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Technological fossils

Posted 04-17-2019 at 12:11 PM by hazel

One of the problems of old age is that nothing looks the way it ought to any more. Take telephones. I have a very clear mental picture of what a telephone ought to look like. It is black, shaped like a truncated pyramid with concave sides and a cradle on the top to hold the receiver. On the front is a circular dial with a chrome-plated surround containing 10 holes. You dialled a number by putting the tip of your index finger into a hole and pulling the dial around clockwise as far as it would go,...

hazel

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Posted in Uncategorized

Views 690 Comments 3 hazel is offline

Notes on building a kernel

Posted 11-18-2018 at 12:12 PM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 04:50 AM by hazel

First of all, why would you ever want to build a kernel? All binary Linux distros (and that means most distros) come with a ready-made "stock" kernel that will run on just about any type of hardware.

In the early days of Linux, many people built their own kernels because memory and disk space were both limited. It made sense to create a kernel that was lean and mean, that would contain drivers only for the hardware you actually had and no spare fat. Nowadays a stock kernel...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in Linux kernel

Views 1789 Comments 0 hazel is offline

Bisecting a kernel

Posted 09-04-2018 at 08:12 AM by hazel
Updated 11-27-2019 at 10:53 AM by hazel

Sometimes you find yourself doing things that you would previously have considered as only suitable for geeks.

I don't consider it particularly geeky to build your own kernel. When I was starting out with Linux, hardware was pretty limited, and building a custom kernel was often the best way to get a quick boot. Nowadays I prefer to use the stock kernel if there is one, but two of my regular distros (Crux and LFS) require a hand-rolled kernel.

I have always regarded...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in Linux kernel

Views 493 Comments 0 hazel is offline

Libraries: what they are, how they work, why you need them

Posted 05-11-2018 at 09:37 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 04:50 AM by hazel

All serious software nowadays does most of its work using libraries. The top-level program code is mainly a caller for library functions written by other people, and it is these that actually do most of the heavy lifting. Without libraries, programming would be impossible for anyone but professionally trained coders.

A library is a collection of functions that do a particular set of interrelated jobs: reading and writing a particular media format, doing quad-precision maths, parsing...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in For newbies

Views 1879 Comments 1 hazel is offline

Package managers and how to use them

Posted 01-01-2018 at 07:33 AM by hazel
Updated 05-27-2022 at 04:46 AM by hazel

A surprising number of Linux newbies do not seem to understand how to use a package manager despite the fact that they probably have smartphones and are therefore likely to be quite familiar with the concept of an app store.

Linux was using app stores long before Steve Jobs created the iPhone. However in the Linux world they are called repositories (repo for short).

Windows users tend to acquire bad habits where software installation is concerned. They browse about...

hazel

LQ Guru

Posted in For newbies

Views 1032 Comments 1 hazel is offline

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