Reference Guide

Mandrake Linux 9.1

http://www.MandrakeSoft.com

by Camille Bégnis, Christian Roy, Fabian Mandelbaum, Joël Pomerleau, Vincent Danen, Roberto Rosselli del Turco, Stefan Siegel, Marco De Vitis, Alice Lafox, Kevin Lecouvey, Christian Georges, John Rye, Robert Kulagowski, Pascal Rigaux, Frédéric Crozat, Laurent Montel, Damien Chaumette, Till Kamppeter, Guillaume Cottenceau, Jonathan Gotti, Christian Belisle, Sylvestre Taburet, Thierry Vignaud, Juan Quintela, Pascal Lo Re, Kadjo N'Doua, Mark Walker, Roberto Patriarca, Patricia Pichardo Bégnis, Alexis Gilliot, Arnaud Desmons, Wolfgang Bornath, Alessandro Baretta, Aurélien Lemaire, Daouda Lo, Florent Villard, Gwenole Beauchesne, Giuseppe Ghibò, Joël Wardenski, Debora Rejnharc Mandelbaum.

Legal Notice

This manual is protected under MandrakeSoft intellectual property rights. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the invariant sections being Section , “About Mandrake Linux”, with the front-cover texts being listed below, and with no back-cover texts. A copy of the license is available on the GNU site.

Front-cover texts:

MandrakeSoft March 2003
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/
Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 by MandrakeSoft S.A. 
and MandrakeSoft Inc.

Mandrake”, “Mandrake Linux” and “MandrakeSoft” are registered trademarks of MandrakeSoft S.A.; Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds; UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

Tools Used in The Making of This Manual

This manual was written in XML DocBook. Borges was used to manage the set of files involved. The XML source files were processed by openjade and jadetex using Norman Walsh's custom stylesheets. Screen-shots were taken using xwd or GIMP and converted with convert (from the ImageMagick package). All this software is available on your Mandrake Linux distribution, and all parts of it are free software.

2003-03-24


Table of Contents

Preface
About Mandrake Linux
Contact Mandrake Community
Support Mandrake Linux
Contribute to Mandrake Linux
Purchasing Mandrake Products
Note from the Editor
Conventions Used in this Book
Typing Conventions
General Conventions
I. The Linux System
1. Basic UNIX System Concepts
Users and Groups
File Basics
Processes
Small Introduction to the Command Line
cd: Change Directory
Some Environment Variables and the echo Command
cat: Print the Contents of One or More Files to the Screen
less: a Pager
ls: Listing Files
Useful Keyboard Shortcuts
2. Disks and Partitions
Structure of a Hard Disk
Sectors
Partitions
Define the Structure of your Disk
Conventions for Naming Disks and Partitions
3. Introduction to the Command Line
File-Handling Utilities
mkdir, touch: Creating Empty Directories and Files
rm: Deleting Files or Directories
mv: Moving or Renaming Files
cp: Copying Files and Directories
Handling File Attributes
chown, chgrp: Change the Owner and Group of One or More Files
chmod: Changing Permissions on Files and Directories
Shell Globbing Patterns
Redirections and Pipes
A Little More About Processes
Redirections
Pipes
Command-Line Completion
Example
Other Completion Methods
Starting and Handling Background Processes: Job Control
A Final Word
4. Text Editing: Emacs and VI
Emacs
Short presentation
Getting started
Handling buffers
Copy, cut, paste, search
Quit Emacs
Vi: the ancestor
Insert mode, command mode, ex mode...
Handling buffers
Editing text and move commands
Cut, copy, paste
Quit Vi
A last word...
5. Command-Line Utilities
File Operations and Filtering
cat, tail, head, tee: File Printing Commands
grep: Locate Strings in Files
wc: Calculation Elements in Files
sort: Sorting Files
find: Find Files According to Certain Criteria
Commands Startup Sheduling
crontab: reporting or editing your crontab file
at: schedule a command, but only once
Archiving and Data Compression
tar: Tape ARchiver
bzip2 and gzip: Data Compression Programs
Many, many more...
6. Process Control
More About Processes
The Process Tree
Signals
Information on Processes: ps and pstree
ps
pstree
Sending Signals to Processes: kill, killall and top
kill, killall
Mixing ps and kill: top
Setting Priority to Processes: nice, renice
renice
nice
II. Linux in Depth
7. File Tree Organization
Shareable/Unshareable, Static/Variable Data
The root Directory: /
/usr: The Big One
/var: Modifiable Data During Use
/etc: Configuration Files
8. Filesystems and Mount Points
Principles
Partitioning a Hard Disk, Formatting a Partition
The mount and umount Commands
The /etc/fstab File
A Note About The Supermount Feature
9. The Linux Filesystem
Comparison of a Few Filesystems
Different Usable Filesystems
Differences Between the Filesystems
And Performance Wise?
Everything is a File
The Different File Types
Inodes
Links
Anonymous Pipes and Named Pipes
Special Files: Character Mode and Block Mode Files
Symbolic Links, Limitation of Hard Links
File Attributes
10. The /proc Filesystem
Information About Processes
Information on The Hardware
The /proc/sys Sub-Directory
11. The Start-Up Files: init sysv
In the Beginning Was init
Runlevels
III. Advanced Uses
12. Building and Installing Free Software
Introduction
Requirements
Compilation
Structure of a distribution
Decompression
tar.gz archive
The use of GNU Tar
bzip2
Just do it!
Configuration
AutoConf
imake
Various shell scripts
Alternatives
Compilation
make
Rules
Go, go, go!
Explanations
What if... it does not work?
Installation
With make
Problems
Support
Documentation
Technical support
How to find free software
Acknowledgments
13. Compiling And Installing New Kernels
Where to Find Kernel Sources
Unpacking Sources, Patching The Kernel (if Necessary)
Configuring The Kernel
Saving, Reusing Your Kernel Configuration Files
Compiling Kernel And Modules, Installing The Beast
Installing The New Kernel Manually
Updating LILO
Updating Grub
A. The GNU General Public License
Preamble
Terms and conditions for copying,  distribution  and  modification
B. GNU Free Documentation License
GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents
C. Glossary
Index

List of Figures

1.1. Graphical-Mode Login Session
1.2. Console Mode Login Session
1.3. The Terminal Icon on the KDE Panel
2.1. First Example of Partition Naming under GNU/Linux
2.2. Second Example of Partition Naming under GNU/Linux
4.1. Emacs, editing two files at once
4.2. Emacs, before copying the text block
4.3. Emacs, after having copied the text block
4.4. Starting position in VIM
4.5. VIM, before copying the text block
4.6. VIM, after having copied the text block
6.1. Monitoring Processes with top
8.1. A Not Yet Mounted Filesystem
8.2. Filesystem Is Now Mounted

List of Tables

9.1. Filesystem Characteristics