Appendix A. Package descriptions

Table of Contents
Introduction
Bash
Binutils
Bzip2
Diffutils
Fileutils
GCC
Grep
Gzip
Linux kernel
Make
Mawk
Patch
Sed
Shellutils
Tar
Texinfo
Textutils
Glibc
MAKEDEV
Man-pages
Findutils
Ncurses
Vim
Bison
Less
Groff
Man
Perl
M4
Autoconf
Automake
Flex
File
Libtool
Bin86
Ed
Gettext
Kbd
E2fsprogs
Lilo
Modutils
Procinfo
Procps
Psmisc
Shadow Password Suite
Sysklogd
Sysvinit
Util Linux
Netkit-base
Net-tools

Introduction

This appendix describes the following aspect of each and every package that is installed in this book:

The packages are listed in the same order as they are installed in chapter 5 (Intel system) or chapter 11 (PPC systems).

Most information about these packages (especially the descriptions of it) come from the man pages from those packages. I'm not going to print the entire man page, just the core elements to make it possible to understand what a program does. To get knowledge of all details on a program, I suggest to start by reading the complete man page in addition to this appendix.

Certain packages are documented more in depth than others, because I just happen to know more about certain packages than I know about others. If anything should be added on the following descriptions, please don't hesitate to email me. This list is going to contain an in depth description of every package installed, but I can't do this on my own. I have had help from various people but more help is needed.

Please note that currently only what a package does is described and not why it needs to be installed. That will be added later.