Summary

The chapter introduces a new user to the concepts of using a Linux system. The discussion starts with a brief introduction followed by the Linux booting process. The booting process is explained to a considerable extent, so that a non-Linux user understands how the Linux operating system could share the system resources with another operating system such as Microsoft Windows, and what sequence of actions take place when the system is booted.

The next topic presented involves the kernel features and how the monolithic and modular kernels differ, and what the main functions of the kernel are. Then follows a discussion on how the users interact with the desktop, including some of the most commonly used desktop utilities. Emphasis has been made to convey to the readers that Linux is as powerful a desktop system as Windows is.

Then the readers are introduced to some of the commonly used simple administrative functions such as creating and maintaining users and groups, viewing running processes and log files, setting up daemon processes, and so on.

The next section introduces the readers to the various technical terms and concepts usually unique to the Linux/UNIX-based environment such as file systems, types of files, processes, threads, interprocess communication, and so on, so that they will have less difficulty in understanding the chapters that follow. However, the main purpose of this section was to introduce the new concepts; the details are left for future chapters to deal with.

Two major Linux distributions (Red Hat and SuSE) have been mentioned throughout the discussion, just to bring out the differences between these distributions. But most of the topics/concepts discussed are applicable to any Linux distribution running the most recent version of the kernel (2.4.18 and above). Because Linux is an open source operating system, there are several open source (and commercial) organizations that are contributing to provide robust applications, and hence some differences will exist among the different distributions of the operating system. However, it is important to note that even though there are differences, they are controlled and managed by the different organizations involved.

Chapter 3 will discuss a few of the most commonly used tools on the Linux platform.