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FLOSSARY The Free/Libre/Open-Source Software Glossary 
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FLOSSARY

The Free/Libre/Open-Source Software Glossary

big_D wrote:
This thread is designed to get over some of the technical terms that Linux uses. It won't cover every single term you are likely to come across, but I hope it will give you a reasonable understanding of what Linux is and does...

I am going to break it down into chunks now, so that, if it gets too big for one post, it won't be split up by comments in between...

Thanks also to Tinbath for additional material.


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Hints / Tips / Suggestions:

  1. These are only the most common terms you might come across - if you have a suggestion for an entry please feel free to post a suggestion below
  2. All the entry titles link to an appropriate Wikipedia page.
  3. External links are fomatted as <<Link>> to distinguish them from both the text and the titles.
  4. Cross-references are highlighted in bold

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This is something that Dave and I (mainly Dave though) created back in the good old days. I thought I'd bring it over so that we can maintain it here and not require an external link to the "other place". Sadly though, it seems our work might get filched by those who forced us out in the first place. Therefore:

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Linux Glossary by David Wright and Jim Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

All brand and trade names and marks are the property of their respective owners.


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Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:39 pm, edited 14 times in total.



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A
AIGLX: A variation of the XOrg system, merged into the core XOrg with version 7.1. It is used in conjunction with Compiz to provide amazing graphical special effects and fluid desktop rotation etc. Relies on OpenGL Driver support.

Amarok: This is a KDE based media player that is very popular - the other big name music player is XMMS. Amarok runs in the task bar, has a small player window if you want to view it, and opens up a large playlist library window as well. The playlist/library window allows you to view the playlist and manage your music library. It is also skinable. It supports a number of different "backends" for playing back your music (Helix and Xine being the most popular). Be warned, most distributions supply a castrated version of the player, which can't play MP3 for legal reasons. Most also have additional repositories where you can download the full version, but the full version won't usually be officially supported by the distribution.

Akregator: An RSS feed utility that integrates into the Kontact PIM, providing information about websites that you are watching that have been updated.

Alsa: (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) Introduced around the turn of the century, it provides a standard interface to sound cards and chipsets for software. Previous attempts at standardising had mixed success and had sporadic Driver support. ALSA is much better and has reasonable sound support - although sometimes manufacturers are slow to come up with Drivers for their new kit.
If you are thinking of purchasing a new sound card for your PC, it might be worth checking out the <<ALSA hardware compatibility list>>.

APT: (Advanced Packaging Tool) APT is a text-based package management tool used by many distributions to install new applications from online repositories. It was originally created for the Debian project, but has since been adopted by many others. (see also package manager, repositories)

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B
bash: (Bourne Again SHell) The Bourne shell (named after its creator) was one of the classic, and powerful shells created for Unix. When the Linux project got off the ground, the Bourne shell was resurrected as bash. It is usually the standard command line shell installed in most distributions. You can switch to other shells, such a csh if you so wish.
It is a simple and powerful command line interface, with command history and a simple scripting language. (See <<The BASH online manual>> for more information.)

Binary Drivers: (Proprietary Drivers) are bad :P Seriously though, the Linux Kernel is written under the GPL, which declares that the source code must be made available, and if code is written that uses that GPL code directly (i.e. directly links into that code), then the resultant code must also be released under the GPL.
For "trade secret" reasons, many companies will only release binary Drivers (pre-compiled) and will not let anyone outside the company see the source code. This can cause major problems when trying to debug the Linux Kernel as bugs cannot be traced into the Drivers. Also, because the Drivers have to link directly into the Kernel, they violate the Kernel programmers' copyright. Therefore binary Drivers are technically illegal if they link directly into the Kernel itself - such as graphic Drivers and some wireless, modem and ISDN Drivers.
This means, that for legal reasons, distributions cannot now come with the binary Drivers in the installation. It is up to the user to locate and install the non-binary Drivers - although this is usually no harder to do in practice than installing the Drivers under Windows. For example nVidia and ATi provide their Drivers on their website and they run as a text based wizard in much the same way as the Windows versions.
For many of the devices, basic open source Drivers are available - E.g. there are open source Drivers available for most ATi and nVidia graphics cards, they just don't provide all of the features of the binary versions from the manufacturers.

Bootloader: The Bootloader is a small program that gets called by the PC when it starts up. The Bootloader 's job is to find the operating system and load that up. If the user decides to install more than one operating system on their machine, the Bootloader will allow the user to select which operating system to start.
NOTE: If you are going to dual-boot between Windows and Linux always install Windows first. It doesn't play well with others and will ignore any other operating systems which may be installed. Linux Bootloader s on the other hand will usually recognise Windows and automatically add it to the boot menu. Some distributions, such as SUSE, are better than others, in that they will also recognise other Linux distributions that may be installed on the machine as well.

Brasero: This is the CD and DVD burning suite for GNOME. It will burn audio, video or data CDs and DVDs. To burn audio CDs, it does require that the relevant codecs are installed for reading your ripped music collection.

BSD: BSD is a derivative of the original Berkley Unix. BSD is not a version of Linux, it is a version of Unix. BSD has a long and proud heritage dating back to the 1970's. Linux on the other hand was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds and is a ground-up re-write to make an operating system which uses the same sorts of system flags and principles as Unix, but is not a direct Unix derivative (see Grocklaw/SCO).

Browser: See Web Browser

Bugzilla: Bugzilla is a bug tracking database. Most open source projects have a Bugzilla database for tracking errors in their project, most distributions also have their own Bugzilla. If you find a problem with a package, then you should find the relevant Bugzilla and lodge a ticket with it.
If the application is part of your standard distribution, then you should raise the ticket with the distribution's Bugzilla. If you have installed a separate 3rd Party application, then you should report the bug directly on their Bugzilla.
Because the projects are open source and open to everybody, the developers are usually very happy if you can provide information on bugs you find so that they can fix them and improve the application. Remember that they are there and use them.
Many users will log onto unofficial support forums and rant about how a program keeps crashing and what a pile of junk it is. This might be the way things work for many Windows applications, but in the open source world, the way to get something done isn't to bellyache on a public forum, but to tell the developers directly by using the Bugzilla. The developers are often too busy to frequent too many forums, so if somebody complains on a forum, it is very unlikely the developer will hear about the problem and be able to fix it.

