Learning Unix Concepts Through Fiction?

AntiPasto asks: "Technical reading is often difficult to digest. With a new project called HotelNix I hope to create a database of stories that teach concepts one would normally read in man pages. We all know that these tasty tidbits can be at the very least archaic, so could the Unix world benefit from a public-domain, user-contributed technical story archive? What kinds of writing would be beneficial to readers on many levels, and in what ways could we index it?" Interesting project. I think this might help Unix newbies more than seasoned admins in learning concepts, but that in and of itself would be worthwhile.

Comments

routergod

[po_boy]

Sounds a bit like routergod which includes such articles as Alicia Silverstone on ISDN and Charles Manson On Static Routes. Always have a good reference handy!

Re:Very cool

[CrayDrygu]

I have gotten so used to running installations in Windows, that when it comes to running tar or rpm file, I don't know what to do. I'm sure that the hardcores are sitting there chuckling to themselves right now chanting "newbie, newbie",

Yep! But hey, I was in your position not too long ago (maybe a year to 1.5 years), and I know what it's like. How to deal with tar and RPM files took me forever to memorize, but I eventually got it. Here's a brief overview that'll work for about 99% of them:

tgz/tar.gz:
tar zxf file.tgz
cd file
./configure
make
su -
make install

The z tells it to uncompress the file, since it's been compressed with gzip (if you have just a .tar, you can leave that out). x means extract. f means use the file specified (as opposed to a device like a tape drive or floppy).

Everything after the tar command is for compiling programs -- if your tarball isn't source code, you can skip those.

Oh, and no, there's no "-" in front of the "zxf". tar is weird like that (though I think it'll work with the - too).

rpm:
rpm -Uvh file.rpm

U means Upgrade, but it works for installs too. v is for Verbose, gives a litte more info on what it's doing. And the h tells it to display hash marks (#) as a sort of progress bar.

Uninstalling RPM files is a little different, as you need to specify the package name instead of the file name. The command is "rpm -e package". To find a package name, it's helpful to make a list of all the packages installed on your system:

rpm -qa |sort > rpmlist.txt

Then just open that file in your favorite text editor and find the package you want. Or do it from the command line with grep:

rpm -qa |grep "package"

Now print this out on an index card and keep it near your linux systems. =)

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