Basic Explanation needed[given]

[shouldbesleeping]

I have installed the gentoo system and I'm onto the GUI headaches now, but what I want to know is why the commands I used worked, and what they did. I knew DOS backwards and forwards I knew what everything did. But with linux I was typing just because the manual said to, I didn't understand alot of what was going on.

Like, what is mounting, I know I mounted directories to different physical locations on my hard drive, So is mounting something that DOS did automatically? I'm used to DOS so I don't really understand that concept.

What is the proc file system? is that part of the kernel? I successfully installed gentoo, and I used all of these linux commands, I have practially memorized the steps to install gentoo, but I want to know what all these commands actually mean.

I am almost to the point of buying a linux book at barnes and noble, and I'd rather not, because none of them mention GENTOO! Is there an online guide that can explain this to me?

thanks
_________________
Being on the lower end of geniuses, I have to try a little bit harder than most of them. It still beats being a supreme moron.

[moocha]

http://tldp.org/
http://tldp.org/guides.html
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml
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Military Commissions Act of 2006: http://tinyurl.com/jrcto

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- attributed to Benjamin Franklin

[Budro]

Wow.... where to start..

Lots of documentation everywhere .... now that you have gentoo running and installed, take all those commands that you used during the install process and put the man(manual) or even the info pages to use.

login to your newly built gentoo box and give the delivered docs a chance to answer your questions

man fdisk --- lots to read
info fdisk --- same thing as man page
man mount --- even more to read
info mount --- overkill
info tar --- etc. etc. you get the picture buy now

Also, most commands can be run using --help as an argument which will give you the command line switches

[vhg119]

Mounting is mapping a directory to a filesystem or storage device.

Just keep at it. You'll learn sooner or later through consistent exposure.

[Sith_Happens]

In DOS, primary partitions and logical volumes are read by DOS and automatically assigned drive letters. Each drive is in a sense it's own root directory, C:\, D:\, etc. This is a seemingly simple way of going about things, but it is actually in some ways more complicated and certianly less flexible than the way things work in *nix. In *nix in general, and therefore Gentoo GNU/Linux, There is one root directory, /. Within this directory, there can be many hard drives, ramdiscs, removable media.

In DOS, you had to have one physical partition which was your system partition. However in linux, / can be broken up into as many physical partitions across as many devices as you want, because this heterogentity is transparent to any programs you run (i.e. a program sees /etc as /etc whether or not it is on the same partition or even the same device as the root directory). The real key to wrapping your mind around the *nix filesystem is this. In DOS/Windows, you had drives which contained directories. In *nix you have one directory, which contains everything. It's almost zen really . Well almost.

This creates the need to mount drives, or assign a directory within the root directory for the filesytems contained on the partitions to reside. When you mount a device in the root filesystem, lets say for instance you mount the boot partition at /boot, the directory /boot becomes a link in a sense to the physical boot partiton. Which may lead you to ask "if /dev/hda1 is my boot partition, and I mount it at /boot, then what is /dev/hda1?". The answer is it is a device node, which I will explain a little more about that later. You'll also notice that when you unmount the boot partition, it still contains files. These files exist on the root partition, so even if you mount the boot directory at /boot, those files don't dissappear, the /boot directory simply stops pointing to thier location on the root partition (this is all very abstract, so please don't post corrections saying that this is not exactly true).

The proc filesystem is an example of another advantage of the *nix directory structure. The proc filesystem doesn't exist on a hard disk, it exists in ram, and contains files concerning the state of the kernel and running processes (proc stands for processes, see ). Go ahead and look around in /proc. You'll notice that there are numbered directories, and if you run ps -e, you'll also notice that the numbers of these directories match the PID's of your running proccesses (at least they should, otherwise you might have a LKM trojan ). Inside the directories you'll see files containing information on the process and it's status.

In fact, programs read from the proc filesystem all the time to give you information on the status of your system. lspci for example reads from /proc/pci. Don't belive me? Type cat /proc/pci, look familiar? Even ps which you used just a minute ago reads from /proc to give you a list of running processes.