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C
Cathedral and the Bazaar, The: A watershed essay by Eric S. Raymond in which he contrasts two different methods of software design. Includes the now ubiquitous Linus' Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

CentOS: (Community Enterprise Operating System) This is a distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Server, which has been reworked and open sourced. While RH costs a small fortune, CentOS is free to use. It is designed specifically for use on servers.

CLI: (Command Line Interpreter) Equivalent of cmd.exe in Windows. It uses the BASH program (see above) to interpret the commands by default. It has two main modes, the full screen mode of the console windows, or it can be accessed through a "terminal" window on the desktop.

Codecs: (COder / DECoder) Codecs are the libraries that are required to play multimedia files, such as music and video. Many of these formats are covered by patents and trade secrets and therefore they cannot be distributed for free, because the distribution would need to pay a license fee for each and every copy of the operating system in use! Therefore the distributions usually come without the codecs for proprietary formats, such as MP3, AVI, WMV, MOV, DIVX etc.
There are 3rd party libraries for each of these available from "other sources" and you may use them at your own risk. The projects that have made these codecs have often spent a lot of time and effort to bring these formats to Linux for you, but because they don't have official sanction, and they don't pay the licensing fees, they are not legal. Libdvdcss is probably the most notorious, it. It is the only library that enables DVD playback, but it has been made illegal in most countries by the movie industry, because it broke the region encoding on DVDs to allow playback or ripping and did it for free.

compiz: <<Compiz>> is a desktop manager for Linux which will work under GNOME and KDE
It allows special effects, such as window zooming, transparency, rotating cube desktops, randrop effects, thumbnail previews of applications etc. It is very impressive, although such effects are not to everybody's taste. Most people play with them for a couple of hours and then switch most of them off...

Console: When Linux boots up, it boots up into text mode and processes everything until it starts the graphics session. Distributions such as SUSE and Fedora put a graphical image over this, much like the Windows XP boot screen. Pressing the escape key allows you to view the progress of the boot process.
When the system boots to Run Level 3, it leaves you at a login prompt in text mode.
Linux uses several text consoles. Using the Ctrl+Alt+Fn keys allows you to swap between the text consoles. F1 through F6 give you text consoles, F7 and F8 give you access to two possible X session - usually only the first will be active. F10 gives you access to the message log, showing all the system messages that are being generated.

CUPS: (Common Unix Printing System) This is the standard used by most distributions to allow applications to print. It has been used by Apple in OSX since version 10.2 in 2002 and was bought by them in 2007. It manages the queues and handles the translation using Drivers.
There are a huge number of supported printers, see the <<Linux Printing>> website. The system makes it fairly simple to set up and manage the printing under Linux. Some hardware manufacturers are not as helpful as others unfortunately, which means that you have to be more careful when selecting hardware under Linux.

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daemon: A daemon is a process running under Unix/Linux which doesn't have an associated console or window. These are similar to services in Windows and are used for things like automatic updater, mail server, anti-virus scanner for windows shares, Samba etc.

Debian: One of the original big names in Linux. Set up in the early 90's, Debian was one of the first distributions to be released. It is seen (mistakenly) as a little "old fashioned" in these days of graphic installers and desktop Linux. It is a very powerful and stable system which is ideally suited to server operations, but the slow evolution of the product, its fairly old "stable" applications repository and its love of command line configuration tools instead of GUI based tools mean that it is an acquired taste and not ideally suited to the convert from Windows. Saying that, it is fast and stable, which are the main things that count when setting up large servers.

Desktop: The desktop is the graphical environment in which you will normally work - if you aren't a command line fan. Under Windows or OS X, you have one desktop. This makes things simple, but less flexible. If you don't like the way the desktop works under Windows or OS X, tough, you are stuck with it. Under Linux there are several projects out there which have different principles, different levels of bloat and there will probably be one out there to suit you.
The big two are GNOME and KDE (see below). They provide a complete desktop experience, with associated tools and utilities, but also a fair amount of bloat. If you are running on lesser hardware, try looking at Xfce, Fluxbox, Windowmaker etc. They provide fewer frills, but they are lean and fast, and will usually let you still run the relevant applications from KDE or GNOME.

Distribution: This is where things start to get complicated under Linux... Linux is the Kernel, although it is often mis-used to refer to the whole package of the Kernel, utilities and applications.
A distribution is a complete package of the Linux Kernel, the GNU tools, some applications and a package management and configuration system customised and given a "corporate" identity. Well known distributions include: Debian, DSL (Damned Small Linux), Knoppix, Red Hat (and its community project Fedora), Novell openSUSE, Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) and Ubuntu (with its derivaties Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu). There are hundreds of specialist distributions out there as well, such as Gentoo (very complex, but infinitely configurable) or Linspire (as close to the Windows experience as they can make it).
Each distribution takes a similar core set of Kernel and GNU tools and then they add their own "value" to it to make it unique. There are often branch distributions along the way as well - such as Knoppix and Ubuntu/Kubuntu, which are based on Debian.
Although there seems to be an overwhelming number of distributions out there, the choice for the desktop user is much smaller. <<Distrowatch>> currently lists over 1000 distributions, but many are specialised, such as those in Netgear routers, in navigation systems, aircraft flight systems etc. For general desktop versions, there is a much smaller list, and depending on your hardware, you will probably be better off looking at one of the main distributions, such as openSUSE, Fedora, (K)Ubuntu or Mandriva. These are all fairly friendly distributions which will give the new user a relatively painless view of the world of Linux.
Each distribution has its nice bits and its foibles. It is up to you to find one which suits you. I've tried most of them, but I always come back to SUSE because it is the one that suits me best - that is one of the advantages of having a spare machine to play around with though ;)

Dolphin: File browser built into the KDE4 project and replaces Konqueror. Similar in concept to Nautilus or Windows Explorer. Allows the user to browse through the directories, copy, rename, delete files etc.

Drivers: Drivers allow higher level software to communicate with the hardware; you will need drivers for your hardware. Most of the common devices will come with at least a basic driver to get them working. E.g. video cards will show a desktop and be perfectly usable, but until you download the proprietary drivers form the manufacturers website you might not get all the features, such as 3D or dual head. OSS projects such as the Radeon driver project have, however, started to achieve much closer parity with the company's own drivers.
Unlike Windows, Linux usually comes with thousands of drivers pre-installed, although only those that are open source, which means that there is a good chance that you can plug the device in and go. If the manufacturer isn't as Linux friendly and hasn't either written an OSS driver or released enough information on their products to allow the community to write a driver, you might have to go to their website and download the relevant driver, or if you are very unlucky, you might have to dump the device and find one whose manufacturer supports their users.
When buying new hardware, always check before splashing the cash, that the manufacturer supports Linux. A lot of people buy hardware because it is a cheap bargain, only to find out, that because it is a cheap bargain with little margin for the manufacturer, they don't write Linux drivers for it. Lexmark are notorious for this with their cheap products, whilst their professional products are some of the best supported...
As an example, I bought an HP Photosmart PSC2610 a while back. Windows needed 45 mintues to install the drivers to use it properly. Conversely I plugged it into my SUSE box and it said "aha, you have an HP printer, do you want to print to it?" Then "aha, you have connected a scanner, do you want to test it?" Then, when I plugged in a CF card into the printer, SUSE said "aha, you've plugged a CF card into the printer, do you want to view the contents?"

DSL: (Damned Small Linux) was a distribution designed to be very light and work with older kit - it also worked with most modern kit. It was very basic and only had a lightweight GUI, but it was enough to make use of an old machine that didn't have the horsepower to run Windows or a full-blown Linux distribution. Unfortunately the project stalled and the community dispersed. For a good alternative, try Tiny Core Linux

DVD Playback: DVD-Video is encrypted using the Content Scrambling System (CSS). They won't let anyone produce an open source library for reading DVD's, because the information on the region coding is "secret". Therefore most free distributions don't come with DVD support. A few will supply it for a charge, and I believe PowerDVD is available in a Linux version. VLC will also play DVDs.
There is a library called libdvdcss which you can look for, which will allow DVD playback for free, but it is illegal to own and use in most western countries. Therefore you won't find a link for it here. Mm-mm not us - we would never suggest such a thing. Naughty!

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Eclipse: Eclipse is a platform independent development platform, sponsored by IBM, all of the Rational development tools now plug into Eclipse.

Emacs: A very powerful, feature-rich extensible text editor used in Unix, Linux, MS-DOS, Windows etc.. One of the two chief protagonists in the editor wars, it was started by Richard Stallman in 1976 and as of 2010 is still very popular in its 23rd version. Can be extended to function almost as an Integrated Development Environment.

Evolution: Evolution is a powerful PIM and email client for GNOME. It is the preferred tool for some distributions, although it tends to look a little clunky if run under KDE. It is powerful, supports pop, smtp, imap and there is a plug-in for Microsoft's Exchange Server. It has To Do, Calendar and other normal functions of a PIM.
It is the GNOME equivalent of Outlook for want of a better explanation (that is Outlook, not Outlook Express).

Ext: (EXTended file system) The standard file system for Linux. It is currently in its fourth version (ext4). Both ext3 and ext4 are journalling file systems which, to cut a long story short, means they're more crash resistant and you don't have to defrag them.

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Fedora: Fedora is a community project offshoot of the original Red Hat project. It is free to download and there is an active community working on the project to make it better. Basically Red Hat use it as a testing ground for their enterprise variants.

Firefox: An open source Web Browser, available on most platforms these days. It is the biggest competitor currently to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It is fast becoming the de facto web browser under Linux. Nearly every distribution installs it as their standard web browser.

Free Software Foundation: Originally set up by Richard Stallman to employ developers for the GNU Project, it owns the coyright for the GPL and now mainly maintains many documents and features that define the Free Software Movement. It still maintains the GNU Project but is now also a very prominent campaign organisation.
Taking a much more zealous line than the OSI and others, it insists that software should be built according to moral and ethical imperative, rather than technical merit.

F-Spot: The open source communities answer to iPhoto. It is controversial because it uses C#, a language developed by MS.

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G
GAIM: See Pidgin

gcc: The GNU C Compiler is the core compiler for the Linux system. If you want to build an application from source, you will need the compiler and associated tools installed. The same goes for things like the nVidia and ATi proprietary Drivers, the install script calls the compiler and linker.

Gentoo: A very powerful and complex distribution, that has several levels and provides probably the best performance for any machine, but that is because most of the system is built from scratch. It is really aimed at the advanced user who enjoys taking days compiling their own system.
You can get various stages with various parts pre-compiled, and it is a very good distribution, but not really aimed at the beginner. You have to make a lot of choices, so you need to understand much of the basics of Linux in order ot make these decisions.

