Physical filesystems reside on block storage devices, such as CDs, floppy disks, compact flash cards, or hard drives. Today open source software has become critical for almost every organization. If you love the rolling Linux distributions (here are some fixed vs rolling release differences), then you don't need to look …

Each device driver tells the operating system how to use that specific device. The process tree is rooted at the first process, known as the init process, which is typically the init program. By and throughout the 1990s, you could find MINIX installations thriving in universities worldwide-and a young Linus …

No distribution of Linux is completely bug-free, so you may be required to fix small problems by hand after installation. Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. There are Web sites, articles, and books devoted to the subject, and Linux User Groups (also known as LUGs) meet in …

From the filename, the kernel obtains the inode number. The command cd may be run without a location as we saw in the shortcut above but usually will be run with a single command line argument which is the location we would like to change into. A block device cannot …

Initially, there is only one directory on the disk, the root directory. But note that this book does not cover the Linux programming environment -for example, there is no tutorial on make in these pages. The count is the number of kernel entities that are dependent on this module. In …

By opening the code to widespread examination, more people take part in finding its bugs and security flaws, in testing for broad compatibility across platforms, and in providing new ideas. This means that when the next process that attempts to access this memory gets a page fault, the shared memory …

In this way, the Internet acts as the glue that binds together Linux developers in particular and OSS developers in general. Built in to the structure of the command-line environment are dozens of commands and several text-based help systems. Now, imagine that the execution of all the above commands is …

However, this is no less "programming" than anything else. On these foundationless grounds, what would be the problem with using Skype and locking not only yourself, but also all of your friends, into one company's software and protocol? It uses YUM for package management. A host wishing to know the …

Linux is a popular platform for everything from middleware to embedded computing and clusters, to parallel supercomputers and gadgets. Anyone who knows what they are doing is welcome to develop for the core, and submit patches. All controllers are different, but they usually have registers which control them. A block …

Whenever we refer to a file or directory we are using one of these paths. Popular distributions include Debian, Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu, but there are many others. The CPU can access both the system space memory and the I/O space memory, whereas the controllers themselves can only access …

The access file logs every visit to your web site. For example, a processor could execute an instruction every clock pulse. A way to prevent that is regular updates and only download software, themes and plugns form reliable sources. It looks at each member of the operations pending queue (sem_pending …

Because Linux has such a large number of contributors from across multiple decades of development, contacting each individual author and getting them to agree to a new license is virtually impossible, so that Linux remaining licensed under the GPLv2 in perpetuity is all but assured. Linux tracks the usage of …

The issues with the Diebold [2] voting systems in the US is testament [3] to the need for transparent systems that are trustworthy. In the above example, the vfat and msdos modules are both dependent on the fat module and so it has a count of 2. For Linux, a …

Therefore, an alias definition appearing on the same line as another command does not take effect until the next line of input is read. Let's face it; Windows OS is vulnerable to different types of attacks (or hacks). Grep will take the output for that command, which is the name …

Linux is open-source. With all the activity around Unix at Berkeley, a new delivery of Unix software was born: the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD. Furthermore, the developer writing Python or Ruby or Scala can still benefit from knowledge of system programming, as an understanding of the soul of the …

Public domain refers to the total absence of copyright protection. Normally, Linux would suspend the requestor, putting the process onto a wait queue until there is enough physical memory. It sounds counterintuitive and/or just plain stupid on paper, but is generally seen as the traditional and conservative way to …

In addition to the real uid, each process also has an effective uid, a saved uid, and a filesystem uid. The terminal in Linux is a wild card. Whereas sockets communicating over the Internet might use a hostname and port pair for identifying the target of communication, Unix domain sockets …