Linux was written by Linus Trovalds, of Finland, as an open source operating system comparable to the more powerful and expensive UNIX. Originally Trovalds wanted to call it Freax a combonation of Free, Freaks and UNIX. But Ari Lemmke named it Linux a combonation of LINus and unIX and the name stuck.

Linus Trovalds started writing the Linux kernel in 1991 as a personal project which consisted of a small number of C files for personal use only. To date is has grown to over 370 MB and branded in a multitude of flavors.

Linux is fast... faster... fastest. Linux is way fast. It is written in C and that is fast. If you need an os that is fast... you need linux.

Linux is also secure. You can't do jack in linux if you have no clout. And that is a good thing. I'm a developer, and for developers it's like this:

- I have clout. On my machine I am a god. Administrator, in the administrators group, can do what I want when I want without any permissions. Can install any software I please... In Development

- I'm just like anyone else. Gotta get permission just to cut one. In the Test Environment

- I don't even have rights to go to the toilet... I have no rights at all. Everyone has better rights in production than developers, because other people follow instructions. Developers are... well developers. They break stuff, plays with stuff, push stuff. That can't happen in production. If production goes down we crash! In Production

Linux assignes permissions on every file. And in linux everything is a file. If it isn't a file, linux acts like it is a file. That's why linux is so hard to hack.

lspci - lists all devices that occupy pci ports

A link is a shortcut to another program. Much like shortcuts in windows. However, there is no similar object in DOS. ln man page

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian squeeze main contrib non-free

/etc/apt/sources.lst

DOS has type, linux has cat and more. Both commands dump the contents of a file to the screen. The difference? more dumps the first page then individual lines everytime you press Enter .

You logout... you get a message that you have stopped jobs... you think What the heck is a stopped job?

It means a job was stopped (suspended) either...

• you intentionnally stopped a job (ctrl-z) or
• you stopped a job unintenntionally with your fat fingers.

The latter happens to me when I make a typing mistake and try to undo it the DOS way when I'm on a linux platform... yes Ctrl-z. Undo in Windows but suspend in linux. No worries... there are two options.

• Blow it away by typing logout again, or
• Take a peek at them with the jobs command

kennyl@magnum:/var/www > jobs
[1]+  Stopped   sudo nano index.html  (wd: /dir/to/some/file)

In this example, I was modifying an index page when I fat fingered Ctrl + Z or in linux terms ^z. Since there is only one stopped job it can be resumed with...

fg

If there were more than one, use the number of the job to resume....

fg [number]

It works like a champ!

Cat /etc/passwd |grep "/home" |cut -d: -f1 Cat /etc/passwd |cut -d: -f1

The user list is in /etc/passwd but it is rather confusing. So this command will get just the user names from the file.

This actually gets all the users with a home directory of /home. If you eliminate that as in...

...it will produce a list of users...