Notices

maybe that would be the intelligent thing to do.

how about this:
you show a newbie a little bit of kindness and good information, he gets interested, and actually starts looking up information for himself, and becomes a productive member of this community one day.

people who never really get interested in this matter are easy to spot, and won't get any help soon anyways, after asking a third time.

there surely isn't anything wrong with sharing a little information, though. linux may not be for the lazy, but giving a friendly bump in the right direction is most many people need to get off their asses.

you, with your customers worth several hundred thousands of dollars (feeling better telling everyone?) can't spare a little of your oh-so-precious time introducing someone new to the linux community?

what's worse, you come here, make him feel unwelcome, and actually BELITTLE those who try to help?

that's stupid and childish.

so yeah, regardless of the size of your ****, i'd really appreciate it if you refrain from posting in these sort of threads from now on. you know, the sort where people are exchanging actual information.

I personally would like to see a tutorial or thread started on just simple commands that we can type into the terminal.
Maybe status of cpu/RAM usage things like that.

What you are asking is the essence begining Linux. With the Xterminal you have at your finger tips the fpower of an fully operational battle station, er, I mean Linux computer. One thing that most people don't realize is that that *NIX is *NIX is *NIX. Different Unixs are a lot more alike then they are different. The basic Unix things I learned, (ye gads) almost 30 years again on high end Unix box are still applicable to the small N900. The same commands I run on the big IBM AIX hardware at work are the same I used on my Linux desktops which is the same on the N900.

When everyone says go get a beginning Linux user docs, that's your begninng N900 Xterminal tutorial. 80% of what pick up from there is directly applicable to the N900. The N900 IS a Linux computer. 'Linux for Dummies' can be subtitled 'N900 Xterm for Dummies'.

Awesome, I'm excited to do some simple code then.

nothing like creating a wiki.

there's some basic commands http://www.howtoforge.com/useful_linux_commands . Note that all commands may not be available in maemo

That is on my Maemo desktop as we speak. I'm learning as we speak. Great link for guys like me.

Another handy guide is http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html .

Linux is built on top of UNIX, and many of the commands you will come across in this forum are UNIX commands.

For me as a beginner, the most confusing thing was the idea of "permissions" in UNIX. Whatever I tried to do, I would get an error message: "You do not have permission to do this." It took a while before I understood that I could give myself the permission by using chmod and chown commands. That's not the way you get permission in the big, bad world outside.

STANDARD WARNING. Using the command line, you can end up with a Maemo device that does not work. It could freeze up, it could reboot over and over again, it could go completely blank. To get it working again, you might have to reflash the firmware. Until you are comfortable with the flasher, you are better not to use X-Terminal. You also need to be comfortable with taking out the battery, because that might be the only way to turn off your device before reflashing.

Usually the only "permission" you can grant yourself is the permission to execute a file as a program. This isn't so much a true "permission" but a flag that says, "this text file isn't just a text file, it is a script that can be executed!"

All of the other permissions (reading, writing, deleting, etc) are only given to you by those of higher authority (ie root), just like in the real world. And just like in the real world, you can grant yourself those permissions if you pretend to be a person of higher authority

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