The alt key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard

American National Standard Institute (org., USA)

a revision of C, adding function prototypes, structure passing, structure assignment and standardised library functions.

Advanced Power Management

Abbreviation for `argument' (to a function)

manipulate the system ARP cache

(American Standard Code for Information Interchange): This is the defacto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.

Run a command once at some future time in *nix.

GNU's Autoconf is a tool for configuring source code and Makefiles.

Autofs controls the operation of the automount daemons. The automount daemons automatically mount filesystems when you use them and unmount them after a period of inactivity.

A powerful and featureful web server log analyzer Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats) is a powerful web server logfile analyzer written in perl that shows you all your web statistics including visits, unique visitors, pages, hits, rush hours, search engines, keywords used to find your site, robots, broken links and more.

The GNU Bourne Again SHell Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input or from a file. Bash also incorporates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh)

Security hardening tool Bastille Linux is a security hardening program for several Linux distributions

Electronic BBSs formed much of the the core "cyberspace" in the 1980s. Telecommunication costs were high, so rather than interconnected via "always-on" connections, such systems transfered files and messages as irregular intervals over dial-up lines. Mail was transported through BBS via protocols like FidoNet and UUCP.

a mail notification tool biff is a small little program that tells you when you get mail

Information consisting entirely of ones and zeros.

BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) is the most popular software on the Internet for providing DNS services. Your ISP is likely running BIND. BIND is open-source. Key point: BIND provides about 80% of all DNS services. It is also enabled by default on a lot of Linux distributions.

To 'boot' a computer is to start the operating system. A boot can be a "hard boot" or a "soft boot".

The first track on an IBM PC-comptible hard disk or floppy disk (track 0). During the boot process, read-only memory (ROM) tells the computer to read the first block of data on this track and load whatever program is found there.

Short for Robot. A program designed to search for information on the Internet with little human intervention.

Buffer uses shared memory to convert a variable input data rate to a constant output data rate.

see CDROM also known as Compact Disk

CDE (Common Desktop Environment) is a standard supported by numerous UNIX vendors to supply a common desktop environment on top of X Windows

Compact Disk - Read Only Memory (CD, ROM), "CD-ROM"

Command line, CLI or known also as command prompt, one of the two fundamental user interfaces. Whereas most people are familiar with "graphical user interfaces (GUIs)" using windows and mice, the command-line provides a raw interface into the inner workings of the computer.

To turn programming source code into an executable program.

A copy of the contents of core, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error.

The GNU versions of commonly used grep utilities. Grep searches one or more input files for lines which contain a match to a specified pattern and then prints the matching lines. GNU's grep utilities include grep, egrep and fgrep.

grub or known as Grand Unified Bootloader is a small software utility that loads and manages multiple operating systems (and their variants). GRUB is the default bootloader for Red Hat Linux.

UNIX-compatible operating system (and kernel) designed with free software tools and ported to several hardware architectures. Linux was initially developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux is open source software (OSS) and aims to be a viable alternative to competing proprietary operating systems.

conditional semaphore-file creator

To store application or system messages or errors. Also, a file that holds this information.

Logrotate is designed to ease administration of systems that generate large numbers of log files. It allows automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files.

LVM includes all of the support for handling read/write operations on physical volumes of a disk example a hard disk. Creating volume groups (kind of virtual disks) from one or more physical volumes and creating one or more logical volumes (kind of logical partitions) in volume groups.

open source: Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code. The intent was to be able to sell the hackers' ways of doing software to industry and the mainstream by avoid the negative connotations (to suits) of the term "free software".

OpenSSH SSH daemon

SSL (Secure Socket Layer): A protocol designed by Netscape Communications to enable encrypted, authenticated communications across the Internet.

TCPIP or TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (RFC 793, IP), "TCP/IP"

The termcap package provides the /etc/termcap file. /etc/termcap is a database which defines the capabilities of various terminals and terminal emulators.