Section 2: a Quick Window Manager and Unix Tutorial
2. A quick windowmanager and Unix tutorial (This section last updated August 2012) This section provides •some "getting started" pointers on the graphical windowing environments you will be using, primar- ily on the ECMC Linux system in the room 52 studio, but also with some references and comparisons to comparable Mac OSX and Windows procedures; and •anintroduction to some basic Unix commands and utility programs that can be run from a shell windowonECMC Linux and Macintosh music production systems As noted in section 1, the core of a computer operating system, which implements the most basic sys- tem protocols and operations, is called the kernel.The open source Linux kernel is developed and main- tained by an international group of thousands of volunteers under the direction of Linus Torvalds, who wrote much of the first Linux kernel, modeled after the functionality of Unix operating systems, during the early 1990s. The Linux kernel is updated several times each year,and includes both a stable branch, designed for most users (likeus), and a developmental branch, used by Linux developers to test newfea- tures before theyare incorporated into stable versions of the kernel. Technically,the term "Linux"refers only to an operating system kernel developed by the team of Linux Project programmers under Torvolds’ direction. The GNU (pronounced "ga-NOO") Project is a non- profit organization that supports the development of a broad range of open source applications, without which the Linux kernel would be useless. Manyusers of GNU software on Linux kernels prefer to call their operating system GNU Linux or GNU/Linux.Incommon usage, however, the term Linux often is used loosely to refer to all GNU operating system components as well as the Linux kernel.
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