I am am complete beginner, forgive me. I have just installed openSUSE 12.3, and find a lot of abbreviations for which I can not find in Help, Users Guides, on-line, or with Google search.
For example, when I look at YaST2, the top of the screen says “Available Storage on linux-erk3.” I have not been able to find any definition of the abbreviation erk3.
This screen lists /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. Does this mean Storage Disk A and Storage Disk B?
This screen list several devices labeled tmpfs. Does this mean temporary file system or storage?
I am having trouble getting started, because I can’t define the terms or codes on the screen.
For example, when I look at YaST2, the top of the screen says “Available Storage on linux-erk3.” I have not been able to find any definition of the abbreviation erk3.
That is referring to your machine (hostname that has been set). It is possible to change it to something more meaningful if desired.
linux-erk3 is de hostname the installer gave your system, it’s not an abbreviation. Most of the things you see are better called “conventions” than “abbreviations”.
For the disks, these days /dev/sda is the first disk (acc. to BIOS), /dev/sda1 is the first partition on the disk. But f.e. a DVD-drive would be /dev/sr0.
IMHO there’s no need to understand the reasoning of all this, since f.e. /etc/fstab (contains info on how partitions are mounted at boot, you would find something like
instead of /dev/sda1, which shows clearly that I have an ADATA S511 120GB SSD.
On the tmpfs: yes, it’s a temporary filesystem, loaded in the RAM of your machine. This speeds up a system compared to writing to disk.
A lot of the abbreviations used in openSUSE are common throughout the Linux ecosystem and very often Wikipedia or Google will be your best source of information.
The problem with a list of abbreviations is that most of them will be irrelevant to you and so it is better to pick them up as you need to rather than present you with a formidable list which might be even more off-putting than dealing with them one by one as you encounter them.
> For example, when I look at YaST2, the top of the screen says “Available
> Storage on linux-erk3.” I have not been able to find any definition of
> the abbreviation erk3.
That’s just the name the installation process gave to your machine, and
it is random, like the plate number on cars. The technical name is
“hostname”.
> This screen lists /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. Does this mean Storage Disk A
> and Storage Disk B?
It means nothing, just names. They refer to “SCSI Disk”, which they are
not really, but… well, does not matter. History. Just remember that
disks are named from sda, sdb… to sdz. You have the full table of such
names in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/Devices.txt (from memory, the
actual file could be different).
> This screen list several devices labeled tmpfs. Does this mean
> temporary file system or storage?
Yes, more or less.
> I am having trouble getting started, because I can’t define the terms or
> codes on the screen.
What does it matter? Just names
> So, is there a list somewhere?
Maybe in books. And they change often.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
Nitpicking - it is unrelated to BIOS order. sda is the first hard disk found by kernel, which depends on order in which drivers are loaded or called during boot. It has absolutely nothing to do with BIOS boot order. I have seen some people were confused because they expected /dev/sda to always be the boot disk. It is not.
On 2013-10-14 06:06, arvidjaar wrote:
>
> Knurpht;2591171 Wrote:
>>
>> For the disks, these days /dev/sda is the first disk (acc. to BIOS)
>
> Nitpicking - it is unrelated to BIOS order. sda is the first hard disk
> found by kernel, which depends on order in which drivers are loaded or
> called during boot. It has absolutely nothing to do with BIOS boot
> order. I have seen some people were confused because they expected
> /dev/sda to always be the boot disk. It is not.
I know it is not boot order, because in my desktop external eSATA disk
are named before the internal, and boot, disks. But I thought that was
the BIOS order.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
