tutorial on basic command line use?
 

I can't imagine someone hasn't written one, I just can't find it. Basic command line edits and commands.

I need to edit a config file then run some commands. I could do it in DOS but not Maemo.

Specifically I'm trying to do the following, from the PC-connectivity-package install instructions.

Thanks.



<To get X11VNC working properly on Diablo, you should install a modified version of hildon-desktop package. After that, you can install X11VNC. It follows the steps:

Add the line below to /etc/apt/sources.list file of your maemo device:

deb http://pc-connectivity.garage.maemo.org/repository diablo free
Execute the following commands:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install x11vnc
# apt-get install hildon-desktop>

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

And your question for the one thousand dollar fridge is?

-

Ah well; The file itself is no longer available from Megaupload but the booktitles should give you some pointers.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=63052

But nothing's lost forever. For example, there is:

http://linuxcommand.org/

But above all: Your question should've been answered by a simple google query done yourself.

http://bit.ly/ydsQoa

I will admit, though, there are very few results...

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"But above all: Your question should've been answered by a simple google query done yourself."

And for that we'd have had to know, going in, that Maemo uses standard Linux syntax rather than some specialized subset, which we wouldn't discover from searching the Maemo site OR Google for tutorials. Now we presumably do.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=maemo+command+line+syntax

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

You need to install an RTFM interface. And for the record, there is thousands of guides. Use google or the search engine of your choice. I guess you are a troll, but anyway...

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Put this in your favorites ;-)

http://i.imgur.com/CJkR9.png

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Well, you could try to use a command recommended in a tutorial/guide?

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

I can only hope, humbly, that some day, with much diligence and study, I too can become wise and proficient in an OS that many people aren't very familiar with, so that I too can be condescending about help requests.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

A simple two-word query (maemo5 terminal) in google returned plenty of pointers. The first two results give you quite a bit of information, already.

I mean: If you can describe your problem to me (How do I know what kind of system Maemo uses), why would you not be able to run a simple google query?

Sorry dude, you're victim-attitude is completely wasted on me.

http://xkcd.com/627/

The time you took to create a new topic, asking questions that even the Romans standing before the cross had become bored with, could have been used better. So, study the comic above, and try and understand the truth it conveys. (Don't forget the mouse-over)

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"The time you took to create a new topic, asking questions that even the Romans standing before the cross had become bored with, could have been used better."

My chagrin knows no bounds. Thank you for your gracious time-efficiency analysis of my activities. I will strive to put that ten or fifteen seconds to more effective use in future, based on your polite suggestions.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Alright, I just can't take this any more. If someone wanted to run a simple google query, they'd run a simple google query! The whole point of asking questions on a forum board populated by actual human beings is to communicate with actual human beings. If all you have to say is "you should enter your request into a lookup-table that associates words with popular websites" (which is all that google is), I gotta say, why are you even here? Just let Google run your Maemo forum account, and go do something useful with your time...

On the original poster's topic: the world of the Unix command line is far more rich, varied, and honestly wild-west than the DOS world ever became. :) To start with, there isn't really just one command line: there are many different "shells", each with their own advocates. By default, Maemo is using a shell called "ash" that comes with the "busybox" package. (Here's the wikipedia link for ash.) You can also download a very popular shell called "bash", if you prefer.

If you're completely new to Unix shell scripts, it is probably more helpful to work through a tutorial of the basic concepts behind shells than to just try to memorize a few useful commands. This website provides a very basic introduction to the shell, but includes some useful information about file, I/O, and job controls that have many subtle differences from how DOS does things:

http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Thanks, Copernicus. I came at the n810 with no Linux background and apparently some fairly naive expectations of how to wring more usefulness out of it. It presented itself to my expectations as a mobile information device similar to the IPAQs and such that I've used forever and even hacked at a bit, but there seems to be an extra engineering degree required before I can bend it to my will. And as I said, I hadn't been aware that Maemo was just basically Linux, or I'd had RTFM long since. I knew there was an evolution from Linux but figured it was a unique OS with its own syntax.

