Raspberry Pi User Guide, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3

Linux System Administration

THE MAJORITY OF modern Linux distributions are user-friendly, with a graphical user interface (GUI) that provides an easy way to perform common tasks. It is, however, quite different to both Windows and OS X, so to get the most out of your Raspberry Pi, you first need a quick primer on using the operating system.

Linux: An Overview

As we briefly explain in Chapter 1, “Meet the Raspberry Pi”, Linux is an open source project that was originally founded to produce a kernel that was free for anyone to use. The kernel is the heart of an operating system, and it handles the communication between the user and the hardware.

Although it rightly refers only to Linux, the term kernel is often used to refer to a collection of different open source projects from a variety of companies. These collections come together to form different flavours of Linux known as distributions.

The original version of Linux was combined with a collection of tools created by a group called GNU. The resulting system, known as GNU/Linux, was basic but powerful. Unlike many mainstream operating systems of the era, it offered facilities such as multiple user accounts in which several users share a single computer. Rival closed-source operating systems have taken this system on board, with both Windows and OS X now supporting multiple user accounts on the same system. It’s also still present in Linux and provides security and protection for the operating system.

In Linux, you ...