les_garten is just a jerk, i think it's ok to ask if your having doubts about a thing, or just need clarification, but an even BETTER way to help the newbies, like myself and others, would be to keep up the wiki, put there some usefull commands, so we have a place to look first, and don't bother the old dogs more than we should, cause' im sure it gets annoying, and for people who keep saying google it, google doesn't always come thru, it may take us to a place were we just get more confused, or to some commands that don't work with maemo or something, that's what talk.MAEMO is for..... a little newbie x-terminal guide in the wiki would rock, specially since most of the other guides for customizing n900 talk about /usr/share and other directories that are only available in x-term..... wiki newbie guide FTW
Nice of you to Join up yesterday and Bump a 3 month old thread...
The command line is not only a tool, but also a way of life.
Although it is not a tutorial, but more a philosophical treatise, you could do worse than reading "In the beginning was the command line" from Neal Stephenson. It is available for free from his website.
Yeah, you can just pick up the spoon I suppose. I'm not inclined that way. I don't believe in a Free, Lazy, Socialistic way of Life either. Linux is not for the Lazy, sorry, it's not.
...
I happen to live in a country that is "Free, Lazy and Socialistic", compared to the US that is. And I rather object to your associations. But this is not a political forum.
Like you, I am a long time Unix user and teacher and I always found the Unix communities far more 'socialistic' than any of the proprietary systems. The Open Source movement has its roots in Unix, and it is all about sharing, teaching newbees and helping collegues. Sometimes RTFM is a suitable way of helping, and sometimes it is spending a lot of time with the problems of others.
I happen to live in a country that is "Free, Lazy and Socialistic", compared to the US that is. And I rather object to your associations. But this is not a political forum.
Like you, I am a long time Unix user and teacher and I always found the Unix communities far more 'socialistic' than any of the proprietary systems. The Open Source movement has its roots in Unix, and it is all about sharing, teaching newbees and helping collegues. Sometimes RTFM is a suitable way of helping, and sometimes it is spending a lot of time with the problems of others.
So there.
Paai
there are a lot of good articles about howto use terminal. and with common usage n900's xterm works just like the ones the articles are written to.
of course there could be one collection of maemo-specific useful wiki articles.
complete tutorial to terminal usage has already been covered multiple times and can be found in less than 2 minutes with google.
Ok so i pressed cont+shift+X and up popped this infamous X terminal. I am new to linux so please can someone tell me a list of commands i can enter so i can have some fun with it. I havnt yet enabled root so dont think i can do damage anyway. So far I tried 'top' which gives performance and I need to know how to get back to the prompt.
I hope I dont get flamed like the op, im just curious.
I suggest that you first get some mileage on a 'regular' command line on a PC that uses 'sh' or 'bash' (the programs that interpret what you type in), the reason being that PCs have nicer screens and keyboards :-) You can even install such things in Microsoft and the Mac has them native as their OS already is a Unix.
Then install ssh on your N900 and connect from the PC to your Nokia. That way, you can explore the commandline of the N900 , write scripts and execute commands from the same confortable keyboard.
hmmm... this looks like a nice place to post this. if this is wrong pls be kind about telling me i posted in the wrong place. not up for insults today. hope it helps
Link to a linux tutorial i found while searching for the same info as the person who started this thread. they say it works in many ways like the n900 so maybe it will help. don't know if it was posted already but here ya go
wiki newbie guide FTW