engl-2311-blog/glossary.md

33 lines
No EOL
3.6 KiB
Markdown

# Glossary
- Linux: An open-source family of operating systems
- Linux distro (distribution): One of the operating systems in the Linux family (i.e. using the Linux kernel)
- OCI: Open Container Initiative; a project for open-source standardization of containers
- Containers: An isolated environment to run programs, great for avoiding conflicting dependencies and for ease-of-use
- Container image: The base filesystem of a container
- OCI image: The OCI's standard for container images, used by essentially all Linux container platforms
- AUR: Arch User Repository, a repository for Arch Linux packages which are maintained by users. AUR only hosts computer-readable instructions and related files (via `PKGBUILD` files) for creating the packages, not the packages or programs themselves
- Filesystem: The system which keeps track of how data is written to disk, like NTFS, FAT32, or ext4. Some filesystems, like ZFS or btrfs, have extra features like redundancy or compression.
- Git: The most common version control system by far - keeps track of different versions of files, can be used to resolve conflicting changes, etc.
- Forking: Copying a Git repository and optionally and making changes to it. Can be simply to contribute the changes back to the upstream project later, or to use something as a base for your own project.
- Branches: Different "chains" of versions of code, which can, well, branch apart, merge back together, and so on. Different branches don't necessarily have to be related whatsoever, but they usually are made from other branches.
- Repository: Usually refers to either a Git repository (i.e. a Git project), or a server hosting packages to be installed by a package manager.
- GUI toolkit: A set of programs used for making graphical interfaces
- Qt: A GUI toolkit with an appearance similar to normal Windows interfaces; pronounced "cute"
- GTK: A more (literally) rounded GUI toolkit, hated by some for its programs usually having highly excessive whitespace and poor design (though there are some exceptions)
- Window manager: The program which keeps track of and determines where each program's window(s) go.
- Desktop Environment: A window manager, programs, and configurations, all wrapped up into a bundle, providing a comprehensive desktop.
- GNOME: A popular GTK-based extensible desktop environment.
- Virtual machine: A virtual computer.
- Partition: A part of a disk. For example, modern computers have a small boot partition and a big partition holding all the actual data.
- GParted: GNOME's partition manager - and my favorite partition manager.
- `sudo`: Super user do; runs a command as `root`, Linux's admin account.
- Tarball: An archive of data, preserving its file and directory structure. Not compressed, though its tools come with options to compress it after generation.
- `apt`: The package manager for Debian-based Linux distros.
- blendOS: "Arch Linux, made declarative, immutable and atomic."
- Akshara: blendOS's system rebuilder/updater
- `pacman`: Arch Linux's package manager, also used by blendOS
- `PKGBUILD`: A file defining how to build a package which can be install by `pacman`.
- `iso` file: A disk image file, can be "burned" to a USB flash drive (or any other disk) and booted off of, often used for Linux installers and/or live images.
- FUSE: A filesystem interface used for running filesystems in userspace (i.e. not in the kernel)
- Kernel: The very core of an operating system, with all its most essential functions, like filesystems (aside from those using FUSE). On Linux, device drivers are usually in the kernel directly, rather than being installed separately like on Windows.