Introduction.

The opening:

"In the Name of Allah the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful." O Allah! (God in Monotheistic religions; mainly: Islam, Christianity and Judaism) Send your Salat (Graces, Honours, Blessings and Mercy) to the prophet Muhammad. In the begining, I start my book by praying Allah with Moses's words
{ قَالَ رَبِّ اشْرَحْ لِي صَدْرِي، وَيَسِّرْ لِي أَمْرِي، وَاحْلُلْ عُقْدَةً مِّنْ لِّسَانِي، يَفْقَهُواْ قَوْلِي }
translation of meanings { (Moses) said: "O my Lord! Open for me my chest (grant me self-confidence, contentment, and boldness) [.25.] And ease my task for me; [.26.] And loose the knot (the defect) from my tongue (ie. remove the incorrectness from my speech) [.27.] That they understand my speech [.28.] (...)"} (Quran, V20:25-28)

With the help and guidance of Allah this Linux textbook was accomplished in the hope it will be a very small contribution for the good of mankind and the case of free software. { قُل لا يَسْتَوِي الْخَبِيثُ وَالطَّيِّبُ وَلَوْ أَعْجَبَكَ كَثْرَةُ الْخَبِيثِ، فَاْتَّقُواْ اللَّهَ يَا أُولِي الأَلْبابِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تُفْلِحُونَ}
translation of meanings { Say (O Muhammad): "Not equal are Al-Khabith (all that is evil and bad as regards things, deeds, beliefs, persons and food) and At-Tayyib (all that is good as regards things, deeds, beliefs, persons and food), even though the abundance of Al-Khabith may please you." so fear Allah^*, O men of understanding in order that you may be successful.} (Quran, V5:100)

Section quotes:

• "And I'm right. I'm always right, but in this case I'm just a bit more right than I usually am."
      -- Linus Torvalds
• "My opinions are correct with incorrectness possibility, others are incorrect with correctness possibility."
      -- Alshafei
• "I have a simple rule in life: If I don't understand something, it must be bad."
      -- Linus Torvalds, rejecting ugly looking code.
• "A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion."
      -- Chinese proverb
• "Mathematicians practice absolute freedom."
      -- Henry Brooks Adams (American historian, journalist and novelist, 1838-1918)
• "Write a wise saying and your name will live forever."
      -- Anonymous

Section contents:

• I. This book.
• II. How to get this book.
• III. Thanks.
• IV. Feedback.
• V. Translations.
• VII. Conventions used in this book.

I. This book.

This is a textbook covering GNU/Linux systems and other UNIX-like systems in simple words. We start from using and moves up to administering complex networked systems in distribution independent ways and provide an appendix discussing solutions specific for three common distributions; Red Hat, Mandriva and Debian. Last chapters cover the UNIX way of programming in some of Languages (including C,C++,Perl,PHP,...etc) and libraries (eg. OpenGL). But before all that we focus on the free software philosophy as described by The Free Software Foundation. This book assume NO pre-experience on Linux or UNIX, But this is NOT Linux Solitaire Playing HOWTO. The Book is divided into chapters, each chapter is divided into sections and followed by exercises. Some appendices we included among them two verbatim articles from Free Software Foundation and one from Debian were included plus a copy of GPL and FDL Lincenses.

Many Computer Science graduated students knows nothing about 'printf', they do secretary-like (ie. typing) work, and keep saying: "Buy (or copy) the recent canned foobar from 'foobar Inc' and learn how to use it" And after months they do that again. Some universities library have no books about 'Python'. This is not the way things should go, the only way to be a computer specialist (scientist or engineer) is to handle source codes (specially in C).

II. How to get this book.

Since this book is free (under terms of GNU FDL) you can read the book on-line at or download it freely from our new site www.cltb.net (thanks to Jad Madi from www.easyHTTP.com) where you should expect the updated version, also it could be found on www.daif.net/linux-book (thanks to Daifullah al-Otaibi). The book is now RPMed by Mohammad alDesoqi and shipped with Resala Core distribution The rpm is located at http://resala.linux-egypt.org/packages/arabic-linux-book. and my oldest site www.koolpages.com/jornix but they all are not uptodate.

I have chosen HTML as transparent document type. Other types can be available soon. I faced some problems with docbook/SGML to support my native language that's why it's in HTML.

III. Thanks.

Behind any great achievement there is team work. I write this book based on self experience on many PC and Linux Distributions, I have refered to many resources, and noticed that computerized resources were better and more updated than printed documents, I have refered to GNU information pages and UNIX manual pages as first reference, then on each package (or it's development package) documents, and distribution specific documentation as official RedHat Linux guides which was very useful. At my first Linux days I found a few old printed books at my university library, they were useful to put me on the road, for example 'Red Hat 7.2 Bible', and some old copies of 'Sair Linux and GNU Certification'. Many other free documentations were very useful specially those found on 'www.tldp.org' as the 'From power-up to bash' ,'Kernel HOWTO' and 'www.LinuxFromScratch.org', see References for complete list.

