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 …

The inode is both a physical object, located on disk in Unix-style filesystems, and a conceptual entity, represented by a data structure in the Linux kernel. It may not be the best choice for word processing (or maybe it is -- read on), but many see it as an "ISP in …

Free software, as the term is usually used, and public domain software resemble each other in that both are usually free both in a monetary sense and with regard to use. Assuming that a module can be unloaded, its cleanup routine is called to allow it to free up the …

You can control everything from the command line. There is yet one other weakness: if a computer switches operating systems later, the long uptime is credited to the new OS. Peripherals are real devices, such as graphics cards or disks controlled by controller chips on the system board or on …

The four bytes are written as four decimal numbers in the 0-255 range, separated by dots. In this case the waiting process will be suspended and another, more deserving process will be chosen to run. The most difficult part of the installation process is, without a doubt, partitioning the hard …

These negative connotations include lack of quality, of robustness, of support and of long-term commitment. The shell program is what presents the prompt and accepts subsequent commands. This means that it's not enough for a Linux platform to support what an enterprise needs right now. Copyright does not protect facts …

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 device drivers for a class of block device provide class specific interfaces to the class. There is yet one other weakness: if a …

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 …

For those companies, Linux supports most UNIX commands and standards, which makes transitioning to Linux very easy because the company likely would not need to pur- chase additional software or retrain staff. Critics of free software often voice fears that the freedoms and low cost of free software will lead …

Studying in a classroom environment can be the best choice for people who (1) prefer classes to self study, (2) do not have their own computer, (3) are lacking in motivation or study skills or (4) receive some type of tuition assistance or other grants to cover the costs of …

In the Linux world, a large number of users will always prefer to compile applications from source, rather than using an installer package. While there are other options, the most common scripting language is Bash. It's a must try Linux distribution for those are willing to test the working of …

If these programs actually cost money, you'd probably be able to buy a small house for the money you paid for them. To quit from manual page press q key. Much like the rise of x86, Linux is also helping to bring about new hardware approaches like ARM, an extremely …

Linux is full of shortcuts to help make your life easier. Those programs or issues that have not yet been addressed or resolved for Linux can still reside on the original drive and remain operational as long as they are needed. Free software, as the term is usually used, and …

For example when user data is being written to the hard disk. ARP is not just restricted to ethernet devices, it can resolve IP addresses for other physical media, for example FDDI. One more thing, if you don't want your programming Linux distro to be devoid of systemd, there's an …

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 …

IP addresses on the other hand can be assigned and reassigned by network administrators at will but the network hardware responds only to ethernet frames with its own physical address or to special multicast addresses which all machines must receive. Any site that is requested through the "what's that site …

There are three types of partition supported by fdisk, primary, extended and logical. The examples continue, but all hit the same chord: there is no use in preventing the spread of information. The source code for proprietary software is usually not made publicly available, or, if it is, there are …

Processes are allowed to do non-blocking reads (it depends on the mode in which they opened the file or pipe) and, in this case, if there is no data to be read or if the pipe is locked, an error will be returned. When processes are deleted, as they exit …

This means that when the next process that attempts to access this memory gets a page fault, the shared memory fault handling code will use this newly created physical page for that process too. Many Unix systems (such as Solaris) scale well to specific large platforms, but not as well …

Linux is one of the most dominant and adaptable operating systems globally. Linux operating system is utilized in many areas of Computer Science, ranging from embedded to smart devices. This Operating system is utilized in High-Performance Computers, servers that are running the global Internet infrastructure services like DNS, smartphones, android …

For example, you cannot unload the VFAT module if you have one or more VFAT file systems mounted. In fact, there is no difference between command execution directly via terminal or within a shell script apart from the fact that the shell script offers non-interactive execution of multiple commands as …

Sed is the Spanish word for thirst, Though you may thirst (or hunger, or whatever) for an easier way to do things, its name did not derive from there. As of April 2008, Linux had fewer than 100 known viruses, whereas Windows had more than 1,000,000 known viruses …

This modest computer's official Raspbian OS comes loaded with tons of programming tools, connector pins, and other useful ports. To accomplish more complex tasks, tools would simply be connected together, using pipes. For self study it can be useful to have a good introductory book. Organizations today do not need …

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 …

The most common meaning for the term free software is programs whose source code is freely available to anyone to use for any purpose, including studying, copying, modifying, extending and giving away. This is an example of the meritocracy of Linux and open source being pulled into the mainstream, where …

Moreover, even older and simpler machines can be used to study Linux without a graphical user interface (GUI), i.e., with only text and no images on the display screen. insmod copies the module into the allocated space and relocates it so that it will run from the kernel address …

Processes are free to use a FIFO so long as they have appropriate access rights to it. Most people believe it is wrong to steal, and therefore, won't rob a wallet. Today open source software has become critical for almost every organization. The access file logs every visit to your …

Device drivers have to be careful when using DMA. Let's face it; Windows OS is vulnerable to different types of attacks (or hacks). However, the root user is the only one who is able to add new users to the system. For self study it can be useful to have …

A server is a computer with an operating system that is configured to allow other computers to connect to it from across a network. Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. Setting up TCP/IP connections is very different from setting up an amateur radio X.25 connection …

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 …

You need to start from the ground up, choose components, and build a customized operating system that could easily become a great Linux distro for programming and other development purposes. Each filesystem is mounted to a specific location in the namespace, known as a mount point. One who bases his …

An exit status of zero indicates success. One year after the disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, it is increasingly clear that we are dealing with an entirely new class of problems that will be keeping us busy for some time yet. A CPU is a small but powerful semiconductor device …

When one single governing body gains absolute control over something, it is only a matter of time before that governing body increases its power tremendously. The application can then trap into the kernel through this well-defined mechanism and execute only code that the kernel allows it to execute. When the …

To accomplish more complex tasks, tools would simply be connected together, using pipes. As such it is possible to have two or more files and directories with the same name but letters of different case. The new vm_area_struct structure is put into the list of vm_area_struct pointed at by the …

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 …

The LSB is a joint project of several Linux vendors under the auspices of the Linux Foundation (formerly the Free Standards Group). A filesystem is a collection of files and directories in a formal and valid hierarchy. Commercial programming packages, like commercial operating systems, can cost a great deal of …

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 examples continue, but all hit the same chord: there is no use in preventing the spread of information. Well, you can't actually look at the four of them at the same time, but this doesn't matter since your eyes can't look in two directions at once, right? To help …

The platters are attached to a central spindle and spin at a constant speed that can vary between 3000 and 10,000 RPM depending on the model. These applications are not going away anytime soon. When there are no more characters left to read, the device returns end-of-file (EOF). The …