Introduction

Abstract

This chapter presents an introduction to the book. It describes the book’s scope, intended audience and its suitability as a textbook in Computer Science/Engineering curriculums. It presents a brief history of Unix, which includes early versions of Unix at Bell Labs, AT&T System V and other developments of Unix, such as BSD, HP UX, IBM AIX and Sun/Solaris Unix. It describes the development of Linux and various Linux distributions, which include Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat and Slackware. It lists both the hardware platforms and virtual machines for Linux. It shows how to install Ubuntu Linux to both VirtualBox and Vmware virtual machines inside the Microsoft Windows. It explains the startup sequence of Linux, from booting the Linux kernel to user login and command execution. It describes the Unix/Linux file system organization, file types and commonly used Unix/Linux commands. Lastly, it describes system administration tasks for users to manage and maintain their Linux systems.

Keywords

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