So what do I mean by transparent? Disk drives provide a more permanent method for storing data, keeping it on spinning disk platters. Like MINIX, it could uncharitably be described as a "toy" example of its kind-the MINIX filesystem could handle filenames only up to 14 characters and address only …

For example, a process may have to wait for a character to be read from a file. Loadlin works from a DOS command line, killing DOS and invoking Linux. Character devices are accessed via character device files. These operations start at a specific byte, which is one's conceptual "location" within …

The Unix philosophy recommended utilizing small, purpose-built programs in combination to do complex overall tasks. An exit status of zero indicates success. Dynamic new technologies such as the Java technology and XML run swimmingly on Linux, as do any number of more esoteric programming languages, from Logo and Rebol to …

Linux keeps looking through the pending list from the start until there is a pass where no semaphore operations can be applied and so no more processes can be woken. For example 128 or 512 bytes, even if the device driver asks for less. For developers, opening one's mind to …

Because of POSIX standards and compliance, software written on Unix could be compiled for a Linux operating system with a usually limited amount of porting effort. When the process resumes operation it appears as if the signal handling routine were called normally. They will be the "power users" and the …

If a developer needs a VM or if IT Ops needs to provision a server, they expect to do so quickly and painlessly; Linux's scalability allows for this rapid provisioning, as does its lack of cost-prohibitive licensing. These processes are said to be in the foreground. The file position starts …

Keep in mind that these are only conventions---not rules. In fact, the current cloud functions-as-a-service (FaaS)/serverless computing model owes much of its heritage to the Unix philosophy. This chapter describes how Linux supports the network protocols known collectively as TCP/IP. Remember that the shell is a program providing …

Each command comes with a manual page which can be used to learn about its function as well as what options and arguments each specific command accepts. Before I became involved in Free Software, I had far different opinions, ideas, and beliefs than I do today. A security breach unnoticed …

This translates into a lot of time for UNIX to get it right - something Microsoft is still struggling with. So, /dev/hda2, the second partition of the primary IDE disk has a major number of 3 and a minor number of 2. If you tried to code up something similar …

If a parent process terminates before its child, the kernel will reparent the child to the init process. The takeover of software by corporations continued at a rapid pace, and free software was becoming an endangered species. Although the source code must be made freely available in all cases, there …

The term “emotional support animal” is in the news at present, mainly, sadly, because of its predictable abuse. In Japan, companion animals are petto or aigando butsu, animals to love, or play with, or take pleasure in, which just about covers it all. The next time you greet your own …

To kill rhinos, Mozambican poachers appear to prefer hunting rifles over other firearms available to them. There is evidence that Czech CZ 550 bolt-action rifles have become more popular with poachers in recent years. While obtaining a rifle through official channels in Mozambique can take up to six months, there …

While Colombia is a special case in some ways because of its long history of conflict, extractive industry activities in less extreme settings are increasingly marked by the presence of private, corporate security. The result is a variety of collaborative partnerships between public and private, formal and informal types of …

To help bring order to chaos, standards groups codify system interfaces into official standards. The number of bytes that the device driver requests is rounded up to the next block size boundary. To those who believe that even bad attention is better than no attention, being treated as a non-entity …

For instance, containers have largely evolved through community involvement. There are three types of partition supported by fdisk, primary, extended and logical. Any of the bytes within a file may be read from or written to. The answer is that you can use any method you like to refer to …

Disk drives provide a more permanent method for storing data, keeping it on spinning disk platters. By contrast, most software carries fine print that denies users these basic rights, leaving them susceptible to the whims of its owners and vulnerable to surveillance. The majority of those working on Free Software …

Recently DBMS Superpower Sybase made their Adaptive Server Enterprise technology available on the Linux platform. The takeover of software by corporations continued at a rapid pace, and free software was becoming an endangered species. When a user logs in, the login program checks the username and password, and then starts …

The most common disks used in Linux systems today are Integrated Disk Electronic or IDE disks. This is because IP addresses are simply an addressing concept, the ethernet devices themselves have their own physical addresses. The LSB extends POSIX and SUS, and adds several standards of its own; it attempts …

It would not be enough to stop here, though. OSS is developed by those people who have a use for it. TCP/IP is so entrenched that Windows implemented it. Shell scripts are not unlike Windows batch files for controlling the system, but a lot more powerful.

