First steps in Debian: A noob’s viewpoint, Part 2

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My first concern was to successfully get a desktop environment up and running (thinking of trying out alternative desktop environments other than GNOME and KDE). I believe the files for gnome and kde have been installed by ‘tasksel’ but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to actually start a session, heh. I’ll check the manuals later.

Anyway, the first thing I was curious about was to check out what exactly was installed. I also wanted to check out some guides on the Debian documentation page. There were quite few things I wanted to do, but I’d forgotten most of the shell commands. It was fun re-learning them, and I would like to suggest a few important commands noobs should have on hand so it is more efficient to get things done. I guess this has been done many many times and so I suppose this will be a negligible addition and so it is ok.

I think the most important commands to remember are:

• apropos: use this to search for other commands.
• man: type “man commandname” to find out more about what a command does.
• For a simple listing of the syntax of a particular command, type “command –help”
• use “pwd” to find out which directory you currently are in.

Using these commands, I believe one should be able to search for other commands and learn how to use them in order to perform basic tasks.

Next, some useful ones are:

• Basic web browser: “w3m [url]” –so you can check out useful things like documentation in times of need.
• To display text files (eg. foo.txt) use “<foo.txt pager “, remember to type the path for the file if your current working directory is not in the same directory as the file
• One can also make use of this concept to scroll through output from a command that stretches for several screens: ” commandname | pager”
• If output in the shell stretches for several screens long, one can also use Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn to scroll through screens, and Esc to go back to the prompt.
• Finally “ps” gives a nice list of running processes and “df” gives a brief review of what your harddisk usage is like.

Will talk more on dir/ls later.

Finally, having a brief knowledge of how to use a basic text editor (eg. vi, emacs) is quite fun. I learned how to use vi through the cool program Vim for Windows. Go give it a try!

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