GIMP: (GNU Image Manipulation Program) It is the dominant open-source high-end graphics editor and as such is often mistakenly billed as a competitor to Photoshop. It is used for production and modification of bitmap images and photos. Whilst it may not have the top-end professional tools of Photoshop, it is by far the best choice for the intermediate to advanced user. Despite its understandably unpopular interface, in terms of "bang-per-buck" it is simply unbeatable and has a huge fan base and support community. (tb)

GNOME: (GNU Network Object Model Environment) One of the Big Two desktops for Linux. It is friendly and well designed, but lacks a little in flexibility. It is easy to use and the standard for many distributions.
However in its attempt to make it easy to use, many think it has gone too far. In many themes one cannot, for example, change the window colours if they are not to one's liking; one has to switch to a whole different scheme instead. This keeps things simple, but can also be very frustrating.
That said, there isn't anything major wrong with it: give it a try, OSS is all about choices after all ;)

GNU Project: An open-source, mass -collaboration project, it initiated the GNU (GNU's Not Unix) operating system. The system was started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Open Source movement and the GPL (GNU General Public License). It is a collection of tools and utilities tied into a Kernel. In the 1990's it switched to using the Linux Kernel, hence the distributions these days are called GNU/Linux in general.

GPL: (GNU General Public License)[/url] is the main license under which the Linux distributions are released. It specifies, basically, that the availability of the source code for inspection is as high a priority as the distributed binary itself. Therefore each distribution must make the source code available (although they can charge for access).

Groklaw: (<<Groklaw.net>>) is a website that offers a place where lawyers and geeks could explain things to each other and work together. It is famously tracking the fiasco that is SCO's attempt to sue IBM and others over their inclusion of SCO's proprietary Unix code in Linux. The fact that SCO released the code, still offers some of that code for free on its servers and can't point out the exact bits which were stolen doesn't seem to phase them, but Groklaw turns it into a fun read at times.

Grub: (GRand Unified Bootloader) This is the default Bootloader for most Linux distributions, having taken over from LILO several years ago. It starts up a simple menu which allows you to start whichever operating system(s) you have installed on your machine. It also allows the input of some basic boot parameters - for example if the graphic environment isn't working properly, you can issue the option "3" at boot time and the machine will only boot up until Run Level 3 (networking and multi-user, but without a graphical environment). (see also Run Level)

GTK+: A cross-platform toolkit, (framework and set of library routines) which is the basis of GNOME, Xfce and large numbers of free applications such as The GIMP.

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Linux Glossary by David Wright and Jim Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.


Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:12 pm, edited 33 times in total.



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H
Helix: (Properly called Helix DNA) Originally started by RealNetworks (of RealPlayer infamy), it is now an OSS project. Helix DNA Client is one of the sound engines which can be used by media players for audio and video playback. Helix Player is an application from the Helix project that uses the Helix engine and runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and Symbian. Helix DNA Server is for streaming media files over a network.

Help: There are lots of sources to go to for help Google is your friend! Also check the Wikis and online manuals of the distribution you are working with. This forum is currently pretty small and we aren't experts in every aspect of every distribution. We will help you where we can and we provide howtos and other advice from time to time, but we can't compete with the resources of the distributions themselves.

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init command: (SUSE), see Run Level. In SUSE this command allows you to change the current Run Level to the one you desire.

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K
K3B: (KDE Burn Baby Burn) This is the CD and DVD burning suite for KDE. It will burn audio, video or data CDs and DVDs. To burn audio CDs, it does require that the relevant codecs are installed for reading your ripped music collection.

Kaffeine: A media player, used mainly for video, but plays also audio. An easy to use and flexible media player for the KDE environment.

Kate: Kate is a powerful KDE based text editor. It is often used in super user mode for editing configuration files.

KDE: KDE is one of the Big Two players in the modern desktop fight. It based on the Qt graphics library, which is also available for Windows, and caused controversy when it was first used, because Qt wasn't released under the GPL, which annoyed OSS zealots, and they went on to create the GNOME desktop. Since then Qt has been released in an OSS version.
KDE is a lot more flexible than GNOME in many respects and has a strong following. The main point is, KDE applications work in GNOME and GNOME applications work in KDE, so don't worry about experimenting and mixing and matching until you have found a combination that suits you.

KDevelop: KDevelop is an integrated development environment that has templates for most common languages. KDevelop 3 is for KDE3; likewise KDevelop 4 is for KDE4.

Kernel: This is the core of the GNU/Linux operating system and is the part called Linux. Written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Since then a large group of developers have come on board and extended it to what we have today. The Kernel takes care of the general operations of the computer and ensures that everything runs smoothly.

Kernel Source: When you install a custom binary device Driver for a video card or certain ISDN adapters, modems or certain Wi-Fi adapters, you will need to link them into the Kernel. To do this you will need to ensure you have the latest Kernel Sources installed - they must match the Kernel you are actually running.
Therefore, if you have received an updated Kernel for your distribution, you need to ensure you have also downloaded the updated source code.

Knoppix: Probably the most famous Live CD, it kicked off a fad for an all-in-one CD that boots up into a graphical environment and runs from the CD. It allows you to test Linux without actually touching your hard disk. It also has recovery tools which allow you to examine you hard disk in the case the PC won't boot from the hard disk.

Konqueror: The built-in web browser and file system browser for KDE. The khtml engine formed the basis for the WebKit engine that is now used in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. Konqueror can be used for browsing the internet, the local filesystem or the network neighbourhood. It is fairly compliant with Acid2, but it does lack some plug-ins, although most video and audio streaming formats are supported. Its web browser function has now been superceded by Firefox and its file browser function has been superceded in KDE4 by Dolphin.

Kontact: A PIM for KDE. It supports plug-in modules, which can be run separately as well. It integrates Kalendar, Akregator, KMail and other applets to make a complete solution similar to Outlook. Normally most users will make a decision between Evolution, Kontact or Thunderbird for their mail and PIM activities.

KMail: The Mail component of Kontact. It supports the usual suspects: POP, SMTP, IMAP etc. It supports filters and SpamAssassin works with it.
One very nice feature is that it displays HTML email un-interpreted and has a button to display it formatted if you trust the sender - there is also an option to always trust specific senders if some idiot insists on sending you HTML email.