Thanks to my friends at www.linux-egypt.org Forum and LUG. Thanks to Jad Madi and Daifullah al-Otaibi for hosting the book, Mohammad alDesoqi for packaging it,Isam Byasidi for many things, Mohammad alZobair for docbook template, and all the Arabeyes.org team. Thanks to Madian Jamal Saleh for passing me a copy of the book "The Nobel Quran, meanings translated by Dr. Muhammad T. Al-Hilali, Dr. Muhammad M. Khan, published by King Fahd Complex". Thanks to all who contributed in translating GNU lincenes into Arabic language, specially Anas Tawileh<anas(AT)tawileh(DOT)net> for translating GNU FDL, and Muhammad Sameer Ameen for translating GNU GPL. Thanks to Muhammad Odeh and Muhammad Burhan for helping me getting many Linux CDs and help me tesing them on different PCs. Thanks to all who send me emails, Thanks to all those people, and many others.

IV. Feedback.

You may help me by sending any notes,bugs report (including misspellings and bad links), or even writing a complete section (providing your name to be mentioned there). yet the only way is to email that to <alsadi[at]gmail.com>

V. Translations.

{ وَمِنْ ءَاَيَاتِهِ خَلْقُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالأَرِض وَاخْتِلافُ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ وَأَلْوَانِكُمْ، إِنَّ فِي ذَلِكَ لأَيَاتٍ لِّلْعَالِمِينَ }
translation of meanings {And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. Verily, in that are in deed signs for men of sound knowledge.} (Quran, V30:22.)
{ يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُم مِّن ذَكَرٍ وَأُنثَى وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوباً وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا، إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ، إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌ }
translation of meanings {O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes that you may know one another. Verily, the most honourable of you with Allah is that (believer) who has At-Taqwa [ie. he is one of the pious]. Verily, Allah is All-Knowing, All-Aware.} (Quran, V49:13.)

Any translation of this book is welcomed, but you should be aware of that it should be covered by terms of GNU FDL. Quotes from Quran should be kept in Arabic and maybe followed by translation of meanings or interpretation (not to be introduced as translation of Quran), And you had better pick such translation from a certified source.

You could translate this book from Arabic or English (as soon as it's completed) to your language but please contact me first in ordered to get the latest major release. Keep the original version you are translating so that in next release you could use 'diff' to know exactely where to continue.

VI. Conventions used in this book.

Rules for conventions used in this document are listed below, but keep in mind that you don't have understand them all now, you could refere to them once you are confused.

• This document use 'he', 'his' and 'himself' to refere to unknown gender person, instead of using 'he/she', 'his/her' or 'himself/herself' for simplicity. Some GNU documents uses gender-neutral third-person pronouns 'per', 'pers' and 'perself' but this one is not.
• Acronyms are defined the first time they are used.
• Acronyms and common GNU commands should be listed in the Glassory.
• From time to time you see a few useful tricks, indirect hints or things that are given a head of time, they are called Tips and they appear as:
  Tip

  A Tip goes here, it's an advice that makes your life easer but you may live without it.

• From time to time you see a few warnings, usually to warn you about hidden risks, misleading statements, expected misunderstandings or just an emphasis, they appear as:
  Warning

  A Warning goes here, don't panic!

• In the body of this document we put double quotes around:
  • Text quoted from other documents or famous sayings.
  • Concepts we don't recognize nor accept like "piracy".
• We put single quotes around:
  • texts that should be understode as is without any change, like web 'www.Linux.org'.
  • when the quoted text contains double quotes in the middle or similar situations.
  • concepts, commands, computer codes and output embedded in the document body are written in a fixed width font, like '[^a-z0-9]'.
• Syntax of formulas, commands or standards should satisfy the following:
  • Optional parts, that could be ommited, are included inside square brackets, eg. 'su [NAME]'.
  • Things that should be understode and substituted accordingly, are printed with 'Italic' style. For example 'myname' means that you should put your name not mine.
• Once we start to discuss commands and console, the following convention are used:
  • Console screenshot (input and output) are written in a fixed width font and surrounded with a gray box. (see below)
  • We use and recommend BASH as our command interpreter, because it's the GNU standard interactive shell.
  • What you should type is printed in bold, so that normal weight text is the expected output.
  • The prompt you get need not be the same, it could be something like '[ali@localhost]$', we usually use the name of the program for simplification 'bash$'.
  • The output you get need not be the same, since your name need not be "Ali" nor "Ahmad".
  • We put '#' instead of '$' when the command is (or should be) executed with the super user privileges (ie. root) as a form of warning.
  • We show '>' prompt if that line is a continution of previous one, it's not in bold you should not type it. You may, at your choice, type the two lines in one.
  • Bold single or double quotations should be typed.
  • Remember that almost very thing is case sensitive.

  bash$ echo "Hello, world!"
  Hello, world!
  bash$ echo \
  > "Hello, world!"
  Hello, world!
  bash$ ping somewhere.com
  bash$ whoami
  ali
  bash$ su
  Password: 
  bash# whoami
  root