On Thursday 05 September 2002 10:28 am, you wrote:
I attend a small community college in a rural portion of the southwestern U.S. Very few people here even know what Linux is, and most of the people, at my small college in the CIS department, venerate Bill Gates as some sort of diety.
A bit conservative are they? ;o)
USER LINE LOGIN-TIME FROM max :0 Sep 4 21:19 (console) max pts/0 Sep 4 21:19 max pts/1 Sep 4 22:51 max@linux:~>
I understand everything but the column "LINE". I know that its the line to a session, but what do the acronyms pts/0 , pts/1 stand for? and I think :0 means my screen? and what does (console) mean?
pts stands for pseudo terminal slave. A terminal (or console) is traditionally a keyboard/screen combination you sit and type at. Old UNIX boxes would have dozens of them hanging off the back, all connected with miles of cable. A pseudo terminal provides just the same facility only without the hardware. In other words, it's an xterm window or a konsole window, or whatever utility you use. They pop into life as you ask for them and get given sequential numbers: pts/0, then pts/1 and so on. The physical console is the hardware which is actually attached to your box - you probably only have one. That's labelled ":0" and is refered to as the actual "console". -- The past: Smart users in front of dumb terminals