Kopete: The chat client for KDE. It is skinnable and supports multiple protocols, including at the moment: AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, MSN Messenger, SMS and Yahoo.

Ksnapshot: This fun little utility is used to make screen grabs. It makes a screen grab when it starts, but you can make further ones, including having a time delay to allow you to open menus etc. Once the image has been grabbed, it allows you to save in a variety of formats, including jpeg and png.

Kubuntu: This is the KDE version of the Ubuntu project (Ubuntu itself being GNOME based). Created by Mark Shuttleworth and his Canonical company in South Africa, the Ubuntu family was originally a branch from the Debian distribution, and still relies on the .deb packaging format.

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libdvdcss: This is the library you need to install to watch DVD films. There is one catch though: it is illegal in most countries to use. It was written by <<Jon Lech Johansen>>, aka DVD Jon. He was sued because he cracked the regional encoding key on DVD's to allow them to be played back, or ripped, without having to pay a license to the DVD holding body. Also he gave the code away for free, which they claim was giving away their trade secrets.
The stupid thing is they mark this codec illegal, but they don't provide a legal alternative :roll:

LibreOffice: An open source Office Suite with a similar set of features to Microsoft Office, only free. It is cross platform and its default file format is now an agreed international standard. The applications contain most of the common features that MS Office provides; it is lacking in some areas but mostly only those areas that most people never use. For normal to semi-power users it has more than enough features that you won't notice much of a difference.

Libre Office forked from OpenOffice following Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Oracle's reputation regarding open-source projects is poor and as such, most of the Openoffice.org community jumped to a new project before Oracle could can the project

LILO: Now largely superceded, LInux LOader is another Bootloader for Linux. It is text based, while GRUB allows skinning. Some distributions still supply and use it, but most have moved over to GRUB as their main or default option.

Linux: See Distribution.

Live CD/DVD: A CD or DVD with an operating system on (usually a version of a Linux distribution), which will boot from the CD and run fully from the CD without needing to touch the hard disk. Useful for seeing if your hardware is supported, to see if you like Linux or to help recover information from a damaged hard disk without having to actually install the operating system. The are very small versions of Linux now which will also boot from USB Memory Sticks and Flash chips on certain specialist motherboards.

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M

Mandriva: (Formerly Mandrake). <<Mandriva>> is another of the major commercial distributions and comes from France. Aimed squarely at new and business users, it tends to stay out of most of the more ideological battles and instead focuses on ease of use. Mandriva are well known for implementing their own technologies and are not shy of using principles from other distributions to improve their own. Hence its package manager, urpmi, uses design cues from Synaptic, the Debian package manager as presently used in Ubuntu.

mc: (Midnight Commander) a console-based file manager that allows the easy navigation of the file system and normal housekeeping tasks. Very useful for beginners and experienced users alike. Part of the standard installation of SUSE, might be an additional package on other distributions. Famed for allowing very fast copying of large amounts of data.

mcedit: (Midnight Commander Editor) a console-based full "screen" text editor. Works similarly to "edit" in MS-DOS or Windows. Simple, uncluttered editor with function key prompts and a menu bar to make navigating its functionality easy. Very handy for quickly editing config files. Part of the standard installation of SUSE, might be an additional package on other distributions.

Mono: Mono is a massive project and is essentially a re-write of the .Net libraries for use under Linux. Many Linux applications are now being written under Mono, including Beagle and the new package manager for SUSE.
It is rather unpopular with certain quarters due to its being based on Microsoft technologies and patents.

Mozilla: The open source continuation of the original Netscape web browser. It is also the name of the project, which has also launched Firefox and Thunderbird.

MPlayer: Another media player, very popular for video and DVD playback (must be used in conjunction with libdvdcss).

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Nautilus: File browser built into the GNOME project. Similar in concept to Dolphin or Windows Explorer. Allows the user to browse through the directories, copy, rename, delete files etc.

ndiswrapper: A special set of libraries for unsupported wireless cards. It allows Linux to use the standard Windows Drivers.

Newsreader: Allows access to newsgroups, one of the traditional ways for accessing information on operating systems, among other things. Most distributions have multiple newsgroups available - although nowhere near as many as Microsoft! :shock:

NFS: Network File System. It is the native way for Unix and Linux systems to talk to each other. It is typically faster and more efficient than SMB. Some distributions don't install it as default though (E.g. Ubuntu).

==========================================================================
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Linux Glossary by David Wright and Jim Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.


Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:13 pm, edited 20 times in total.



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==========================================================================
O
Open Office: (Offically called OpenOffice.org) An open source Office Suite with a similar set of features to Microsoft Office, only free.

The majority of the OO.o community jumped ship following uncertainty over the future of the project, Oracle's rather sinister behaviour and the unwillingness of the leadership to incorporate advances from other projects. See LibreOffice for a better alternative

OpenSolaris An operating system based on Unix, born from the formerly closed source Solaris. OpenSolaris refers to both the OpenSolaris distribution and the community built around it. It was the only open-source Unix System V derivative available. Unfortunately Oracle, in their role as lead arsehole, decided to can the project.

Open Source Software: This is the general term for software released under the GPL and similar licenses. Essentially, as well as the binary code, the programmer must make the source code available for inspection. Any changes anybody makes to the code must also be released under the GPL and passed back to the original project.
Contrary to popular belief, it does not mean that you need to be a programmer to use open source software, and you do not need to know how to use a compiler to compile programs from source. The programs are usually distributed in binary packages which you can just install and run, just like a Windows application, but you also have the option to look at the source code if you want to and to build it yourself. It is an option, nothing more. However, it does not mean that the software has to be free, you can charge as much as you like for the software and a reasonable fee to customers to give them access to the source code (for example Amstrad's Emailer device uses Linux, but you need to supply a purchase receipt and 50 quid to get access to the source code!).