The instructions for a lot of the applications are Greek without approaching them from the Linux user's viewpoint, so I've wasted a lot of time.

I'll take your advice and get a grounding in Linux concepts before trying to get this thing to do something new.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

I gotta admit, I made the same assumption a few years back -- I've actually been a Unix-head for years and years, but I'd assumed that every pocketable device out there had some unique wacky OS. (I owned an iPhone for years, and enjoyed it for what it did, but never really got into messing with it.) So a few years ago my brother showed me his N810, and I just figured it was yet another iOS clone of some sort. I was totally amazed when I discovered that it had an honest-to-god shell, and all the commands I'd been using for the past two decades worked just fine on it. I've been hooked on the Nokia NITs ever since then...

Yeah, unfortunately, this is the biggest hassle with Unix -- learning it really demands more of your time up-front than any other modern operating system. To be honest, though, this is a side effect of the fact that it provides the user with more control than any other OS; and in order to make effective use of that power, you've got to deal with a lot more options and downright grungy details than in other systems. :)

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Yes, linuxcommand.org is a good site. :) Here is another one:
http://www.funtoo.org/wiki/Linux_Fundamentals%2C_Part_1

And:
http://www.playterm.org/

If bored, take a minute and read this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"you've got to deal with a lot more options and downright grungy details than in other systems."

I love grungy and hands-on, but I kinda like to know what I'm getting into. I've fallen into some stuff here that's very complex and time-consuming that was evidently presented as a solution to some basic user needs, but which proved to be advanced and byzantine and has me setting up server/client heavy artillery to shoot at flies, so to speak.

I love a good chewy hack but I wish there were a FEW more signposts that read "leaving practical usage territory and moving into regions where you are spending days doing stuff that's way more time consuming than the end result is worth, and which won't really solve your problem anyway". I'm not serious in that wish, I know this is the open-source universe and only the strong survive, but it's tough burning the midnight oil by the gallon when you're just trying to get some work done and just this once, don't really WANT to know how to code it yourself from scratch.

Ignore me. Just b itchin'. I'm constitutionally unable to refuse a challenge so I'll be slogging through it.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Well, I'm not going to get into a rant right now, a waste of energy but I find your posting insulting on so many levels, I can't even begin to describe where you go wrong.

Anyhow, OP prefers to be spoonfed, while my look at the world is that it's pointless to feed people fish if you can teach them how to fish.

And I did give some clear pointers by linking the thread with collected command line-works that I have created earlier, and by linking to the linuxcommand site.

But most of all: any tech-person who doesn't know how to use a search engine is worthless unless he or she is omnipotent.

Command line is not equal to "basic user needs". Far from.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

LOLWUT?

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Anthonie, you seem to be an unhappy person. I don't know command-line scripting but I'm a fair hand at lay psychology. Would you like to talk to someone about your anger issues?

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Wait. How would he find someone in his area to talk to about that? Being that there's no way to search for such things on the internet. I mean, if you're right and there was no way for you to find this out without starting your own thread, then how is he to do the same? (PS: How did you find out about this site? Did you google it?)

Lets be real here. You asked a simple question that Google or any other search engine (or even a simple power search here) could have easily answered. And yes, this is a user forum, but when every new person coming is asks the same basic questions, over and over again, it gets old. (And yes, this has been asked in at least 4 other threads before this...)

The solution: Either stop answering and leave the community, or answer in a way that will make the poster STOP asking simple questions that are easy to find in an automated way. If you spoon-feed them, they just keep doing it. Yes, negative reinforcement isn't pleasant, but it's quite effective.

Don't think that's an issue? I invite you to do a search on this forum and find threads started by people that were "spoon fed" early on and the royal pain they became simple because they came to expect their every whim to be answered directly, in a new thread. There are tons. It would also give you some practice with the search options on the site...

