contributing to the kernel community

[Phillip Lougher]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 1:16 PM, roshan jose <joro_manage at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am new to programming in linux and I have never programmed the kernel, but
> I wish to learn and contribute to the ubuntu community. I want to learn to
> program so that I can fix the bugs in the coding. I hav been using ubuntu
> for the past 4 months and I had been using other linux distros for the past
> 8 months. So I am kind of a newbie...
>
> Just today I went to the bugs section and I found myself lost in reading
> some geeking things that was far beyond my understanding. I couldnt
> understand the problem stated as they were too geeky.
>
> I hope I can get some info upon  how to improve my knowledge of linux. I
> want to write a kernel patch as well as part of my college project.
>

Best thing to do is read some kernel books.

Understanding the Linux Kernel, Third Edition by Daniel Bovet gives a
good overview of the techniques used in the kernel.

Most people start-off kernel programming writing device drivers.  The
following two books give a good overview of this.

Linux Device Drivers by Alessandro Rubini, Jonathan Corbet, Andy Oram

Essential Linux Device Drivers (Prentice Hall Open Source Software
Development Series) by Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran

There's lots of websites devoted to kernel newbies too, try
http://kernelnewbies.org/

Phillip