Open Source Initiative (OSI). Founded in 1998 as a moderate alternative to the FSF, it came about because of dissatisfaction with what was seen as a hardline approach. It takes the position that open-source software should be marketed not on its ethical stance but rather on its technical merits, an idea promulgated by Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". It chose the term "open source" to "dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with 'free software' in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape."

openSUSE: The open source project behind SUSE Linux. Their first release was SUSE Linux 10.1, before that, SUSE was a company on its own, then taken over by Novell, they decided to make it a community project in a similar vein to Red Hat and Fedora.
Since version 10.2, the actual release is now also called openSUSE, to differentiate it more from the Novell corporate offerings and bring it into line with the project name.

Opera: Another web browser, this is closed source, but it is free (gratis). Version 10 is the current version and supplied in some distributions. It is a very friendly and easy to use web browser which now incorporates desktop widgets.

==========================================================================
P
Package: One key part of each distribution is its packaging system. Applications and libraries are supplied in a package. The package basically holds the files, information on the locations where they should be installed and possibly a script to compile or link the package if required.
Not every distribution has its own package format. The most well known are RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) and .deb (Debian). Non-distribution specific packages usually come in .tar.gz (tar archive zipped), these need to be manually extracted and copied into the right place, much like a zip file under Windows.

Package Manager: A package manager works in conjunction with the install media (the CD's or DVD) and online respositories (see below). The package manager keeps track of which packages are installed, which versions, what versions are available online. The better ones will prompt you when updates are available, others will show you they are available when you manually check for updates. It automates the installation and removal of applications.
Like Apple's OS X, Linux doesn't use a central registry, so when you remove an application, you also remove all of its global configuration information. Local user settings will remain though, each user will need to remove them, but they are usually in a directory named .<application> in the user's home directory.

Partition: A drive is split up into partitions. Linux requires at least 2 partitions, one for Swap and one for root (/). However, for permanent setups, it is advisable to make a third (/home) partition for personal data.
SUSE recommend 10GB for root and the rest for home on a typical home desktop install. However if you are running big databases or need to do a lot of backing up, then you might like to think about increasing /var or /tmp, /www etc. The root partition needs some space to work and to store the programs and your data. It all depends on what you need to install and how much space you can spare.
The nice thing about Linux is that it doesn't use the silly drive letter conventions of MS-DOS, so if you need more space for a specific directory, just slap a new disk in the machine and mount it under the directory where you need space.

  • The swap should be twice the size of your RAM or 1GB, whichever is the larger.
  • The root (/) partition should be at least 10GB
  • The home partition should be as big as you can make it.

passwd: 1.) a command to change your password - as root, you can also use it to change other users passwords.
2.) a file in the /etc directory which lists all of the users on the system, their passwords (historical, nowadays Linux uses the shadow file and the password field just contains an x), user ID (each username has an associated number which is used to identify the user internally), the default group to which they belong, their home directory and their default command shell.

Pidgin: A messenger client that works with most of the popular chat protocols such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN, Yahoo etc. It is designed to work with GNOME, although it can be used under other desktop environments such as KDE. It has a big, cuddly interface that goes with GNOME but is too big for some. It is one of the major clients for Linux. Used to be called GAIM.

pkg: A cross-platform package management system created and used by OpenSolaris. Similar to apt

==========================================================================
Q
Qt: (pronounced "Cute") A cross-platform toolkit, (framework and set of library routines) which are the basis of KDE and large numbers of free and commercial applications.

==========================================================================
R
Raymond, Eric S. (aka. ESR) A popular cult figure in the OSS community, ESR is an author and software developer. In 1997 he published "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which is viewed by many as one of the holy scriptures of the OSS movement

Red Carpet: See ZENWorks Linux Management

Red Hat: One of the major players in the corporate Linux space with their Enterprise Server and Enterprise Desktop products. They have the offshoot project Fedora which is a community project and test bed for the corporate offerings. A big name in the states, but not so big over in continental Europe, where Novell SUSE and Mandriva seem to bigger, as they are European based distributions (at least historically), Mandriva is French and SUSE is based in Nürnberg in Germany.

ReiserFS: A file sytem format for Linux, it is supposed to be fast for accessing lots of small files. It used to be the default format for Novell SUSE until it was dropped in favour of ext3 because of problems with scalability and multiple cores. The original developer, Hans Reiser, was convicted of murder in 2008 since when development, although continuing, has been somewhat turbulent and uncertain.

Repository: A Repository is a collection of packages held online and specific for the distribution you are using. There will be the official ones that belong to your distribution and will hold mainly OSS and legal non-OSS packages that might be of interest.
Then there are the semi-official, but unsupported repositories for those that either want to experiment with newer versions or to stick with older versions. It is created and maintained by people who work on the distribution, but if you have problems with packages from these repositories, you are on your own.
You then get enthusiast repositories. These contain even newer versions of some applications and other applications which don't fall into the mainstream and therefore aren't included in the main repo.
Finally there are the "slightly dodgy" and very useful repositories, which contain things like the video codec. These are important to the success of a distribution, but cannot garner official support. The sooner the likes of the movie industry and Microsoft realise that Windows isn't the only platform people want to watch videos on the better - although Real are releasing many of the Windows codecs into the public domain at the moment, so hopefully shortly the codecs will be available officially!

Run Level: Run Levels are the different operating modes of many Unix-like operating systems. In Linux it has three special modes:
  • 0: Halt, halts or shuts down the systm.
  • S: Single user mode, doesn't start daemons or multi-user access.
  • 6: Reboot the system.

On top of that, it has the following standard modes:
  • 1. Single user mode, essentially S above.
  • 2. Multi-user mode, but without daemons (system services) or networking.
  • 3. Multi-user mode, with startup daemons and networking.
  • 4. unused.
  • 5. X11 graphics mode - essentially Run Level 3 + a graphical environment.

