Welcome, and thank you for using Linux-Mandrake! This book is aimed at people wishing to dive into the depths of their GNU/Linux system, exploiting its huge capabilities
This part shows you the internals of your system and how to use them. It begins with a chapter introducing you to the Unix and more particularly GNU/Linux worlds. It is necessary to understand well the concepts presented here before going to the next chapter dedicated to the command line. This chapter introduces you to the standard utilities for manipulating files and also some useful features provided by the shell.
Another chapter is dedicated to editing text. As most Unix configuration files are text, you may need to edit them in a text editor. You will learn how to use two of the most famous text editors in the Unix world: the mighty Emacs and the modern :-) VI.
You should now be able to perform some basic maintenance on your system. The following three chapters present three useful features of your Linux-Mandrake: how to manage printers and print documents on them, connectivity with Windows based machines, and finally the Linux-Mandrake security tool: MSEC.
Next, we will enter deeper into the GNU/Linux system. You will see how the file tree is organized. Unix systems tend to grow very large, but every file has it's place in a specific directory. After reading this chapter you will know where to look for files depending on their role in the system.
Another section covers the topic of filesystems and mount points. Here you will learn what both of these terms mean and you will see a practical example.
One chapter will be dedicated to the GNU/Linux filesystem ext2fs. Here you will learn more about file types and some additional concepts that may be new to you. Another chapter will introduce the special GNU/Linux filesystem /proc.
You will then learn about the Linux-Mandrake bootup procedure, and how to use it efficiently.
Then we enter three more chapters especially dedicated to people willing to become experts with GNU/Linux the first one will describe how to compile and install a new kernel.
You will also want to refer to the chapter dedicated to the building and installing of free software. Finally, you'll be introduced to (yet) another set of command line utilities.