Randolph Bentson Issue #5, September 1994 Every wonder what it’s like to write a driver under Linux? Here’s a summary of one hacker’s experiences. It started out innocently enough. I had been looking for an upgrade for my home system, a decrepit Unix workstation with only 8MB RAM and 40MB disk. I had been looking at 386BSD, but was a ...

Jeff Tranter Issue #5, September 1994 Linux is based on the Unix operating system, but also features a number of unique and useful kernel features and application programs that often go beyond what is available under Unix. One little-known gem is “dialog”, a utility for creating professional-looking dialog boxes from within shell scripts. This article presents a tutorial introduction to ...

Hamish Macdonald Issue #5, September 1994 Most people think that Linux runs only on Intel 80386 and above processors. This article is a status report on Linux/68k, the port of Linux to Motorola 680×0-based systems. Linux has been ported to 680×0 based machines. Amigas, Ataris and Macintoshes with the appropriate hardware support are the intended platforms. Only the 68020 (with ...

Chet Ramey Issue #4, August 1994 Conclusion of an article started last month. While originally written by Brian Fox of the Free Software Foundation, bash is now maintained by Chet Ramey. In this article, Chet explains the history of shells and then goes on to explore features specific to bash. History Access to the list of commands previously entered (the ...

Matt Welsh Issue #4, August 1994 This month, Cooking with Linux jogs your memory with a look at the history of Linux. Or, at least, that’s how we remember it… Linux users these days have it easy. Back when I was starting out with the system (around the 0.12 days), we didn’t have the luxuries of networking, documentation, DOSEMU, or ...

Michael K. Johnson Issue #4, August 1994 In this month’s column, I said that I would give a simple screen-locking example that uses the VT, or Virtual Terminal, ioctl()’s that I documented in that column. In case you can’t remember or didn’t read last month’s column, the VT ioctl()’s allow you to specify from a user program what the kernel ...

Phil Hughes Issue #4, August 1994 Over the past few months, Slackware has become the most popular Linux distribution to be made available on the Internet. This new release will differ in one major way yet continue to offer the availability and reliability that Slackware has become known for. As LJ is just about to go to the printer, a ...

Frank B. Brokken K. Kubat Issue #4, August 1994 In part 1, Brokken and Kubat explained where the ideas for icmake came from, the basics of the program and where you can get a copy. In Parts 2 and 3 we covered the grammar of icmake source files. In this final part of the article we show examples of the ...

Jeff Tranter Issue #4, August 1994 Multimedia has received a lot of attention in the computer industry recently. Unix systems traditionally have not provided much support for multimedia in general, and sound in particular, except for some expensive professional systems. Workstation vendors are now scrambling to introduce multimedia-ready systems. With the availability of Linux and low-cost sound hardware for Intel-based ...

Ronda Hauben Issue #4, August 1994 Although the word Linux does not appear in this article, it does offer a lot of interesting background on Unix. That background tells us how we got to the point where Linx is a reality. This year is the 25th anniversary of the invention of the Unix kernel in 1969 at Bell Labs. The ...