OpenSolaris run levels differ slightly from Linux's:
  • 0 - Shut down but don't power off
  • s or S - Single user mode
  • 1 - Administrative - Mount most local file systems but don't allow user logins
  • 2 - Multiuser - Mount all local file systems and start all services except for NFS
  • 3 - Multiuser - Mount all file systems - Default state
  • 4 - Alternative multiuser - Customers own configuration
  • 5 - Shut down and power off
  • 6 - Reboot - Go to level 0 then default level

==========================================================================
S
Samba: Windows uses a network protocol called SMB (Server Messaging Block) which is used for file transfers between different Windows machines. Samba is a server daemon for Linux which allows Windows machines to connect to the Linux machines and store or retrieve files on the Linux machine.
There are several configuration tools to allow you to set it up graphically or through a web front end (SWAT).
Talking to a Windows server to retrieve files does not require Samba to be installed. Konqueror and Nautilus have built in SMB client support for example.

sax2: An X configuration tool for SUSE. It allows the user to configure the graphics card(s), monitor(s), keyboard, mouse, graphics tablet etc. It can be run from the command line or from within YaST

Sea Monkey: Sea Monkey is the follow-up to the Mozilla web browser suite.

Smart: Smart is a package management system which is reputedly very fast. Many distributions support it and it has a large following.

SMB: The "Server Messaging Block" protocol used by Microsoft to transfer files between machines. Most of the file browsers for Linux include SMB support and the Samba service provides server side facilities for Windows clients.

Solaris: (Properly called Oracle Solaris) A version of Unix, certified against the Single Unix specification and built on System V Release 4 (SVR4). It is known for its scalability and innovative features such as DTrace and ZFS. Formerly closed-source, most of its code is now open-source from the OpenSolaris project.

Stallman, Richard: (sometimes known as RMS). The founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation as well as the writer of Emacs, GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler and the GNU Debugger. He is the author of the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), the most common free software licence. He is also a controversial figure in some quarters with a reputation for being somewhat of a free software zealot. Put simply, without RMS, the free software movement would have died a long time ago. (tb)

su: (Substitute User) Allows a user to temporarily log in as a different user, on the command line, and assume their rights. It is normally used to temporarily obtain root (administrator) rights to the system. It can't used directly to launch graphical applications with administration privileges. SUSE provide a modified version of the command called 'sux' which does allow the user to launch graphic applications.
The su command is powerful and depending on how it is used can greatly alter the rights assumed. See the relevant help files for details

sudo: Allows single commands to be launched by a lower ranking user with higher privileges. Each command that the user can execute must be given in the sudo list, if the users name and the command don't cross reference, the execution of the command is refused.

SUSE: Originally SuSE (Software und System Entwicklung), the company is based in Nürnburg Germany. They were bought out by Novell in 2005 and now SUSE is just a division of Novell and the name on their Linux products. They are primarily focused on the Enterprise sector with their commercial packages using stable and mature technologies. They use the openSUSE project as an open source testbed for more bleeding-edge technologies.

Synaptic: A graphical front end for the APT package manager.

==========================================================================
T
Thunderbird: The mail client from the Mozilla project, it also does news. It has a very good reputation as being fast and secure.

Tiny Core Linux: is a distribution designed to be very light. It is very basic and only has a lightweight GUI, but it is enough to make use of an old machine that doesn't have the horsepower to run Windows or a full-blown Linux distribution.

Torvalds, Linus: A low profile character, Linus wrote the original Linux Kernel (called “Freax”) as an alternative to Minix (because he wasn't allowed to reuse its code) and later made it the subject of his M.Sc. Thesis. Although only about 2% of the current Kernel is by LT, he is the owner of the Linux trademark and now acts as the project co-ordinator (or Benevolent Dictator for life). (tb)

Totem: The official media player for the GNOME project. Uses the codecs installed on the system to play videos and DVDs.

==========================================================================
U
Ubuntu: Perhaps the most famous and popular version of Linux. It is aimed at the average user and is named after the southern African concept of "humanity towards others". It is based on Debian and uses the .deb packaging format. Derivatives include Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu and Linux Mint.

Unix: Unix is the parent of the Linux operating system. Developed in Bell Labs back in the late 1960's and early 1970's, it was a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system designed to run on a range minis and mainframes. UNIX was also coded in Dennis Richie and Brian Kernighan's C language, making it more portable than many other OS's of the time.
Unix is totally different from Linux and has been around a couple of decades longer than Linux. However they do share many similarities

==========================================================================
Image
Linux Glossary by David Wright and Jim Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.


Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:14 pm, edited 29 times in total.



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==========================================================================
V
vi: The original text file editor for Unix, it is old, esoteric and can be a pain to use. It can also be very powerful. You will either swear by it or swear at it! It isn't a tool you can use casually, you have to invest a little time and effort into learning how to use it. If you are more interested in actually editing your config files than learning a new command language, you will probably be better off looking at something like "mcedit".

Virtualisation: Put very simply, this set of techniques allows one system (the host) to run services designed for another system (the guest) without needing to lose the properties of the host. It is a very powerful technique that, for instance, allows a Linux machine to run a Windows desktop, a Solaris machine to run Linux-native software or a x86 processor to execute PowerPC instructions.
Virtualisation packages you may have heard of include VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, Zones and the Java Runtime Environment.

==========================================================================
W
Web Browser: Oh, come on! That thing you are using to read this article! :lol: Popular examples include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium and Epiphany

Webmin: A web based remote management tool. It allows the administrator to sit at their workstation and graphically administer a server at another location. It is configurable and handles most of the common services and administration tasks - adding/removing users, printer queue configuration, MySQL and Apache configuration, Samba etc.

