as it keeps the kernel size to a minimum and makes the kernel very flexible. For DOS formatted disks, those formatted by fdisk, there are four primary disk partitions. Linux is that power. The originator of the request, the client, creates …

When provided with a relative pathname, the kernel begins the pathname resolution in the current working directory. Linux systems always have a root filesystem. I've been in Free Software for a few years now and learned a ton from it. Modularity is common in nature, and its application to man-made …

Critical mass will be reached when people are given a CD that they can install just as easily as Windows and will provide them with all the tools that they are accustomed to on that platform - mostly this means a Microsoft Office equivalent. If, however, that company transitions to Linux …

There are various other shell interpreters available, such as Korn shell, C shell and more. The first method is most often the easiest, as long as your system UEFI boot manager allows you to disable the secure boot feature. For the operating system to accomplish this, it must contain the …

Newbies can directly cat crontab file to see the syntax in case they forget it. The API merely defines the interface; the piece of software that actually provides the API is known as the implementation of the API. There are editors, compilers and interpreters for nearly every language ever created …

A security breach unnoticed by the vendor can easily be exploited by the wrong person. That aside, FIFOs are handled almost exactly the same way as pipes and they use the same data structures and operations. Although there are numerous distributions available, most of the older, well-known distributions are good …

The code is supplied on CDROMs or other media with the executable program and/or it is made available for downloading from the Internet. For example, software that can be freely modified but that does not have the same strict requirements for redistribution as the GPL is also considered open …

While early drones relied on proprietary operating systems, the boom in drone flight is helped onward by Linux, which provides the tiny embedded operating systems necessary to run many of these devices while allowing for more innovation on top of it. Businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies and other organizations around …

For example, when we add a user named "paul," Linux creates a directory /home/paul. It is just the way Linux works that makes it a secure operating system. insmod copies the module into the allocated space and relocates it so that it will run from the kernel address that …

Written originally for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) family of PDP microcomputers, this most popular of multi-user, general-purpose operating systems has taken over roles in all areas of computing -- even those once held by mainframes. Although, there's no rocket science in it. Because of the rarity of malware threats, there …

The IP protocol is a transport layer that is used by other protocols to carry their data. One interesting feature it has is that every instruction is conditional. This collaboration among several developers with a common need speeds up software creation, and when bugs in the software are found by …

All Unix versions and workalikes, including Linux, communciate between devices (computers, printers, cash registers, etc) using TCP/IP. Where Linux has shown a significant advantage over proprietary Unix is in its availability across a vast number of hardware platforms and devices. As both communities have matured over the past decade …

The instructions executed by the processor are very simple; for example ``read the contents of memory at location X into register Y'. The target host that owns the IP address, responds with an ARP reply that contains its physical hardware address. Staff and students in the school have the tcsh …

The API user (generally, the higher-level software) has zero input into the API and its implementation. The file position starts at zero; it cannot be negative. Processes are generally associated with a user's login group, not any of the supplemental groups. (Even of the large corporately-funded developer base, many have …

There are many ways to make money, so why choose a method that requires investing just as much time and effort into making software that lots of people want to use as trying to prevent the usage of said software? Most shells offer a similar set of internal commands, but …

The exact wording of a recipe as it is written by its author is protected under copyright law, but the information itself (i.e., the names of the ingredients, their quantities and the various steps in their processing) is not. Even so, if a process executes until it waits then …

Mostly Linux kernel modules are device drivers, pseudo-device drivers such as network drivers, or file-systems. The IP protocol layer itself uses many different physical media to transport IP packets to other IP hosts. Software and other creative works enter the public domain only if the author deliberately surrenders the copyright …

A mechanism is needed whereby activities can be scheduled to run at some relatively precise time. The registered protocol operations are kept in the pops vector, a vector of pointers to proto_ops data structures. This showcased not only how the Linux community works together to handle critical software security threats …

This hides the underlying differences from the generic system calls which read and write to ordinary files. It was a failure. When it boots, it automati- cally looks for a GRUB 2 bootloader image file named grubx64.efi, also in the uefi folder on the system. Windows 10 is perhaps …

