[Wolves] Newbie questions..

[Adam Sweet]

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On 27/03/12 19:46, James Turner wrote:
> On 24/03/12 09:22, Ravinder Verma wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Firstly, thanks for the warm welcome on Wednesday and apologies
>> for rushing off, so early.
>> 
>> I've been playing with a few versions of linux over the last few
>> weeks and am leaning towards fedora (& crunchbang, on an old
>> laptop).
>> 
>> I'm going to be using libre office and vlc.
>> 
>> I understand that the command line is a must to use fedora
>> effectively. I'm reading a lot about the command line from the
>> flossmanuals site. Can anyone recommend any books on the the
>> subject?
> 
> The Linux Documentation Project (http://tldp.org/) has lots of
> material on how to use Linux. For general intro to the command
> line:
> 
> Bash Guide for Beginners 
> http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html
> 
> Index of potentially useful material:
> 
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/os.html
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> James

I wouldn't say the command line is a must these days. You should for
the most part be able to do everything you need to do without using
the command line. Quite often when somebody offers you advice in
response to a question, they'll tell you to run this command or that
command, so it helps to have an understanding of what they're telling
you to do.

If anybody tells you to run a command that contains the 'rm' command,
think carefully about what you're doing, especially if it starts with
'sudo'. rm deletes files. sudo enables global admin rights. Add them
together and do it wrong, or run a malicious command somebody gave you
and you will trash your system.

That said, for most things the command line is way more efficient. It
depends on what you want to do with Linux. Unless you want to be a
sysadmin, there's no great need to learn the command line but on
balance it will stand you in good stead if you do.

Somebody else asked this kind of question back in January, so here is
my response:

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/2012-January/029377.html

I found the best way to learn the command line is to have a particular
project in mind while doing it, ie build a mail server, build a web
server etc. Some of the links in my post from January are almost
literally full of how to build a mail/web/DNS/something else kind of
server documents, so maybe start out that way.

Regards,

Adam Sweet

- -- 

http://blog.adamsweet.org/

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