PS: Your sarcastic replies indicate that you too follow this approach to things in life at times. You're not a stranger to it's use, as indicated by the quickness in which you utilized it. Maybe it's time to stop whining about things and take your lumps for asking something a 5 year old could have told you by checking google. By continuing to act like a spoiled 5 year old, you're simply increasing the chance that you wind up on the ignore list of people that could actually be helpful to you later.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Couple of things. There is a reason why far more knowledgeable people than myself are usually not seen in threads like these: They are fed up with answering the same stupid questions over and over again. If you don't want to do even the most basic of research, why should they waste their time on questions that could've been answered within miliseconds? Even more so in the light of complaints about their "tone of voice".

Secondly, once more, I did give you pointers in my first reaction. Number one a list of books on the topic, that I have named and collected in a zip file, two, the link to a beginners-tutorial on terminals in general.

All you had to do in that list of books is select the name and right click to google it. And about the tutorial, true, it's not targeted at busybox, but bash is installable on the n900, so the advice was not useless, or so I thought. If only you would have cared to read better.

You know what? I'll spoonfeed you and link it again.

http://linuxcommand.org/

Now, please, don't ask me to chew it for you...


While we're at the personal level now, anyway, I don't really appreciate you making personal remarks. If that is in any way a measure for your "fair hand of psychology", I do not want to know any more of it. I had a nice, sunny day, believe me. I thought we were having a meta tech-discussion here, not some name calling event. You don't know me, but I do know a little of your assumptions now.

Lastly, you seem to miss the point that I was helping you, and you only got upset about my remark that with fairly little hassle, you could've helped yourself. Now tell me, what's wrong with that? I didn't even shout rtfm at you. I gave you no "rm -rf /*" command.

So quit whining, and take the knowledge you can get. If you want to pick people's brains, learn which parts to pìnch, and which not. Especially if you can't even ask a decent opening question to begin with.

Now enough of the matter, and back to topic.

You could have asked the question by now, "Busybox, what's busybox?". Unless you already knew, of course.

Psssst... free knowledge? Care for a shot? Psssst...

http://wiki.maemo.org/Terminal

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

:) :) I feel your pain; I think everybody who codes for a living runs into this more than you'd expect...

You know, it's weird; back when I started fooling with personal computers, with an Apple ][+ (and man, I guess that does mean I'm really old), the command line was the only way to deal with the machine, but since everybody focussed on it (and, to be honest, it couldn't do all that much anyway), it really was easy to work with. Now, the world has bifurcated into the Steve Jobs "a computer should be as simple as a toaster" camp and the open source "real men compile their own kernels" camp. Even the cell phone world is that way now -- you can choose iOS, or the similar Android "it's got Linux, but so heavily locked down, you'd never know it" option, or the "of course I hack my phone with my own kernel, everybody should" camp.

There really ought to be a middle-ground somewhere between a user interface based around finger-painting and one based on kernel-hacking. :)

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

ROFL! Geez, guys, lighten UP, it's just a geek forum.

Next time I'm looking to get a spanking I'll go see Mistress Cruella, not to Maemo.org. She's LOTS more fun although she's not half as dramatic, even with all the leather and whips and stuff. Sheesh.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"Now, the world has bifurcated into the Steve Jobs "a computer should be as simple as a toaster" camp and the open source "real men compile their own kernels" camp. "

I hear ya. I was just ranting about Apple last night, how much I hate the fascist approach to computing ("you vill do it Schteve's vay, or not at all!"), but I'm talking out of the other side of my mouth on the morrow.

If forced to pick I'd always vote for full control over even my toaster's innards, but after a long night of configuration agony I'm sure ready to moan and weep a little at the injustice of it all.

Have you ever looked at this thing I'm fighting with? It's got a full multipage site JUST for the directions. I still don't even know what it's supposed to do, other than a promise of "PC Connectivity".

http://pc-connectivity.garage.maemo....ion/index.html

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Hi gryvn,
I am N810 user and developer, if you want a lot of hints & tips, software suggestions, etc, please tell me so that I can send them by email to you.
Be a proud N8x0 user : Maemo 4 has some features and softwares totally unavailable to Android, iOS, Symbian, etc.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Nah. No need to lighten up as it has been a bright and sunny day for me already. The negativity and name calling came from your side. It might actually surprise you, but maemo is a pretty newbee-friendly place, compared to a lot of other linux forae. Especially the niche type of linux distributions tend to get a pretty esoteric and sometimes downright militaristic following. And you know what the result is there? You ask OP "questions" like this and your post simply gets ignored. 200 people will look at it, but no one will even bother telling you that they can't be arsed. After a while your posting will be deleted as if the question was never asked.

