Debian Tutorial (Obsolete Documentation)


(A terminal is just a keyboard and a screen, connected to the computer through the network, over a modem, or directly. Your keyboard and monitor form a terminal which is directly attached to the computer: this special terminal is often called the console.)


The solution to this problem is fairly technical. You have to boot with a rescue disk, mount your normal root partition, and edit /etc/passwd to remove the old root password. Ask for help if this doesn't make sense to you (see Getting help from a person, Section 5.5).


To avoid possibly weakening some hardware components, only turn off the computer when you're done for the day. Power up and power down are the two greatest contributors to wear and tear on computer components. Turning the computer on and off once a day is probably the best compromise between your electric bill and your computer's lifespan.


Syntax means the correct ways to combine various options and arguments.


While you can use almost any letters or symbols in a file name, in practice it's a bad idea. It is better to avoid any characters that often have special meanings on the command line, including: { } ( ) [ ] ' ` " \ / > < | ; ! # & ^ * % @

Also avoid putting spaces in filenames. If you want to separate words in a name, good choices are the period, hyphen, and underscore. You could also capitalize each word, LikeThis.


There is also another use for the word "path" . The intended meaning is usually clear from the context.


daemon originally means Disks And Extensions MONitor


In technical terms, kill simply sends a signal. By default it sends a signal which requests termination (TERM, or signal 15); but you can also specify a signal, and signal 9 (KILL) is the signal which forces termination. The command name kill is not necessarily appropriate to the signal sent; for example, sending the TSTP (terminal stop) signal suspends the process but allows it to be continued later.


Debian have packages for the German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Swedish and Chinese versions of the HOWTOs; usually available in the package doc-linux-languagecode, with languagecode being fr for French, es for Spanish, etc...


You may see a chicken and egg problem here. There is an original process that starts all the others; it's process number 1, init. You can see it running by typing ps u 1.


If you're running a C Shell derivative, the equivalent builtin to type is which.


Actually, files beginning with . are not included in the expansion of *


The keyboard of some very old terminals (from the 60s) had no BackSpace or Delete key


It's also sometimes called X11 or X Window. Please note that "X Windows" is not correct and you're likely to offend the purists if you use this incorrect term.


You can see how Debian's X startup works in the file /etc/X11/Xsession. Note that the behavior of /etc/X11/Xsession can be changed by modifying the file /etc/X11/config, which specifies a few system-wide preferences.


The single quotes are not always needed, but they never hurt.


Some people spell it as two words, i.e. "file system". A quick poll of man pages (man -k filesystem, man -k 'file system') reveals about an even split. So I'm spelling it as one word.


This isn't a comprehensive list. Generally the documentation for a particular device or program will tell you what device name you want to use. There are hundreds of different device names. A pretty complete (through not very detailed) list should be on your system in the file /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt.


SCSI devices have a more complicated naming scheme than IDE devices, mostly because SCSI has more uses. The partitions of a SCSI disk have the form /dev/sda[1-9a-f], that is, /dev/sda (or sdb or sdc, etc.) followed by a number or letter from 1--9 or a--f. /dev/scd0 is the first SCSI CDROM device; general devices such as scanners might look like /dev/sg0; /dev/st0 is a SCSI tape drive.


If you have SCSI hard disks in your system, you'll have to change sda by sdb or sdc, etc... in the example above.


"Assembly language" is a very basic computer language that is tied to a particular type of computer. It is usually considered a challenge to program in.


Previously, USL was owned by AT& T and later Novell


A cryptic way of saying "System Five, Release Four".


The source code of a program is what the human programmer reads and writes. It is later translated into machine code that the computer interprets.

Debian Tutorial (Obsolete Documentation)

29 Dezember 2009

Havoc Pennington hp@debian.org