• Mackerras, Paul
  employed by Linuxcare, Paul is famous for his widely used ppp-2.2 code and LinuxPPC
   
• macro
  A command that incorporates a set of other commands. You custom design a command, called a macro, from existing commands. Both the vi editor and the nroff and troff formatters use macros. The mm macro package described in this book is an example of a large collection of nroff and troff macros
   
• magic number
  In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented #define. Magic numbers in this sense are bad style. 2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. 3. pecial data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under Unix, the system and various applications programs (especially the linker) distinguish between types of executable file by looking for a magic number
   
• mailing list
  An e-mail address that is an alias (or macro, though that word is never used in this connection) which is expanded by a mail exploder to yield many other e-mail addresses
   
• mainframe
  The largest and most powerful type of computer system that is widely used. A mainframe typically occupies many cabinets and fills an entire room.
   
• makefile
  A file that instructs the program make how to compile and link a program.
   
• mass storage device
  A piece of equipment, such as a disk or tape drive, that stores large amounts of data relatively inexpensively. Although these devices cost less than the main memory in a computer system, they are much slower to access.
   
• mbr
  master boot record - The first sector of the disk; this is the sector that the BIOS reads in and starts when the machine is first booted. The master boot record contains a small program which reads the partition table, checks which partition is active (that is, marked bootable), and reads the first sector of that partition, the partition's boot sector
   
• menu
  Functions and actions of a program can be reached via a menu. Menus usually offer submenus that drop down from it.
   
• Mesa
  A free implementation of the OpenGL API, designed and written by Brian Paul, with contributions from many others. Its performance is competitive, and while it is not officially certified, it is an almost fully compliant OpenGL implementation conforming to the ARB specifications
   
• metacharacter
  A character that is used to carry a special meaning, such as a caret (^, beginning of line), a dollar sign ($, end of line), or an asterisk (*, match any character). To use one of these characters without special meaning, you must either precede it with a backslash (\) or enclose it within quotation marks. Bypassing the special meaning of a metacharacter is called escaping or quoting the character
   
• Metafont
  a graphics programming language (like postscript) that has applications wider than just fonts
   
• microkernel
  An approach to operating systems design which puts emphasis on small modules which implement the basic features of the system kernel and can be flexibly configured
   
• Miller, Cliff
  president and CEO of TurboLinux, a popular Linux distribution
   
• Miller, David
  responsible for the TCP/IP coding in the Linux kernel, David Miller is also responsible for UltraPenguin (a project to port Linux to Sparc CPUs), kernel fixes and developments such as fuzzy hashing
   
• MIME
  Multipurpose Internet Mail Exchange; A protocol that allows non-text data to be embedded in an e-mail message
   
• MIT-SHM
  A MIT shared-memory Ximage \ref {X extension}. It provides both shared memory XImages and shared memory pixmaps based on the SYSV shared memory primitives.
   
• mkdir
  creates directories with the specified names.
   
• mkfifo
  creates FIFOs (also called "named pipes") with the specified filenames.
   
• mknod
  creates a FIFO (named pipe), character special file, or block special file with the specified name.
   
• Mobile IP
  specifies enhancements that allow transparent routing of IP datagrams to mobile nodes in the Internet
   
• module
  A non-linked driver which contain device specific system routines and fills in non-boot gaps in the kernel. Modules can be loaded and removed dynamically and allow for smaller generic kernels.
   
• Motif
  A widely-accepted set of user interface guidelines developed by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) around 1989 which specifies how an X Window System application should "look and feel". Motif includes the Motif Toolkit (also called "Xm" or the "Motif widgets"),
   
• MTA
  Mail Transfer Agent: a program, such as Sendmail, responsible for passing mail from one location to another
   
• mtime
  Unix jargon for "the time a file's data was last 'changed'". (cf. atime, ctime)
   
• MTU
  Maximum Transmission Unit - the largest packet size for a network. In RedHat the MTU is set for pppd in "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp"
   
• MUD
  Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension - A (usually text-based) multi-user simulation environment. A feature of most MUDs is that users can create things that stay after they leave and which other users can interact with in their absence, thus allowing a "world" to be built gradually and collectively
   
• multicast
  a type of communication between hosts (or computers) on a network where one computer can communicate with a select group of others. See broadcast and unicast
   
• Multitasking
  The ability to run more than one program at once
   
• multithreading
  native kernel support for multiple independent threads of control within a single process memory space
   
• mv
  moves or renames files or directories.
   
• MX
  Mail eXchange: a DNS record used to define the host(s) willing to accept mail for a given machine

Key:  Commands - People - General

Last Updated Saturday, December 04 2004 @ 09:35 AM EST