About This Book
Only two things are infinite, the universe
and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
Acknowledgments
Joanna's acknowledgments
Many people have helped me with this book, directly or
indirectly. I would like to especially thank Matt Welsh for
inspiration and LDP leadership, Andy Oram for getting me to work
again with much-valued feedback, Olaf Kirch for showing me that it
can be done, and Adam Richter at Yggdrasil and others for showing
me that other people can find it interesting as well.
Stephen Tweedie, H. Peter Anvin, Remy Card, Theodore
Ts'o, and Stephen Tweedie have let me borrow their work (and
thus make the book look thicker and much more impressive):
a comparison between the xia and ext2 filesystems, the device
list and a description of the ext2 filesystem. These aren't
part of the book any more. I am most grateful for this, and
very apologetic for the earlier versions that sometimes lacked
proper attribution.
In addition, I would like to thank Mark Komarinski for
sending his material in 1993 and the many system administration
columns in Linux Journal. They are quite informative and
inspirational.
Many useful comments have been sent by a large number
of people. My miniature black hole of an archive doesn't let
me find all their names, but some of them are, in alphabetical
order: Paul Caprioli, Ales Cepek, Marie-France Declerfayt,
Dave Dobson, Olaf Flebbe, Helmut Geyer, Larry Greenfield and
his father, Stephen Harris, Jyrki Havia, Jim Haynes, York Lam,
Timothy Andrew Lister, Jim Lynch, Michael J. Micek, Jacob Navia,
Dan Poirier, Daniel Quinlan, Jouni K Seppänen, Philippe Steindl,
G.B. Stotte. My apologies to anyone I have forgotten.
Stephen's acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lars and Joanna for their hard
work on the guide.
In a guide like this one there are likely to be at least
some minor inaccuracies. And there are almost certainly going to
be sections that become out of date from time to time. If you
notice any of this then please let me know by sending me an email
to: bagpuss@debian.org.NOSPAM. I will take virtually
any form of input (diffs, just plain text, html, whatever), I am
in no way above allowing others to help me maintain such a large
text as this :)
Many thanks to Helen Topping Shaw for getting the red pen out
and making the text far better than it would otherwise have been.
Also thanks are due just for being wonderful.
Alex's Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lars, Joanna, and Stephen for all the
great work that they have done on this document over the years. I
only hope that my contribution will be worthy of continuing the work
they started.
Like the previous maintainers, I openly welcome any comments,
suggestions, complains, corrections, or any other form of feedback
you may have. This document can only benefit from the suggestions
of those who use it.
There have been many people who have helped me on my journey
through the "Windows-Free" world, the person I feel I need to thank the
most is my first true UN*X mentor, Mike Velasco. Back in a time before
SCO became a "dirty word", Mike helped me on the path of tar's, cpio's,
and many, many man pages. Thanks Mike! You are the 'Sofa King'.
Revision History
0.7
2001-12-03
SS
0.8
2003-11-18
AW
Added a section on NTP
Cleaned some SGML
Added ext3 to the filesystem
section
0.9
AW
Cleaned some SGML code, changed
doctype to lds.dsl, and added id tags
Updated section on filesystem types,
and Filesystem comparison
Updated partition type section
Updated section on creating
partitions
Wrote section on Logical Volume
Manager (LVM)
Updated section on space allocation
Added chapter on System Monitoring
Added more command line utilities
Verified Device list
Modified email address for Authors
Added references to more in-depth
documents where applicable
Added notes on upcoming sections
Indexed chapters 1 - 4, & part of 5
Updated Misc Information throughout
the book
Source and pre-formatted versions available
The source code and other machine readable formats
of this book can be found on the Internet via anonymous FTP at the
Linux Documentation Project home page http://www.tldp.org/, or
at the home page of this book at
http://www.draxeman/sag.html. This book is available in at
least it's SGML source, as well as, HTML and PDF formats. Other
formats may be available.
Typographical Conventions
Throughout this book, I have tried to use uniform
typographical conventions. Hopefully they aid readability. If
you can suggest any improvements please contact me.
Filenames are expressed as:
/usr/share/doc/foo.
Command names are expressed as: fsck
Email addresses are expressed as:
user@domain.com
URLs are expressed as: http://www.tldp.org
I will add to this section as things come up whilst
editing. If you notice anything that should be added then
please let me know.