Learn how I …

Why make it easier for them. Linux supports three types of hardware device: character, block and network. For Linux, a vendor can create a device driver for a specific hardware device and expect that, within reason, it will operate across most distributions. They should be given the opportunity to examine …

Its latest releases often inspire the other Linux distributions to adopt new features and make changes. Any site that is requested through the "what's that site running" query form at Netcraft.com is added to the set of sites that are routinely sampled; Netcraft doesn't routinely monitor all 22 million …

An inode stores metadata associated with a file, such as its modification timestamp, owner, type, length, and the location of the file's data-but no filename! Sed, as you saw in our example, is basically used for altering a text file without actually having to open it up in a traditional …

As it's compiled from RHEL sources, most of the commercial software built for RHEL can be made to run on CentOS. Initially, there is only one directory on the disk, the root directory. But the Linux community is much more than the kernel, and needs contributions from lots of other …

To accomplish more complex tasks, tools would simply be connected together, using pipes. Like so many others I have always thought that one of the greatest attributes of Linux is its diversity of choice, but there are those outside of the Linux world that see this as a negative. None …

On i386, for example, a register is used for each possible parameter-registers ebx, ecx, edx, esi, and edi contain, in order, the first five parameters. As users developed ways around the methods, the methods kept getting progressively harsher, severely punishing casual proprietary software users who had been legally using and …

awk is actually a programming language designed particularly for text manipulation, but it is widely used as an on-the-spot tool for administration. Notably, Linux is the fastest growing operating system released to date. Linux is a multiprocessing operating system, its objective is to have a process running on each CPU …

Automation is also a game-changer using the terminal. Open source has become the de facto way to build software - not only in tech, but across diverse industries. In 1991, this final gap was filled by Linux, a kernel which was written independently of the GNU project by Linus Torvalds, then …

Processes are separate tasks each with their own rights and responsibilities. By using open source software, you can benefit from integrated management. In this case, Direct Memory Access (DMA) controllers are used to allow hardware peripherals to directly access system memory but this access is under strict control and supervision …

One register might contain status describing an error. When new users encounter Linux, they often have a few misconceptions and false expectations of the system. While Microsoft and Apple development tools can cost upwards of hundreds of dollars, Linux, since its user base is comprised of a lot of developers …

From the inode number, the inode is found. To be safe, always put alias definitions on a separate line, and do not use alias in compound commands.and comments, except that the function name must be the first thing on the line. These extensions are collectively called GNU C, and …

This bleeding edge distro's repository is always up-to-date. Each class of device driver, character, block and network, provides common interfaces that the kernel uses when requesting services from them. Extended partitions are not real partitions at all, they contain any number of logical parititions. (There are a few instance where …

When a command terminates on a fatal signal, bash uses the value of 128+signal as the exit status. Institutions that rely solely on commercial-proprietary vendors - whether on-premises or cloud-based - effectively outsource their IT strategy and reduce their capability to deal with change with agility. Specific filesystems, however, may impose …

It would not be enough to stop here, though. The world economy will not collapse if creators of software choose to share their work with the world. It may not be the best choice for word processing (or maybe it is -- read on), but many see it as an "ISP …

Where Linux has shown a significant advantage over proprietary Unix is in its availability across a vast number of hardware platforms and devices. Another type of open source license is the artistic license, which ensures that the source code of the program is freely available yet allows the original author …

Many times, it does this in order to avoid vice, but counterintuitively, only ends up creating more of it in the process. At kernel initialization time, the address families built into the kernel register themselves with the BSD socket interface. This subshell reinitializes itself, so that the effect is as …

This is especially true for large contributions, new features, or standalone code, like a driver for a specific piece of hardware. Knowledge and information are the building blocks of change. A runnable process is one which is waiting only for a CPU to run on. In addition, in the open …

Binary compatibility is maintained across a given major version of glibc, at the very least. Does it support my critical applications? Linux aims toward POSIX and SUS compliance. Of course, most system calls have only a couple of parameters.

Getting Enlightenment to work with a dual screen monitor

So when you're writing something in your word processor and you want to check out something on the web, no need to review all your windows to find your browser, stacked all the way behind the others. If you are not already familiar with the GNU GPL, the best way …

For high speed devices, such as hard disk controllers or ethernet devices the data transfer rate is a lot higher. Even in the days before the Internet, information and so-called "intellectual property" could still be, and were, exchanged. The proto_ops data structure consists of the address family type and a …

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 …