The saved uid stores the original effective uid; its value is used in deciding what effective uid values the user may switch to. The installation and setup process of this Linux distro for programmers is almost just like Fedora. The address bus specifies the memory locations (addresses) for the data …

It will even automatically look for requests for missing or non-existent web pages, known as 404s. Most of the servers that hold the entire internet are Linux-based for many reasons that will not be listed here. The access file logs every visit to your web site. The shell program is …

The read/write heads are moved across the surface of the platters by an actuator. The BSD socket layer passes the socket data structure representing the BSD socket to the INET layer in each of these operations. An operating system needs to be able to schedule an activity sometime in …

Closed source software can be distributed for free or for a cost; either way, the source code for the software is unavailable from the original developers. In Linux, no further organization or formatting is specified for a file. Until Linux came along it was either Windows or Macintosh - take it …

At that time a new generation of computers with proprietary operating systems was introduced, and their vendors required that users sign non-disclosure statements in order to obtain copies of the operating systems. Software running on the CPU must be able to read and write those controlling registers. (To be a …

Open Source software, like its name suggests, provides users with an open code that can be freely used, modified, and shared by everyone. The so-called open source and free software development models started with the Free Software Foundation and were popularized with Linux. Each filesystem is mounted to a specific …

They come in multiple varieties, including the Unix domain socket, which is the form of socket used for communication within the local machine. The GNU C library provides more than its name suggests. The bss section was conceived solely as an optimization for this purpose. Unix systems, however, are dynamic …

As a result of this restriction, artistic licenses are rarely used because many developers do not want to work on potentially futile projects. So, you can focus on the development work and leave other worries aside. The CPU can access both the system space memory and the I/O space …

The price for a Windows license amounts to an average of one fourth of each new computer's price. Many of the devices you own probably, such as Android phones, digital storage devices, personal video recorders, cameras, wearables, and more, also run Linux. Linux systems always have a root filesystem. Again …

(See "Shell Built-in Commands.") Readline has variables that can be used to further customize its behavior. This led to the development of the free software movement by Richard Stallman. If a parent process terminates before its child, the kernel will reparent the child to the init process. The price for …

The text section contains executable code and read-only data, such as constant variables, and is typically marked read-only and executable. At the same time, many executives have a crude interpretation of its value to corporations?"It's free, and therefore it's cheap." Slowly, that mentality is changing, but it's still true …

Block devices are accessed via the buffer cache and may be randomly accessed, that is to say, any block can be read or written no matter where it is on the device. Among the easiest to try at first are the text editors, word processors, image viewers, calculators and games …

Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. You can easily see the exported kernel symbols and their values by looking at /proc/ksyms or by using the ksyms utility. Traditionally, Unix programs have been single-threaded, owing to Unix's historic simplicity, fast process creation times, and robust IPC mechanisms …

For some small business leaders I've consulted, the human factor is either a notion to be rejected or ignored. For most users, LILO works best. Kerneld is just an agent of the kernel, scheduling work on its behalf. Not often are our basic rights thought of in the context of …

Its latest releases often inspire the other Linux distributions to adopt new features and make changes. By then, much of the GNU operating system had been completed, with the notable exception of a kernel (i.e., the core of the operating system). The entire Linux kernel was written from scratch …

You can also press the C key at any time to enter an interactive shell mode, allowing you to submit commands on the fly. Businesses, with no faith in their ability to succeed with Open Source, would resort to writing proprietary software that can be sold on a shelf. The …

Time enough for a soapbox. It could be argued that its smaller number of vulnerabilities is because of its rarer deployment, but the simplest explanation is that OpenBSD has focused strongly on security - and achieved it better than the rest. The BSD socket layer calls the INET layer socket support …

Installation can take a while, depending on the speed of the computer and the options selected. Apart from the ability of a loaded module to crash the operating system by being badly written, it presents another danger. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. If your memory is like mine …