1. Intro: Glossary

1. OPEN SOURCE: Source refers to the code, and open refers to it being public and before compilation. You are able to review the code in a way that you can learn everything it does with nothing hidden. Open source code is in human-readable form and it essentially is an instruction for the computer how to assemble the program during compilation. Because it is just blueprints - it cannot work just yet, you need to compile it.

2. COMPILATION: Act of turning open source "blueprints" into the actual finished functional build (program) on your machine. (EXTRA: Compilation only goes one way so if you need to compile this thing again or review the code again you need to keep the source code.)

3. BIOS: Is the software on your motherboard itself which in principle serves to detect and gather all parts of your machine to work together. It also detects your hard drive storage (like SSDs, HDDs, USB drives etc.) and decides which of them to use to start up a bootloader and after everything goes good it passes all further control to the bootloader it selected (EXTRA: You can select which device to boot up yourself, usually you need to press F11 before system loading and select your device or choice, you can also enter BIOS settings and change defaults and select which device should be automatically booted up each time)

4. BOOTLOADER: When you have a hard drive with a working operating system - the bootloader is the first set of instructions on how to actually load up your system. In most bootloaders you can also set parameters. It also has great capability for protecting your system from people who capture your disk to enter your system. It is like genkan before your operating system. (EXTRA: You can also encrypt the whole operating system so that nobody unauthorized can use it, instructed in later articles)

5. OPERATING SYSTEM: self explanatory. It is the actual system that you are going to use like Linux, BSD, Temple, Windows, MS-DOS etc. with everything ready.

6. PARTITION: Every persistent storage drive (SSD, HDD, USB, CD etc.) is split into parts that separate things and depending on the format have different properties. (Your bootloader is one partition, your system is another for example. USB drives tend to have only one partition but you can split them however you want but that is a lengthy topic in itself)

7. ROOT: Is what on Linux they call admin. There is one root user on each Linux system who has all permissions. (It is a lengthy topic too, but in short on Linux when you use your regular account you can authenticate as root too (most common solution is "sudo" command) - don't worry, but it is quite long to explain everything, I will only mention whatver is relevant for each topic in appropriate chapters)

8. ROOT PARTITION: Is the partition where your root user lives, vulgar name for the system partition. (It is assigned "/" location in Linux as the most fundamental location on the system)

9. GUI - Graphical User Interface. Basically a program that you can interact with something more than pure keyboard text. So it includes icons, lists, checkboxes etc. instead of just text.

10. CLI - Command Line Interface. You interact with the terminal in order to perform tasks that are not exclusively typing the whole commands but also selecting things, clicking, scrolling, multi-step menus and so on.

11. STRING - A series of characters. Usually human readable text. String is a fancy word for "name" or "text" in most cases.

12. Binary (plural: binaries) - Code in its binary form (1s and 0s that the computer understands). Binary is the ready code you receive after compilation. You cannot turn a binary back into text code (like java, C++ etc). Executable code. Binary and binaries can be used interchangably, some people call it one way or another but in a vulgar way they mean the same thing.