What's really cool about /proc though is that, despite the fact it exists in ram, you can look at it as if they were files on your hard drive. Pretty cool eh? /dev and /sys are other examples of virtual filesystems which exist in ram, but are mounted within the root directory.

When we say /dev/hda1 for example, we are reffering to a device node hda1 contained within /dev, which points to or represents the first partition on the first hard disk. The device node itself however is not the drive, it exists in ram. It is also not the same as a mountpoint. The device node is a file which represents the physical drive, where as the mount point could be said to represent the filesystem contained on the drive. If you need me to clarify that more I can, but hopefully your starting to get it.

/dev also contains other interesting device nodes. For instance, it contains the always fun /dev/urandom, which is the node for the random number generator. Just do cat /dev/urandom and you should get a random and infinite garble or characters filling your screen.

There are also nodes which represent your tty's or virtual terminals and pts's which are your xterms/aterms/eterms/whateverterms. For example start X and open two xterms or whatever terminal emulator you prefer. Then in the first term you opened, type echo Hello Dave > /dev/pts/1. "Hello Dave" should be printed to the second terminal.

Then there is /dev/null, which is like the "black hole" device node. Anthing you send to /dev/null will dissapear forever . My location used to read UMD a.k.a. /dev/null . Not very funny eh? Well I'm a nerd what do you expect. I got rid of it because it is very un-original.

Hope that answers some of your questions, I'd be happy to answer any more if I can.
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"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

[shouldbesleeping]

Thanks Sith Happens! and everyone else it really is kind of zen like and mind expanding!

It's like taking the red pill...I just noticed how compiling looks like matrix code

whoa!

thanks again!
_________________
Being on the lower end of geniuses, I have to try a little bit harder than most of them. It still beats being a supreme moron.

[Sith_Happens]

Sure thing. Linux is pretty cool. Just call me Morpheus. Although I would say cat /dev/urandom probably looks more like matrix code than compiling IMHO. Read it again though, because I was probably editing it while you were reading it the first time.
_________________
"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

[Bob P]

that is a nice post.
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[Gripp]

holy piss sith!
you just answered almost every "huh?" i had during the install in one simple, but very concise... swoop!
this should spend more time @TT

so... ^^TTT^^

[Sith_Happens]

Maybe I'll expand on this and put it into the Documentation forum. It seems to be very helpful to some people.
_________________
"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

[Budro]

I think since Windows 2000 you could remap partitions to drive letters but not in Win 98 and below so the disk orders for dos/win for "drive letter assignements" is that it looks at the first partition of each pysical disk for drive letter.

Hope I am gettings this correct...

For this scenario:
-----------------------
Primary master - one full partition = C:
Primary secondary - CDROM = E:
Secondary master - one full partition = D:

Splitting it up thhe disks:
------------------------------
Primary master -- two partitions = C: E:
Primary secondary - CDROM = G:
Secondary master -- two partitions = D: F:

Something like that....

[Gripp]

i have a bit of a question for you about swap partitiions...

my understanding of it is that it acts as extra RAM... not completely sure tho
i would guess that as it resides on the HD it would be slower than normal ram, but atleast stops possible limitations...
if i'm wrong, maybe you could explain??

this leads to my real question... you showed that the /proc folder is basically reading directory from memory... is that the hardware RAM or the swap "RAM" or both?
if it isn't both, which does the /proc folder read? and how can you view the contents of the other???
if it is both, how can one differentiate which process is running from which location??

also, i was wondering about the directoy structure below the /mnt/gentoo point...
does only exist as a "figment" of the computers' imagination while having the boot disk loaded?? or are those folders always there, only hidden?
i guess that could be anwsered by saving a file to say /mnt then rebooting without the disk, then rebooting again with the disk and seeing if the file is still there
if it does still exist during normal use, how would one access that file without using the boot disk?

[Sith_Happens]