Linux Headquarters

Introduction If you have read the Things To Consider Before Recompiling Your Kernel guide and have decided to do it, you’ve come to the right place. Compiling the kernel is a rather complex task, but this guide attempts to explain it in a straightforward manner. Before you can compile the  [ Read More ]

Introduction If you wish to upgrade to a newer kernel, you can patch your current kernel instead of downloading an entire new kernel. By patching your existing kernel, you retain your settings from previous kernel compilations. Patching the kernel is a good choice if you wish to upgrade from your  [ Read More ]

Introduction LILO stands for Linux Loader. It is the Linux boot manager that is either written to the Master Boot Record of your hard drive or to the first sector of your hard drive. It is what loads the Linux kernel when your computer boots up or allows you to  [ Read More ]

Introduction In Linux, the floppy and CDROM drives must be “mounted” before the data on them can be read. This allows users to read not only floppy disks formatted for the ext2 Linux filesystem, but also Windows(DOS) disks. When a floppy disk is mounted, its file heirarchy is added to  [ Read More ]

Introduction In Linux, the floppy and CDROM drives must be “mounted” before the data on them can be read. When a CDROM is mounted, its file heirarchy is added to the existing file heirarchy usually under /mnt/cdrom or /cdrom. It can be mounted anywhere the user wants it to be.  [ Read More ]

Introduction There are two steps to burning a data CD-ROM. You need to create an ISO image with the mkisofs command and then burn the ISO image to the CD-ROM with the cdrecord command. The steps for burning a CD-R or a CD-RW are the same, except that if the  [ Read More ]

Introduction TAR stands for Tape ARchive. It was originally designed for tape backups. Hence, the word tape in the name. It can now be used to create a tar file anywhere on the filesystem. TAR creates one “tar file” out of several files and directories keeping the absolute paths if  [ Read More ]

Introduction The locate command in Linux returns a list of files and directories that contain the keyword you specify. For example, locate kde will return /usr/bin/kde /usr/bin/kdehelp /usr/bin/startkde etc…. The locate command can be helpful if you are looking for a file you have created since it will search through  [ Read More ]

Introduction chgrp is a standard Unix/Linux command that allows you to change the group of a file/directory. To view the current group of a file, execute the following command: ls -l. This will display the files in the current directory in long format. The fourth column in the table is  [ Read More ]

Introduction chmod is a standard Unix/Linux command that allows you to change the permissions of a file/directory. If you do not understand permissions, see the Reading File/Directory Permissions guide before continuing. Using chmod There are two arguments for chmod: the permissions and the file/directory name. The permission argument for chmod  [ Read More ]