Algebraic rearrangement theory, as introduced by Meidanis and Dias, focuses on representing the order in which genes appear in chromosomes, and applies to circular chromosomes only. By shifting our attention to genome adjacencies, we introduce the adjacency algebraic theory, extending the original algebraic theory to linear chromosomes in a very natural way, also allowing the original algebraic distance formula to be used to the general multichromosomal case, with both linear and circular chromosomes. The resulting distance, which we call algebraic distance here, is very similar to, but not quite the same as, double-cut-and-join distance. We present linear time algorithms to compute it and to sort genomes. We show how to compute the rearrangement distance from the adjacency graph, for an easier comparison with other rearrangement distances. A thorough discussion on the relationship between the chromosomal and adjacency representation is also given, and we show how all classic rearrangement operations can be modeled using the algebraic theory.