Essential Series Springer London Berlin Heidelberg New York Barcelona Hong Kong Milan Paris Singapore Tokyo Also in this series: John Cowell lan Chivers Essential Visual Basic 5.0 fast Essential Visual C++ 6.0 fast 3-540-76148-9 1-85233-170-4 Duncan Reed and Peter Thomas John Vince Essential HTML fast Essential Computer Animation fast 3-540-76199-3 1-85233-141-0 John Hunt Aladdin Ayesh Essential JavaBeans fast Essential Dynamic HTML fast 1-85233-032-5 1-85233-626-9 John Vince David Thew Essential Virtual Reality fast Essential Access 2000 fast 1-85233-012-0 1-85233-295-6 John Cowell lan Palmer Essential Visual J+ + 6.0 fast Essential Java 3D fast 1-85233-013-9 1-85233-394-4 John Cowell Matthew Norman Essential Java 2 fast Essential ColdFusion fast 1-85233-071-6 1-85233-315-4 John Cowell Essential Visual Basic 6.0 fast 1-85233-071-6 lan Chivers Essential Linuxfast i Springer lan Chivers BSc, PGCEd, MSc The Computer Centre, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS Series Editor John Cowell, BSc (Hons), MPhil, PhD Department of Computer Science, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LEI 9BH British Library Cataloguing in Publieation Data Chivers, 1.D. (Ian David), 1952- Essential Linux fast. - (Essentials) 1. Linux (Computer fIle) 1. Title II. Linux fast 005.4.'469 ISBN 978-1-85233-408-6 ISBN 978-1-4471-0301-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-0301-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chivers,1.D. (lan David), 1952- Essential Linux fast/lan Chivers. p. cm. Includes bibliographieal references. 1. Linux. 2. Operating systems (Computers) 1. Title. QA76.76.063 C4585 2001 005.4'32--dc21 2001020555 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publieation may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographie reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Lieensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. ISBN 1-85233-408-8 Springer-Verlag London Berlin Heidelberg A member of BertelsmannSpringer Science+Business Media GmbH http://www.springer.co.uk © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2001 The use of registered names, trademarks etc. in this publieation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. Typeset by Mac Style, Scarborough, N. Yorkshire 34/3830-543210 Printed on acid-free paper SPIN 1078669 Contents 1. OVERVIEW................................................ 1 Assumptions ............................................. ......................................................................... 2 What is linux? .................................................................................................................. 2 What is POSIX? ......................................................................... ..... .................................... 4 What is Unix? .................................................................................................................... 4 Brief history of networking: TCP/IP and the Internet ........................................................ 5 The rest of the book ........................................................................................... ............... 5 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 6 Acknowledgements ........................... ................................................................ ............... 7 2. LINUX VERSIONS ...................................... 9 Red Hat .............................................................................................................................. 10 SuSe .................................................................................................................................. 11 Overview of the installation options .................................................................................. 12 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 13 3. THE PRELlMINARIES ................................ 15 How to find out hardware details about your system ........................................................ 16 Hardware and associated manuals .................................................................................... 19 Your DOS and Windows distribution disks .......................................................................... 19 Making boot flop pies ........................................................................................................ 20 What additional files are needed? ...................................................................................... 20 Autoexec.bat and config.sys .............................................................................................. 21 CD-Rom drivers .................................................................................................................. 22 Backing up your work files ................................................................................................ 23 Hard disks background ...................................................................................................... 23 FDISK ................................................................................................................................ 24 What type of linux installation? ........................................................................................ 27 Partitions and the linux file system .................................................................................. 29 Printing documentation prior to the install ...................................................................... 31 Boot floppy ........................................................................................................................ 32 TCP /IP and networking ...................................................................................................... 33 Final note .......................................................................................................................... 35 Bibliography ............................................................................................. ......................... 36 ~. INST}lLLIN~ LINlJ1C .................................... 3~ Single booting at home, local area network, booting from /boot ...................................... 41 Dual boot system at home, local area network, booting from CD ...................................... 42 Dual boot system at home, local area network, booting from /boot .................................. 43 Essential Linux fast Partitionless install ............................................................................................................ 47 Single boot system at work, network conneeted, booting fram Iboot ................................ 48 Dual boot system at work, network connected, LiLo .......................................................... 49 Monitor and graphics card ................................................................................................ 49 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 50 Security and Linux ............................................................................................................ 50 Bibiliography .................................................................................................................... 51 f5. ~IJqlJ1r J\JqI> ~IJqI>()~~................................ f5:J X-Windows and XFree86 .................................................................................................... 54 Windows managers .......................................................................................................... 54 Some basics ...................................................................................................................... 55 Double dick versus single dick .......................................................................................... 57 Logging on for the first time .............................................................................................. 57 KDE .................................................................................................................................... 58 Gnome .............................................................................................................................. 60 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 62 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 63 6. BASIC UNIX ........................... ................... 65 Command examples .......................................................................................................... 66 Getting help ................................................................................................ ......... ............. 70 Basic DOS and Unix counterparts ...................................................................................... 71 Other Unix commands ...................................................................................................... 72 Accessing the floppy drive ................................................................................................ 72 Accessing the CD-Rom drive .............................................................................................. 74 Text editors ........................................................................................................................ 76 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 81 7. ~Y~TEM J\I>MIJqI~TRA.TI()Jq ••..•................... 81 The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) .......................................................................... 82 Accessing the floppy drive ................................................................................................ 89 Accessing the CD-Rom drive .............................................................................................. 90 Making a boot floppy ........................................................................................................ 91 Linuxconf .......................................................................................................................... 92 YaST - Yet another Setup Tool .......................................................................................... 93 Setting up a printer ............................................................................................................ 94 Setting up a modem .......................................................................................................... 97 Setting up asound card .................................................................................................... 101 Setting up a scanner .......................................................................................................... 