Part Three!
Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16!
Part Three!
Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16!
CREDIT: Magictorch
In this month’s article, we are continuing our investigation of the internals of Linux distributions. In the last two articles of the series, we looked at the Linux kernel and discovered some of its capabilities, such as interacting with hardware, providing firewall functionality and a virtualisation platform, and much, much more. While we recommend reading the first two instalments, the content in this article can be considered as standalone and no prior knowledge is required.
This month, we are discovering the various ways in which we can interact with our distributions, from the humble console to the venerable X server, to the Wayland protocol, which has multiple implementations, including the Weston reference compositor.
The time of terminals
In many of our articles, you need to open a terminal application and run commands, which perform a task and then display output on the screen. This was one of the earliest ways to interact with the system and it takes time to learn the commands. If we go back in time, to the dark old days before we had internet access, learning about the commands we needed to use was not as simple as it is now – you probably had to visit your local library or book shop to borrow or purchase a book about the Linux operating system.
When using a terminal from a graphical user interface, this can be referred to as a virtual console. What we will discuss in the next paragraph is interaction with a console. This is not a historic skill to learn – many Linux servers are headless, meaning that access is via a protocol, such as SSH, and commands need to be run.