Re: HELP! I am new to Linux!


Subject: Re: HELP! I am new to Linux!
From: Sean O. Denney (sdenney@cise.ufl.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 06 2001 - 15:29:36 MDT


Why would anyone who is into graphic arts switch to Linux? Sure GIMP
is good and all, but Photoshop is the hands down winner over anything
in Mac, Linux, or Windows.

Some tips are:

1. Repeat after me: "The xterm is your friend. The command line is not
evil." The gist of this is that everything in Linux is by and large
a terminal command program. This means that you must use the terminal
program.

2. use the "man" pages. Almost every program under Linux has
documentation associated with it that is accessable using a command
known as man. So, to read about the man program, open a terminal and
type "man man".

3. the people on mainling lists and news groups will help you on just
about anything, so don't be embarassed to ask stupid questions.

4. Never ever mount your MacOS partition as writable. You can mount
it as readable, but NOT WRITABLE!!

5. If you haven't already done this, create a new user (other than
root-- explained in the latter part of the email) to perform your work
in under Linux. The root user can do anything to the computer, so it
is best to be a user that is not root.

The answers to some of your questions are as follows:

> 1. Installation was pretty simple and easy. How ever I can't install
> any of the Tasty Morsels CD software. I think I have to know some
> Unix commands.... but I don't know any... How can I install Open
> Office?

put the CD in the CD tray, open a linux terminal, type

mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

the cd software can be accessed at /mnt/cdrom.

I don't know where the OpenOffice is on the CD because I haven't
gotten my copy of YDL 2 yet (UPS is slow as dirt).

>
> 2. The Linux partition on my hard disk is 2 GB. But how can I know
> how many disk space is left? I tried the KDE explorer but I couldn't
> find where it says it.
>

open a linux terminal, type

du

It will spit out information about each dev point mounted under Linux,
and how much space is available, etc.
 
> 3. you may laugh at this... but is Root my hard disk? I know I had to
> make three partitions but I don't know where are they!
>

root is two things: 1. it is the super omnipotent all powerful user of
that particular computer; and 2. it is the top level of the filesystem
tree used to store files. Think of it like this: the Hard Drive icon
under MacOS (the one with the active system folder) is the root of the
file system.

> 4. Isn't there any stable web browser? Konqueror crashes very often
> and Mozilla just closes and I have to reboot!!
>

Lynx. To find out more about it, open a terminal and type

man lynx

(OK, so this is a really cruel idea.) Netscape is flaky under
Linux/UNIX, but is the best option. You don't have to reboot the
machine, just kill netscape's process.

> 5. Talking about browsers... How about the plug ins? Do we have
> quicktime and flash?
>

Plugins are non-existent under PPC-Linux (which includes YDL).
Therefore, QuickTime and Flash are non-existent under Linux/UNIX.

> And last question.... I know I need a very good book. However I don't
> know which one should I buy. Any sugestions for a "Linux for dorks"
> book? *LOL*
>

Running Linux by O'Reilly Publishers,
Linux In A Nutshell by O'Reilly Publishers,
Teach Yourself UNIX In A Week by SAMS Publishers

Once you get good at Linux/UNIX, you can move on to

Essential System Administration by O'Reilly Publishers

--- Sean



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