Day Nine: Agony of Typos

Damn! I thought I got to step 5.3 succesfully, but then nothing.



Early today, I wiped my machine clean of Mandrake 8.2 and installed Fedora Core 3.0 --- which I'm not happy about at all. The interface is just crappy and it seems to take much longer to boot up. houg the good thing about using Fedora is that it boots using Grub, so at least I won't have to deal with switching from Lilo like I feared.

But the bad news, Source code gone. Patches gone. Folders gone. I thought I followed all the steps through Chapters 2, 3 and 4, but obviously I didn't. Back to section 2.3 and see where I went wrong.

Day Eight: As The Pages Turn

Moving along Introduction to Linux. I've finished Chapters 7, 8 and 9, covering Home, the X Window System, Printing and the Fundamentals of Backup. Hmm, backup that will have to be something I need to address.





I have been looking at getting Firefox on my laptop, but my distro (Mandrake 8.2) is so old that it would be a giant production to add everything I need to install Firefox. So I posted a note at LFS Chat, asking for input on a favorite distro to install LFS as well as one that would be recent enough to have the capabilities of running Firefox.

Day Seven: It Doesn't Ringeth For Me

There is that nagging thought that I should have entitled this blog, "Learning Linux" or Learning Unix." OTOH, I think that "Building LFS" won't be stopping at LFS 6.0.

Today was a good day. I read through Chapters 5, 6 and most of 7 in Introduction to Linux as well as went throught the vimtutor. Because of that I was able to edit my .bashrc to silence the damn system bell with setterm -blength 0. KDE was a bit tricker, I jsut lowered the sound to 0%. Obviously, I'm making a lot of mistakes if I am hearing the system bell so often. I need to correspond the chapters in The Linux Cookbook with Machtelt Garrels fine guide to Linux.

Day Six: Feeling Bashfull

I've finished reading/completing Chapters 3 and 4 of Machtelt Garrels' Introduction to Linux. These chapters covered the file system and processes respectively. Also, Chapters 1, 2 and 3 (almost done) of Michael Stutuz' The Linux Cookbook, that is "The Introudction", "What Every Linux User Knows" and "The Shell">

Currently Reading

• Essention pre-reading for life with LFS by Richard A. Downing (currently on hold due to compiling exercise at the end)
• Introduction to Linux by Machtelt Garrels
• The Linux Cookbook by Michael Stutuz

To Read

• From Power Up to Bash Prompt by Greg O'Keefe
• Building and Installing Software Packages for Linux by Mendel Cooper
• Linux User's Guide by Larry Greenfield (BTW, the link in the LFS 6.0 book is wrong. Need to figure out how to contact the LFS group on this error.)
• The Linux From Scratch FAQ by Seth W. Klein - now maintained by Jeroen Coumans
• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Raymond
• Linux Installation and Getting Started by Matt Welsh and others
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper
• The Linux System Administrator's Guide by Lars Wirzenius
• Linux Network Administrators Guide by too many to list here
• BASH Programming - Introduction HOWTO by Mike G
• Bash Prompt HOWTO by Giles Orr
• Bash Guide for Beginners by Machtelt Garrels
• Bzip2 mini-HOWTO by David Fetter
  

Day Five: Laundry Day

Besides letting life interfere with my pursuit of Linux, some things have been figured out.

• I've connected my laptop to the internet, though it is through Xwindows, so I dont' know if that really counts.
• I needed to switch from an old version of xkfc to an equally old version of KDE, which I found out through Negene's article at tuxfiles.com, Changing the default window manager - 1.0"
• I've finished the reading of "files and file the file system", thought Tille's exercises seem daunting. I will however plow through them, because I know it can only help.


• I picked up Michael Stutz' The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition. I didn't want to spend any more money on this adventure, but it is great bed-time reading and it is a great companion piece to Tille's Introduction to Linux.
• Though small potatoes, at work today one of my files was not being copied from one directiory to another. A quick look at ls -l showed the the destination folder was created with a different user than the user whose folders I can cp to.

Day Four: Filing the Day Away

Still reading Intro to Linux and I am almost finished with Chapter 3: About files and the file system. This is an overview on how the files and directories are structured as well several useful commands ls, grep, which, df, and echo. There is also some discussion about paths and links. I also looked up what a journaled file system was.

Tomorrow I delve into file security and then Processes.

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I also found something else to read, Learning about UNIX-GNU/Linux by David Harrison of the University of Toronto.

