Not a question, more of a bit of a rant. When I first learned about computers MS-DOS was the shit. I was young and pretty good at it. This was way pre-internet days but I figured it out on my own. 25 years later Linux looks like it should be the same, only different. I got a project I'm working on with a raspberry pi running raspbian. I'm figuring stuff out but it so doesn't feel intuitive. Unimpressively I have it currently mated with a bread board to light up LEDs to prove the status of GPIO pins to iron things out, but it's pretty impressive what I can control just by editing a few files. I just wish I could get to the point where I knew what to edit rather than have to copy it off a google search. End rant.
Just not getting the hang of Linux
- Thread starter renuck
- Start date
IDK didn't get into computers till 1997 with W95. then Went into W98. Never did DOS, felt code was a pain. Struggled with M$ but got the hang and learned of all the stuff needed doing to make M$ run decently. When Vista hit decided it was time to break free of M$. Thought of going to Mac but passed since it cost more than M$! A buddy at work said give FREE Linux a try before blowing all that money on a Mac. So in 2007 began to toy around with Linux. There are over 100 versions of Linux. Started out with Fedora. Tried a few other versions and now mainly use Ubuntu. I find Linux very intuitive and well laid out. Picked it up, all self taught and now Linux is my main OS doing everything needed. IMHO FREE Linux is better than M$ and Mac OS X. The Linux 'help Forums' always gave great support and are FREE also. They even taught me how to run 'code' which is the fastest and easiest way to add and remove apps, programs and modify you computer.
It's nice being M$ and Mac free.
It's nice being M$ and Mac free.
I had a lite Linux on a little laptop I used for travelling, and was very happy with it, I even bought a couple more for my children. Now it has outlived its life, and I am thinking that the next little notebook I need for travelling will be an android.
I have tablets and smartphones, but cannot do without a keyboard.
Any thoughts on that?
Notebooks/laptops are cheap now. Android is a Linux version. Just make sure it has a least 4Gigs of RAM. More RAM is better. You never have too much RAM.
I have 2 laptops in spite of preferring desktops for more power and lasting longer. Laptops are too fragile and have to be babied to last.
One of those laptops is a Toshiba satellite I've had since 2008! That Toshiba has Vista, never used anymore and Linux. Use it for travel and it still runs like new!
The other laptop is an old Dell core2 duo that runs fine. Got it from a friend for free because it died on him. Turned out to just be a HHD that went bad. Put in a new HDD, installed Linux and it's fine.
Use both laptops for travel and or are hooked up to my large LED TV turning it into a Super Smart LED TY.
Thanks for the encouragement. I know with DOS things made sense, and executable files had the .exe extension and I wrote a lot of batch files and manually edited the setup files... I think one was the config.sys and the other autoexec.bat. In dos you just type the name of the file to run in the command prompt. In linux I have to type sudo ./xxxxx. I'm not sure why yet all the extra typing. I'm getting better at it (very slowly) and I think I just need to stick with it a bit more before it starts to make sense.
I've been all self taught on PCs.
When starting out found MS-DOS and command line very daunting and difficult and completely passed on it.
Found the Linux help Forums very helpful in this respect in teaching how Linux command line works. Not that difficult to learn. For Linux 'sudo apt-get update' is the easiest way to make any modifications you desire. You just open a Terminal, then copy/paste in the desired code, hit enter and Linux quite efficently does it's thing. It actually makes code easy.
Here's more: https://askubuntu.com/questions/222348/what-does-sudo-apt-get-update-do
When starting out found MS-DOS and command line very daunting and difficult and completely passed on it.
Found the Linux help Forums very helpful in this respect in teaching how Linux command line works. Not that difficult to learn. For Linux 'sudo apt-get update' is the easiest way to make any modifications you desire. You just open a Terminal, then copy/paste in the desired code, hit enter and Linux quite efficently does it's thing. It actually makes code easy.
Here's more: https://askubuntu.com/questions/222348/what-does-sudo-apt-get-update-do
I agree with all you say here.
I want a small one for travel, like my old Acer with an 8 inch screen running Linux lite, with solid state disk and tons of connectivity.
The tablet I have has very little connectivity options, basically a micro usb and a micro SD card.
I want a couple of usb slots and a couple of slots for SD card. I like to see my photos on the big screen.
I dunno if a chrome book would be the solution for me?
When I looked them over a few years ago it was too underpowered for me.
8-10" notebooks are pretty limited.
Check some out here: https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=8+inch+screen+notbooks&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Don't know anything about Virtualbox.
I've always dual booted my PCs with Linux and never had any problems. Figured if you get a new PC with Windows, I'm not going to dump it. Just split the HDD in half leaving M$ at the front and Linux at the back of the drive. Dual boot installs are very easy now compared to years ago. This way you have two OSs on your PC and both run fine and independently whenever desired .
Now when buying a new SSD, it is installed in the PC and then Linux is installed on it and it runs fine. This gave me three OSs on my PC and they all run fine when desired.
I've always dual booted my PCs with Linux and never had any problems. Figured if you get a new PC with Windows, I'm not going to dump it. Just split the HDD in half leaving M$ at the front and Linux at the back of the drive. Dual boot installs are very easy now compared to years ago. This way you have two OSs on your PC and both run fine and independently whenever desired .
Now when buying a new SSD, it is installed in the PC and then Linux is installed on it and it runs fine. This gave me three OSs on my PC and they all run fine when desired.
sudo allows you to become the superuser temporarily to run a few commands. You could try sudo -i which allows you to become root interactively (dangerous, should only do it if you really have to and know what you're doing, exit will allow you to go back to the user you logged in as). Security is a pain in the arse, just have to learn the nuances and remember, it's designed by people (generally) much smarter about these things than you and I:rockon:
I took a bit of UNIX in college, then started working with a guy who was into Linux pretty hard so he had me install it on my VAIO with no GUI and forced me to compile from source. Right now I have a Mac for personal and a Windows 10 laptop with a Xeon processor and 48GB of RAM (still blows me away, a laptop!).
