Dennis Krinke Linux Articles

Linux Commands - May 2002

Our Linux SIG recommends O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition because of the breadth of relevant Linux topics discussed.
From the Table of Contents:
Chapter 3 Linux Commands
Chapter 5 Red Hat and Debian Package Managers
Chapter 6 Linux Shells, an Overview
Chapter 7 bash: The Bourne-Again Shell
Chapter 9 Pattern Matching
Chapter 11 The vi Editor
Chapter 12 The sed Editor
Chapter 15 NOME desktop
Chapter 16 KDE desktop

One of the questions raised was how to do an install for RPM or a tar-ball. The February 2001 BECS NewsLetter page on Linux RPM was reproduced and handed out. Chapter 5 of Linux in a Nutshell was recommended. A brief discussion of how to gunzip, un-tar and install a tar-ball was mentioned.

An extract of the "man" page for the old 'ed' editor from SUSE 7.2 Linux and from IBM's AIX were distributed which discussed REGULAR EXPRESSIONS. A few simple expressions were demonstrated in 'vi' and with 'sed'.

The GNOME desktop was investigated. My documentation indicated that there might be strange names for things, like "Galeon" Web_Browser and "Gnumeric" Spread_Sheet and "Evolution" E-Mail_Client but found none of these items? [Yes, Galeon, Gnumeric and Evolution are applications that are available for Debian woody, they just need to be installed... "Galeon is a GNOME Web browser based on gecko (the mozilla rendering engine). It's fast, it has a light interface, and it is fully standards-compliant."]

We brought up "GIMP" and displayed someone's spotted cat after doing a global "find" for files of type '*.jp*'

We were looking for an Editor and stumbled across "Abi-Word" which looked an awful lot like "MS-Word".