You, on the other hand, were actually given answers.

You got yourself a device meant for computer geeks but you expect an idiots treatment in the support for it.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Whoa; no, I hadn't looked at it. It looks like a grab-bag of pretty much every major communications tool I've seen on Maemo...

Hmm. I'm not entirely sure they are making things any easier by combining a dozen different tools, either. It looks more like they are just centralizing all of the setup and configuration tasks into one humongous configuration panel. And yeah, there's a lot of additional command-line stuff that they didn't fit into their panel...

Honestly, I'd just pick the individual packages that seem the most useful to you and install them separately. SSH is a wonderful tool for remotely logging in to other Unix machines (or, really, any machine running an SSH daemon). VNC is useful if you want to see (and use) your PC's desktop on your NIT. Samba can be amazingly useful in integrating your device into a Windows network. But yeah, installing all these things at once is probably overkill. :)

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"But yeah, installing all these things at once is probably overkill."

Was for me. Unfortunately, that's the thing that comes up on most searches as "the" answer to networking on Maemo. Just my dumb luck to stumble into the worst nightmare one can possibly find, I guess.

What I STARTED out to do is be able to view my TABLET on my PC desktop rather than the other way 'round (e.g., see "Pocket Controller" for Pocket PC). I work at my desk a lot but would like to access stuff on the tablet so when I pick it up to go, it's ready since I've already been working back and forth on it.

Anything like that you know of?

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Hmm. VNC is the classic app for this situation (so far as I know); I haven't been using it myself, but in theory, you just need to run the VNC server on your tablet and the VNC client on your PC...

Here's a thread that says there's a server available in the extras-devel repository:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48113

I'm not sure how well it will work. It seems that VNC clients are better supported in Maemo than are VNC servers.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Actually, let me add one more note:

I do a lot of my work just typing at a command line, so all I really ever use is the "ssh" (secure shell) utility. (This isn't actually a shell itself, but rather a program that creates a connection to a remote shell.) If you can deal with using it, I suspect it's a lot easier to set up the server than with VLC. And SSH clients exist for practically every OS ever made. :)

Here's a link to the openssh package:

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/openssh/

I've actually never ssh'ed into my N900 (only out from it), so let me try it...

Ok, got it working. I did need to create a password for the "user" account in order to log in (using the "passwd" command).

After that, it's just "ssh <ip address of your n900> -l user", enter the password, and you should be connected.

You can do an amazing amount of stuff with just an ssh connection. :)

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

"You can do an amazing amount of stuff with just an ssh connection."

You do a good sell. When confronted with an especially ill-designed and dysfunctional GUI I alwas know that theres a straighter path to the goal lurking in the command line, if I'd just put forth the effort to learn how to use it. My only excuse is that I'm usually just trying to get something accomplished and dont want to stop and learn the native tongue, so to speak. I dont work in the computer racket so they are tools and the occasional toy to me, and so I wont justify the effort, especially when I've got four other technologies to learn before lunch.

i oughta just take some time and gut through it. Obviously it will pay off in the long run.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

All of these people who know so much about search and are such experts forgot to mention

http://wiki.maemo.org/Terminal

unless I missed it.

I think that many people have forgotten how nightmarishly difficult it is to find information with Google when you don't know correct terminology.

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

You missed it. Page2.

No, I have not forgotten that. But it makes a poor excuse. Google "using google" could and should easily solve that problem. :rolleyes:

Re: tutorial on basic command line use?
 

Thanks, Geneven, That's pretty much exactly what I was needing when I started the thread, although I''ve found a lot of good information since.

I appreciate your contribution.