Wi-Fi: Depends on your wireless chipset. Some, like the Intel Centrino chipsets are covered by open source Drivers provided by the manufacturer and work automatically with most distributions. Others require either binary Drivers from the manufacturer (which can't be delivered with the distributions for legal reasons), or the manufacturers haven't released Drivers at all, in which case the only option is to try something like ndiswrapper to try and get the Windows Drivers working.

Window Manager: The thing that handles the management of windows... Basically it runs under X and handles the drawing of windows, overlaying etc.

Wine: "Wine Is Not an Emulator" allows Windows programs to run under Linux. Variations of this project include CrossoverOffice and Cedega, aimed at running office applications and games respectively.

==========================================================================
X
X: The graphical environment. GNOME, KDE, WindowMaker etc. all run under the X graphical system, which provides the base graphical libraries.

Xfce: A light desktop environment based on GTK+.

XFree86: One of the two implementations of X that are commonly used in Linux distributions. Now largely overshadowed by XOrg.

xgl: A variation of the XOrg system, planned to be merged into the core XOrg somewhere around version 7.1. It was used in conjunction with Compiz to provide amazing graphical special effects and fluid desktop rotation etc. It was dropped from the XOrg core in 2008 and has largely been replaced by AIGLX

Xine: Another media player and the engine used by players such as Kaffeine.

XMMS: A discontinued music player for Linux that spawned several derivatives including Audacious, BMP and XMMS2

XMMS2: A music player for Linux, it is a separate project to XMMS(1). It is designed to be a new generation of the older XMMS player.

XOrg: One of the two implementations of X that are commonly used in Linux distributions. Forked from XFree86 in 2004 due to a licensing dispute, it is now the predominant X implementation

==========================================================================
Y
YaST: (Yet another software tool) The configuration tool for SUSE Linux, it was fully open-sourced a couple of years ago and theoretically available for any distribution. It provides a simple and powerful way to configure the hardware, software services and Drivers on your SUSE system.

Yum: (Yellow Dog Updater Modified) is a directory service wrapper for RPM repositories, making them more flexible and powerful.

==========================================================================
Z
ZENWorks Linux Management: (Formerly based on Red Carpet) ZENWorks LM is a software management solution for Linux. It is a package manager basically aimed at the corporate market, but it has been incorporated into SUSE Linux as a testbed, and is available for other distributions as well.

ZFS: The default file system for OpenSolaris. ZFS is almost a complete redesign of how the file system should work. Rather than working in volumes it works in storage pools.

ZMD Updater: Zen Manager Daemon, is an update to the Red Carpet daemon, used in SUSE Linux and SUSE Enterprise products. It was removed from openSUSE because it sucked. Bigtime.

==========================================================================
Image
Linux Glossary by David Wright and Jim Chew is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.


Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:15 pm, edited 17 times in total.



Fri Jan 29, 2010 11:04 am
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Spare space just in case


Last edited by rustybucket on Wed Mar 10, 2010 5:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.



Fri Jan 29, 2010 11:05 am
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Spare space just in case


Last edited by rustybucket on Wed Mar 10, 2010 5:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.



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Update Notes

  • 19/May/10 - I have removed the blue and green colouring for the entry titles. This is for a simple reason. Back in the old place there was only one colour scheme which was grey and never changed. However not only is there herein a choice of skins but, as this forum matures, each of those skins may be liable to change or replacement. I therefore felt it was unwise to dictate a colour that may render the title unreadable.


Version History

  • 29/Jan/10 - Brought listing over from PCPro Forum. Listing needs updating
  • 30/Jan/10 - Update commences on existing entries A-C
  • 01/Feb/10 - Update finished on all existing entries A-Z
  • 10/Mar/10 - Wikipedia links added to entry titles A-B
  • 24/Apr/10 - Wikipedia links added to entry titles C-G
  • 25/Apr/10 - Wikipedia links added to entry titles H-N
  • 14/May/10 - Ext entry added
  • 19/May/10 - Wikipedia links added to entry titles O-Z
  • 19/May/10 - Colours removed from Links
  • 19/May/10 - ReiserFS added, Partition edited
  • 22/May/10 - External links formatted, Cross-references highlighted
  • 11/Jul/11 - Edited DSL, added Tiny Core
  • 23/Jul/11 - Added LibreOffice; Edited Knoppix, Konqueror, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, Web Browser; Deleted Beagle


To do list

  • Edit entries: openSUSE, compiz, Distribution
  • Add entries: Super User, Btrfs


Licence Information (HTML):

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/88x31.png" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" property="dc:title">Linux Glossary</span> by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.x404.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&amp;t=5829" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">David Wright and Jim Chew</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/">Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England &amp; Wales License</a>



Last edited by rustybucket on Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:37 pm, edited 29 times in total.



Fri Jan 29, 2010 11:16 am
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rustybucket wrote:
Can we sticky this please?


Done

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Fri Jan 29, 2010 6:11 pm
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I shall update this over the next few days.

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Sat Jan 30, 2010 5:44 pm
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Nice work Rusty. I should get around to looking at linux again, and it will help having no nonsense information available.

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Sun Jan 31, 2010 4:26 pm
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I've now updated all the existing entries (and deleted a couple that have been deprecated)

Given that it was written in 2006, it may be missing several key technologies.

I'll update as I spot them but can anybody think of any as of now?

----------------------------------------------------

Added Ubuntu, Solaris, GTK+ and several other entries

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Tue Feb 02, 2010 1:47 pm
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What about ext3 (and 2 & 4)?

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Wed Feb 03, 2010 9:36 pm
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Check it out!

The Glossary should be up to date (as of 19 May 2010). That was a bit of a marathon.

Now all I need is for you enterprising chaps to tell me what you think. (Please be gentle)

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Wed May 19, 2010 2:24 pm
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Looks good!

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Sat May 22, 2010 9:21 am
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