I work in IT so Linux is now second nature to me. Googling stuff is 90% of my job.
Linux has a lot of great innovation but it was developed in large part by a few brilliant adolescent, pre-pubescant kids and the code base reflects it.
If you want a unix based OS that follows a more cohesive path to its development try FreeBSD. I think you will find it a bit more intuitive to use as well.
The ports tree is pretty fantastic too.
If you want a unix based OS that follows a more cohesive path to its development try FreeBSD. I think you will find it a bit more intuitive to use as well.
The ports tree is pretty fantastic too.
Hey there, I feel you on this one! I recently switched to Linux, and it's been a bit of a journey. I'm constantly hunting for info too, so I totally get where you're coming from. I hear you about the lack of intuition with Linux. I'm also working on a project with a Raspberry Pi, and while it's pretty impressive what I can control, I still find myself relying on Google searches to figure things out. Speaking of Linux, have you heard about Centos 7 reaching the end of life? It's a bummer, but I found a great resource for extended support: https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ . Check it out if you're interested. Thanks for the tip about FreeBSD too. I'll have to give it a try and see if it's more intuitive for me.
Started dabbling with Linux in 2007 with the goal of becoming Windows free. Started out in Fedora which I liked and found pretty intuitive. Then tried other Linux versions, there are hundreds to choose from. Many free, some you have to pay for. Always went for the free versions. Tried out Ubuntu and its variants, SUSE, openSuse, Debian, Dam small Linux and a few other variants. Linux has been my main OS for over a dozen years. Many of its OSs and programs are free. Now I have NO need for Windows. Linux has more programs and apps than Windows and MAC combined, all free. Went back to Ubuntu which I found very logically laid out. Ubuntu Help Forums are excellent in helping you with any questions/issues you may have: https://ubuntuforums.org These helpful forums even taught me Command Line, something I always found daunting.
https://distrowatch.com is an excellent helpful site that rates the top Linux flavors.
https://distrowatch.com is an excellent helpful site that rates the top Linux flavors.
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In Linux, there are two aspects to keep in mind in trying to execute a file: Permissions, and Path.
On its own, Linux will search the directories in your PATH trying to find the file you wanted to execute. You can see what directories it's looking at in a colon-separated list:
echo $PATH
You can add other directories to your PATH, but we'll save that for another day
The next thing Linux needs is permission to eXecute the file. Permissions are (simplified) available to Read, Write, and/or eXecute by the User, a Group the user might be a member of, or All users.
ls -l ./*
rwxr--r-- someuser somegroup file_a
shows that "someuser" has permission to read, write, and execute "file_a" and anyone in group "somegroup" has permission to read it (but not write or execute it)
When you "sudo" (SuperUser Do) something, you're escalating your privileges to "superuser" or "root" privileges - which can do almost everything and isn't bound by the silly permissions problems I described above.
And when you specify the exact path to the file (./xxxx .. ie. "xxxx" in the current working directory), the PATH becomes irrelevant, too: no searching is needed because you've said exactly what file you want to refer to.
There are a number of alternative ways to specify what permissions to give a particular file. One simple way is:
chmod u+x somefile
which will ADD ("+") eXecute permissions for the *u*ser. It gets a bit more complicated if you don't have permissions to change the file permissions - in effect you're *w*riting to the directory the file is in. We'll save that complexity for another day
There are additional steps for Linux to determine what program should be used to execute a particular file - it starts off with the Linux "shell" (interpreter), but can be handed off immediately with special notation in the first characters in the first line of the file. Again, more for another day
I hope this helps give a bit more depth to understanding Linux
This is not universally true. apt-get is only one package manager and this will not work universally. There are a bunch of them: apt, dpkg, yum, rpm, pacman, portage, etc. Most have different syntax.
I've been using Linux and Unix exclusively since 1994 and I've learned it can be dangerous to assume what people are using.
Things make sense in Linux too, you just have to get used to where the information is located. Linux is heavily based on UNIX, which predates personal computers and was designed by engineers for engineers. The information is very "intuitive" if you approach it from a scientific/engineering viewpoint. As has been mentioned, permissions are everything.
I would suggest your best friend is the manual pages (usually called "man pages") and information pages. For example, to read about the "change directory" command, you would type either "man cd" or "info cd" into your terminal. So for file permissions, check out "man chmod" or "info chmod". If you get a "command not found" error, check your distribution's online documentation for how to install them.
I'd go even further and say you should NEVER just copy and paste commands. You should always look them up. You'll never learn if you just parrot, and because no two Linux distributions are the same what works on one might end up wrecking another. So if you want to create a new user and you google it, you might see a command that says, "sudo useradd -m -g users -G wheel,audio,cdrom -s /bin/bash username", before typing it in, you should have some idea what it does. "sudo" you'll get very familiar with and know it runs the command with elevated privileges. And maybe you get her "useradd" will add a user, but if I didn't know what all that other stuff did, I would go into the man pages for "useradd* and look for those specific flags. After a few minutes I'd have learned "-m" means to create a home directory, "-g" sets the primary group, "-G" sets supplementary groups, and "-s" specifies which shell to use. And if any of those don't make sense, like maybe I don't know what it means to "have a shell", I know what to google to learn more.
If you follow that process, rather than blindly running commands, you'll be less likely to break something and you'll learn a lot more.
A few of my friends use Linux mainly because it is free. Also, less of a target for hackers because it is not "target rich" (i.e. few users).
