Chapter 9 Terms

Launcher

A GUI object (a bar) on the left side of the Ubuntu Unity desktop that serves the same purpose as the OS X Dock and the pinned items feature on the taskbar on the Windows Desktop.

Kickoff Application Launcher

A GUI object on the KDE GUI bundled with Fedora that, when clicked, opens a menu (similar to Windows start menu) for launching programs.

GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME)

A Linux GUI that uses the Linux X Windows system.

Live Image

A bootable image of the operating system that will run from disc or other bootable media without requiring that the OS be installed on the local computer.

Path

A description that an operating system uses to identify the location of a file or directory.

Absolute Path

A directory path that beings with the top level. In Linux, this begins with a forward slash (/) to indicate the root directory.

Command Completion

A feature of Linux (and OS X Terminal UNIX) that completes what is entered at the command line with a command name or file or directory name.

Switch Users

A feature of most operating systems that allows the currently logged-on users to leave their apps and data open in memory, switching away so that another user can log in to a separate location.

Home Directory

In Linux, a directory created for a user, using the user's login name, and located under /home. This is the one place in Linux where an ordinary user account has full control over files without logging in as the root account.

Daemon

In Linux, software that runs in background until it is activated.

Owner

In Linux, the user account that creates a file or directory. This term is also used in Windows.

Apache HTTP Server

Open source Web server software, originally written for UNIX, runs on Linux.

Command-line History

The Linux and UNIX (and OS X Terminal) feature that saves command history in a file named bash_history.

Bourne-Again Shell (BASH)

The Linux component (shell) that provides the character-mode user interface for entering and processing commands, issuing error messages, and other limited feedback.

World Wide Web (WWW)

The graphical Internet consisting of a vast array of documents located on millions of specialized servers worldwide.

X Windows System

The program code used as the basis for many GUIs for Linux or UNIX.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The protocol for transferring the files that make up the rich graphical Web pages we view on the World Wide Web (WWW). It includes the commands a Web browser uses to request Web pages from a Web server to display on the screen of a local computer.

Ubuntu

A group of Linux distributions supported by a company named Canonical.

Symbolic Link

A link between different directories in Linux.

Web

A shortened version of the term World Wide Web (WWW).

Wildcard

A symbol that replaces any character or string of characters as a parameter in a CLI command.

Access Mode Number

A value assigned to a file permission in Linux. The user (owner), group, and others each have different access mode number calculated using the following values: read = 4, write = 2, and execute = 1.

Terminal Window

A window in a Linux GUI that provides a command-line interface (CLI) for entering Linux shell commands.

Object Code

An executable program, the result of compiling programming statements, that can be interpreted by a computer's CPU or operating system and loaded into memory as a running program.

GNU's Not Unix (GNU)

An organization created in 1984 to develop a free version of a UNIX-like operating system. They have developed thousands of applications that run on UNIX and Linux platforms. Many are distributed with versions of Linux.

Case-sensitive

In an operating system, a feature that allows the OS to preserve the case used for the characters in a file name when creating it, and requires the correct case to open or manage the file.

Case-aware

In an operating system, a feature that allows the OS to preserve the case used for the characters in a file name when creating it, but does not require the correct case when opening or managing the file.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Red Hat's commercially available version of Linux.

Open-source Software

Software distributed with all its source code, allowing developers to customize it as necessary.

Source Code

The uncompiled text program statements that can be viewed and edited with a text editor or special program software.

Burn

Traditionally this term refers to the writing of data to a disc (CD-R, DVD-R, or BD-R) that can only be written to once in any given area of the disc. Once full, you cannot add data to the disc. It is "write-once." The source files can be individual files or an ISO file.