Linux by the Seat of Your Pants
The Raspberry Pi uses Linux as its standard operating system, which means if you don’t know anything about this awesome OS, you’re going to have to learn. Don’t worry—I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.
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Linux by the Seat of Your Pants The Raspberry Pi uses Linux as its standard operating system, which means if you don’t know anything about this awesome OS, you’re going to have to learn. Don’t worry—I’ll try to make this as painless as possible. Whatever your preconceptions about Linux are, you can probably disregard them. Since its inception, Linux has been regarded as the “geek’s OS,” associated with images of button-up-short-sleeve-shirt-clad pencil- necks hammering away on a keyboard while the screen fills with text, and somewhere, deep in the basement, a row of tape-driven computer hard- drive cabinets spin to life. (See Figure 2-1.) In the background, a 20-sided die rolls across the table, and there is the soft muttering of an argument: “No, Han shot first!”
© Wolfram Donat 2018 W. Donat, Learn Raspberry Pi Programming with Python, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3769-4_2
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Figure 2-1. The Linux users’ playground (©2006 Marcin Wichary) However, fear not. While some of us still heartily embrace that culture and all that it stands for, that doesn’t mean you have to. Linux has come a long way since it was first introduced, and it is now not only a real powerhouse of an operating system, but also extremely user friendly (at least, most of its distributions are). The most popular flavors of Linux are Ubuntu and Mint. Both are visually so similar to Windows and Mac that many people find switching to them fun and easy. Another popular version of Linux is Debian, which is the distribution that the Pi’s operating system, Raspbian, is based on. When it first began, Debian was the only distribution of Linux that was truly “open”—allowing any developer and user to contribute. It still remains the largest distributor of Linux that is not a commercial entity.
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Okay, enough horn-tooting. In order to really use the Pi, you’ll need at least a basic understanding of Linux and how it works. So, let’s get started.
THE LINUX STORY Linux is an operating system loosely based on the Unix operating system. It has always been free and open source, and it was first released in 1991 by its creator, Linus Torvalds. It is written in the C programming language and was originally designed to run on Intel’s x86-based computers. In the intervening 20+ years, it has been ported to every imaginable device, from mainframes and supercomputers to tablets, televisions, refrigerators, and video-game consoles. The Android operating system is built on top of the Linux kernel— the nugget of code on which an operating system is built. Like most computer software, Linux was not born in a black hole. It owes its beginning to operating systems and kernels such as Unix, BSD, GNU, and MINIX. In fact, Torvalds has said on occasion that if the GNU kernel had been complete or if BSD had been available in the early 1990s, he probably would not have written his own kernel. He began his work on the kernel with MINIX and eventually added many GNU software applic
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