Day Three - Actually Three Point Five

Machtlelts Tille's Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide is fresh and clean. She has divided up the book into several sections: What is Linux?, Quickstart, About files and the file system, Processes, I/O redirection, Text editors, Home sweet/home, Printers and printing, Fundamental Backup Techniques, Networking, and several appendixes. The book could could be considered a class since each chapter ends with several exerices.

I've finished "What is Linux?" that a good but short history of Linux and the "Quickstart" chapter covers logging in, basic bash, and help (man, --help, info, whatis and apropos) . I have begun the chapter on the "About files . . . " chapter tonight.

The sad news in reading such a good piece of documentation, I guess I'll have to add her Introduction to Basic Unix System Administration to my ever increasing reading list.

Day Three - Everybody Reads Raymond

Eric Raymond may probably be best known for his never-ending book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which looks at two distinct software development models, but he is also the maintainer of many open-source software, FAQs, and HTML documents. One of them, The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO "describes the working basics of PC-class computers, Unix-like operationg systems, and the Internet in non-technical language." The document is divided into several sections which Raymond heads with questions, such as "What happens when you log in?"

I found "Unix and Internet Fundamentals" met Raymond's goal of non-techinical language, but I admitely got lost in 9.1 Numbers.

Integer arithmetic is close to but not actually mathematical base-two. The low-order bit is 1, next 2, then 4 and so forth as in pure binary. But signed numbers are represented in twos-complement notation. The highest-order bit is a sign bit which makes the quantity negative, and every negative number can be obtained from the corresponding positive value by inverting all the bits and adding one. This is why integers on a 32-bit machine have the range -2³¹ to 2³¹ - 1. That 32nd bit is being used for sign; 0 means a positive number or zero, 1 a negative number.

Overall, Raymond's explantion of the boot, login, file systems, rights and priveleges as well as his illustrations of the internet were basic, clear and spot on.

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Just a quick side note on .gz files, read gzip and gunzip: Files With .gz Extensions by Brent Fox as well as the gzip home page.

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I realized that I was using vim, and not vi — that should make finding documentation much easier.

Day Two - Lost in bz2

Okay, not being connected to the internet is for the birds. I've downloaded all the source code for LFS as well as the HTML version of LFS. I have to burn these files on to a CD and sneakernet them over to my laptop. Two other problems.

1. I want to stay a the prompt as much as possible, rather than running Xwindows. How am I expected to learn vi if I am viewing all my documention in HTML?!
2. .bz2? What's that? I know it is a compressed file, but how do you uncompress it? man bz2 and bz2 --help do absolutely nothing.

Back to the internet.

My Google search returns a nice little description of the bz2, bzip2 and bunzip: Files With .bz2 Extensions by Brent Fox. man bunzip2 works much better. I also download the text version of the LFS book, burn that to a CD, copy it over to my linux box, and I am able to unzip it with the following command, bunzip2 LFS-BOOK-6.0.txt.bz2 .

So now it's time to begin reading. And a lot of reading there is to do. Gerard Beekmans, the creator of LFS, recommends several HOWTOs and guides to read.

• From Power Up to Bash Prompt by Greg O'Keefe
• Building and Installing Software Packages for Linux by Mendel Cooper
• Linux User's Guide by Larry Greenfield (BTW, the link in the LFS 6.0 book is wrong. Need to figure out how to contact the LFS group on this error.)
• Essention pre-reading for life with LFS by Richard A. Downing
  

At first glance, this doesn't appear to be much reading, but each of these, in turn, recommends other books to read. My list is ever increasing.



Both O'Keefe and Downing recommened The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO by Eric Raymond. Downing has a long list of others items to read as well. My only problem with Dowing's html page is that he frames his pages, so even though you are leaving his site to go to The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP), the link always reads http://www.109bean.org.uk/lfsdocs/LFS-prereading.html. Not a big problem, since a simple right click gets me to where I want to go, but an annoyance nonetheless. Downing recommends the following:

• The Linux From Scratch FAQ by Seth W. Klein - now maintained by Jeroen Coumans
• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Raymond
• Introduction to Linux by Machtelt Garrels
• Linux Installation and Getting Started by Matt Welsh and others
• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper
• The Linux System Administrator's Guide by Lars Wirzenius
• Linux Network Administrators Guide by too many to list here

And my own quick jaunt through TLDP, left me with these to add to my list:

• BASH Programming - Introduction HOWTO by Mike G
• Bash Prompt HOWTO by Giles Orr
• Bash Guide for Beginners by Machtelt Garrels
• Bzip2 mini-HOWTO by David Fetter
  

I have a feeling ths list will grow and grow, and I need to be conscious of the fact that I need to be doing as well as reading.