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All kinds of version numbers

Posted 08-28-2020 at 05:44 AM by hazel

A novice in on of the LQ forums recently complained that he couldn't understand version numbers in Linux. That's not perhaps surprising because software version numbers are used in several different ways, often simultaneously. Every program or library that is in active development goes through different versions as its developer adds features or corrects reported bugs. The Linux kernel is no exception, for it is, after all a program. But over the years, the kernel versioning system has become a...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in Linux kernel, For newbies

Views 3526 Comments 0 hazel is offline

How to read man pages

Posted 01-10-2020 at 10:50 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 04:48 AM by hazel

The Problem
Linux newbies tend to find man pages somewhat offputting. That may be because they are very concentrated, compressing a large amount of information into a small, highly-formatted package. They go back conceptually to the original UNIX Programmers' Manual, which was designed for experts who just wanted to bone up on something occasionally.

When the GNU people were creating GNU/Linux, they included man pages but also provided an alternative called info pages. This...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in For newbies

Views 2318 Comments 2 hazel is offline

Choosing a Linux distribution

Posted 11-25-2019 at 05:52 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 04:49 AM by hazel

Tags distributions

The problem

One of the commonest newbie questions on this site is "What Linux distro would you recommend for me to use?" It's understandable that newbies ask this question. With Windows, the answer to "What Windows should I run?" is easy: the latest one that will run on your machine (and that is still supported by Microsoft and the companies that produce your antivirus software). But Linux comes in a lot more than 57 varieties, most of them equally up to date. Which then should...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in For newbies

Views 1838 Comments 1 hazel is offline

What I discovered about pointers when I was learning C

Posted 07-25-2019 at 06:25 AM by hazel
Updated 08-29-2020 at 07:51 AM by hazel

I first started fiddling about with C when I became a Linux user. I had done some previous hobby programming; like many people back in the 1970's, I started with BASIC, moved on to Fortran and then Pascal, which I particularly liked because of its logical structure.

In all these languages, a variable was simply a named entity that had a type (for example integer) and a value. You did not have to bother about where it was stored. The computer handled that for you. These languages were...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in Programming

Views 2405 Comments 3 hazel is offline

Some tips on programming in C

Posted 07-18-2019 at 12:11 PM by hazel
Updated 07-21-2019 at 10:38 AM by hazel

Many people, after using Linux for a while, get the programming bug. I doubt if that often happens to Windows users, but Linux offers such convenient tools for writing programs that it tempts you to put one toe into the water.

Here are one or two tips that you might want to follow to make programming less stressful and confusing. I have chosen C as the language because it's one I know something about. Most of what I want to say applies just as much to C++. Some of it probably applies...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in Programming

Views 739 Comments 0 hazel is offline

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