Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux for Dummies?

Author:John W. Williams II
Posted:12/3/1998; 7:54:45 PM
Topic:Linux for Dummies?
Msg #:758 (In response to 749)
Prev/Next:757 / 759

Hi Brent,

I was in a situation similar to you. I installed LinuxPPC and it automatically boots into KDE and I didn't know what to do with it from that point.

Since then, I have learned quite a bit (and I'm no UNIX guru) I will tell you what I did, assuming it might help you:

1) bought book A Practical Guide to Linux by Mark G. Sobell

(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201895498/qid=912742832/sr=1-50/002-9636455-3900036)

2) Check out Linux PPC Faq-o-matic

(http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jonh/lppc-cache/1.html)

3) Inside a terminal window use the "man" command to call up manual pages. For example, if you know a command, but you don't know what it does (like "ls") then try "man ls". Of course, the man pages are notoriously cryptic...

4) and here's the rest of what I did:

I ditched KDE, which is really only one of several possible X window interfaces. Now I'm using "afterstep" which is based loosely on NextSTEP. To do this involved some reading of faqs and consequent editing of obscure text files which contain scripts / preferences.

I set up "netatalk" so that I can mount my linux volumes on my mac over appletalk, and print to my ethernet networked printer (using a localtalk to ethernet bridge, actually) from the linux command line

I believe that apache is on by default, serving web pages after you install linux. Try connecting to the ip number of your LinuxPPC Mac by using a web browser on another machine (perhaps you can use Netscape on the same machine too) and you should see apache serving html pages which basically contain the documentation for apache.

Hope this helps. I am a total Unix/Linux novice, but I'm proud to have done quite a few things with my Linux box, and I can see enormous potential there.

Good Luck.

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