101 Setting up a Web camera .................................................................................................. 101 CD rewriter ........................................................................................................................ 102 System start-up and shutdown ........................................................................................ 102 Making more memory available ........................................................................................ 103 Contents Accessing a Windows partition .......................................................................................... 104 Miscellaneous .................................................................................................................... 106 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 107 8. NETWORKING AND SECURITY .................. 109 Networking basics ............................................................................................................ 110 Basic network terminology ................................................................................................ 111 Networking at home ................................................................................................... ..... 113 Network administration via graphical interfaces .............................................................. 114 Networking at work .......................................................................................................... 120 Network set-up programs ................................................................................................ 120 Networking utilities .......................................................................................................... 120 Security ............................................................................................................................ 121 Sendmail .......................................................................................................................... 126 Other security options ...................................................................................................... 127 System logs ........................................................................................................................ 129 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 131 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 132 9. MORE UNIX .............................................. 135 Computer system overview ....... ............................................................... ............... ........... 136 The command interpreter or shell...................................................................................... 136 Pattern matching .............................................................................................................. 138 Metacharacters .................................................................................................................. 138 Unix metacharacters and associated programs .................................................................. 139 Working with files, directories and the file system ............................................................ 151 Help .................................................................................................................................. 154 vi ...................................................................................................................................... 155 Managing jobs and processes ............................................................................................ 160 Managing your environment ............................................................................................ 163 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 169 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 169 10. INSTALLING SOFTWARE ............................ 171 RPM .................................................................................................................................. 172 Wh at is installed? .............................................................................................................. 172 Gnome RPM - GnoRPM .................................................................................................... 173 YaST .................................................................................................................................. 174 Compression ...................................................................................................................... 174 Mounting the CD-Rom drive .............................................................................................. 176 Adobe Acrobat .................................................................................................................. 176 SuSe 6.4 Linux and ed ...................................................................................................... 177 GNU Fortran 77 .................................................................................................................. 182 NAG Intel g77 Double Precision Numeric Library .............................................................. 183 Essential Linux fast Java .................................................................................................................................... 184 Summary ...................... ................................................... .......... ......... .......... ......... ........... 185 Bibliography .................. ................................................ ................................................ .... 185 11. TEXT FORMATTING AND DOCUMENT PRODUCTION ........... ............ ......... ...... ...... 187 Electronic publishing basics .............................................................................................. 188 Text tools ................. ........................................ ........................................ ......................... 189 TeX .................................................................................................................................... 190 LaTex .................................................................................................................................. 191 Fonts.................................................................................................................................. 191 W3C .................................................................................................................................. 192 Graphics formats .............................................................................................................. 192 Bitmap .............................................................................................................................. 192 HTML ................................................................................................................................ 193 Portable Document Format (PDF) ...................................................................................... 194 PostScript ................................. ............................. ........... ................. ........ ........................ 194 Ghostscript ................................................ ........................................................................ 194 XML .................................................................................................................................. 195 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 195 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 195 12. PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES .................... 197 History .............................................................................................................................. 198 C ........................................................................................................................................ 200 C++ .................................................................................................................................. 200 Intel/linux Fortran compilers ............................................................................................ 201 Java .................................................................................................................................. 204 Practical extraction and report language (Perl) ................................................................ 204 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 206 13. MISCELLANEOUS ...................................... 207 Electronic mail-email ...................................................................................................... 208 linux as a platform for a Web server .................................................................................. 21 0 Database management...................................................................................................... 213 High-performance computing .............................. ..................................................... ....... 214 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 216 14. RESUME .................................................... 219 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 220 )l~»EN])~ ....••••....................•.................••...•.... 221 INI>EJe .............................................................. 22~ Overview I. Chivers, Essential Linux fast © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2001 Essential Linux fast 'Don't paniC> Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy d The aim of this chapter is to provide a background to the rest of the F material in the book. Assumptions It is assumed that you have your own pe with aversion of Windows installed, have abasie familiarity with DOS, Windows and the hardware, and are not scared by the idea of taking the case off and having a look inside. It is also assumed that you are interested in installing Linux either on a system on its own or have it coexist with Windows, so that you get the best of both worlds. What is Linux:? The common perception most people have of Linux is a free Unix-type operating system. In fact it is made up of two major strands that were independent. The first component historically to be developed was by the GNU project and its efforts to develop a free Unix operating system. This work was driven by Richard Stallman. The second component was the development of the kernel for an operating system. This was driven by Linus Torvalds. The GNU Project The GNU project's aim was to develop a free Unix operating system. They started in 1983 and by the early 1990s had put together the whole system apart from a working kernel.