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Introduction 0
CHAPTER 1
19
There's no support.
Every Linux distribution comes with more than 12,000 pages of documentation. Commercial
Linux distributions such as Red Hat Linux, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, Turbo Linux and
OpenLinux offer initial support for registered users, and small business and corporate accounts
can get 24/7 supports through a number of commercial support companies. As an Open Source
operating system, there's no six-month wait for a service release, plus the online Linux
community fixes many serious bugs within hours.
Why choose Pristine source?
All the programs in Red Hat distributions of Linux are provided as RPM files. An RPM file, also
known, as a “package”, is a way of distributing software so that it can be easily installed,
upgraded, queried, and deleted. However, in the Unix world, the defacto-standard for package
distribution continues to be by way of so-called “tarballs”. Tarballs are simply compressed files
that can be readable and uncompressed with the “tar” utility. Installing from tar is usually
significantly more tedious than using RPM. So why would we choose to do so?
1) Unfortunately, it takes a few weeks for developers and helpers to get the latest version of
a package converted to RPM’s because many developers first release them as tarballs.
2) When developers and vendors release a new RPM, they include a lot of options that
often are not necessary. Those organization and companies don’t know what options you
will need and what you will not, so they include the most used to fit the needs of
everyone.
3) Often RPMs are not optimized for your specific processors; companies like Red Hat
Linux build RPM’s based on a standard PC. This permits their RPM packages to be
installed on all sorts of computers since compiling a program for an i386 machine means
it will work on all systems.
4) Sometimes you download and install RPM’s, which other people around the world are
building and make available for you to use. This can pose conflicts in certain cases
depending how this individual built the package, such as errors, security and all the other
problems described above.
Compiling software on your system
A program is something a computer can execute. Originally, somebody wrote the "source code"
in a programming language he/she could understand (e.g., C, C++). The program "source code"
also makes sense to a compiler that converts the instructions into a binary file suited to whatever
processor is wanted (e.g. a 386 or similar). A modern file format for these "executable" programs
isELF. The programmer compiles his source code on the compiler and gets a result of some sort.
It's not at all uncommon that early attempts fail to compile, or having compiled, fail to act as
expected. Half of programming is tracking down and fixing these problems (debugging).
For the beginners there are more aspect and new words relating to the compilation of source
code that you must know, these include but are not limited to: