On Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:33:30 +0100, Axel Berger wrote:

> But I know next to nothing about the basics. What I have heard is that
> all setup tend to reside in ASCII files.
>
True: all are ASCII files. Global settings are in /etc if the programs
are supplied in one the distro's standard packages and/or packages from a
recognised 3rd party library and  *should* be in /usr/local/etc if you've
downloaded source or developed the code yourself.

Most documentation for packaged programs ends up in /usr/share/docs and
can be quite extensive.

> I expect those to be well commented.
>
Some is, some isn't.

> What I do not know is what setup files there are, where they reside,
> and what each is responsible for.
>
This should be described in the manpage for the program or library
function. If the configuration files are complex, there's often a manpage
documenting it as well.

Really complex utilities (Apache webserver, Postfix MTA, the named DNS
server are examples) have books written about them, often published by
O'Reilly.

> Next I heard that Linux uses a standardized directory structure, parts
> of which I'm free to abuse and parts I should leave well alone.
>
Correct. Go and look at a copy of 'Linux for Dummies' and/or sysadmin
books in a good bookstore and pick the one you're happiest with. Despite
the title, the "...for Dummies" series seem to be quite well regarded,
but you need to decide for yourself because some of the so-called 'System
Administration' books for UNIX/Linux I've run into have been diabolically
bad.

> Standard shell is of course important too.
>
The de-facto standard these days is the 'bash' shell, but there are a
bunch of them. 'sh' and 'csh' were among the first, with 'ksh' following
on from it, so check out the 'bash' books as well.

> And of course on top of vanilla Linux everything PI specific especially
> hardware interfaces with drivers and APIs.
>
Much of that is well enough wrapped in standardised system code that you
don't need to bother too much about it. I expect almost that anything I
write on my laptop or house server (Lenovo laptop and AMD Athlon PC, both
running RedHat Fedora Linux) and run there in user space will compile and
run on my RPi without any errors or source changed being needed.

Of course, if you're adding hardware expansion cards or using I2C serial
links to other devices, then the above assumption may not be correct
because there may be no standard libraries for supporting them on
anything except a Raspberry, Arduino board or similar hardware.


--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie
          | dot org

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05