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Designing Integrated High Quality Linux Applications

Avi Alkalay


avi at br.ibm.com
avi at unix.sh

Senior IT and Software Architect :: Linux Market Developer
IBM Linux Impact Team :: ibm.com/linux

v2.1, 2002-08-24

Revision History
Revision 2.1 24 Aug 2002 Revised by: avi
Rewrite of the /opt /usr/local section.Cosmetics on graphical user interface and plugins sections.Fixed screens and programlistings width.
Revision 2.0 07 May 2002 Revised by: avi
Final XML conversion. Files reorganization.
Revision 1.9.9 20 Apr 2002 Revised by: avi
Included other document locations.
Revision 1.98 14 Apr 2002 Revised by: avi
Title changed from "Creating" to "Designing".
Revision 1.97 09 Apr 2002 Revised by: avi
Converted to XML 4.1.2, and started to use real XSLT. Spell checked the english version.
Revision 1.96 23 Mar 2002 Revised by: avi
Better HTML style sheets.
Revision 1.95 17 Mar 2002 Revised by: avi
Last chapter: One Body, Many Souls. Created appendix. Still have to translate some words here and there.
Revision 1.9 16 Mar 2002 Revised by: avi
Added universal software table with FHS.
Revision 1.7 16 Mar 2002 Revised by: avi
Everything is now translated except some words.
Revision 1.3 27 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Translated and reviewed the most important section of the article: The /opt and /usr/local section.
Revision 1.2 23 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
English translation at 65%. Doing some corrections to potuguese version also.
Revision 1.1 17 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Started english translation.
Revision 1.0 16 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
First final version of proposed skeleton.
Revision 0.9.6 16 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Finished Plugin chapter.
Revision 0.9.5 15 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Finished chapter about boot and subsystems.
Revision 0.9.4 14 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Finished chapter describing the boot process.
Revision 0.9.3 08 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Text and style updates.
Revision 0.9.2 07 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
Text updates.
Revision 0.9 06 Feb 2002 Revised by: avi
First translation to DocBook.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. User Friendly: Guaranteed Success
2.1. Embrace the Install-and-Use Paradigm
3. The Four Universal Parts of Any Software
3.1. Practical Examples
3.2. The Importance of Clear Separation Between Four Parts
3.3. One Body, Many Souls
4. Linux Directory Hierarchy: Oriented to the Software Parts
4.1. FHS Summary
4.2. Examples Using the FHS
4.3. Developer, Do Not Install in /opt or /usr/local !
5. Provide Architecture for Extensions and Plugins
5.1. Abstracting About Plugins
6. Allways Provide RPM Packages of Your Softwares
6.1. Software Package Modularization
7. Security: The Omnipresent Concept
8. Graphical User Interface
8.1. KDE, GNOME, Java or Motif?
8.2. Web Interface: Access from Anywhere
8.3. Wizards and Graphical Installers
9. Starting Your Software Automatically on Boot
9.1. From BIOS to Subsystems
9.2. Runlevels
9.3. The Subsystems
9.4. Turning Your Software Into a Subsystem
9.5. Packaging Your Boot Script
A. Red Hat, About the Filesystem Structure
B. About this Document