Greetings!

[odougs]

 Hello everyone!

 

 I'm a n00b who, until recently, only used Windows. I took the plunge and installed Lubuntu a little over a week ago. Although I have had some seriously frustrating moments, I'm really impressed and excited by what I've seen so far - especially with the power and elegance of the terminal compared to the Windows Command Interpreter!  

 

 To give you a little more background about myself, I'm a guy in my early 20's, living near Washington, DC. In the past six months or so, I've gotten really interested in Computer Science, and I will soon be returning to school to pursue a CS degree. My brother and father are both engineers, so I grew up surrounded by computers. I managed to pick up some basic CS vocabulary and learn some rudimentary administrative tasks in Windows when I was younger, but I didn't start to look deeper until recently. 

 

  CS is an absolutely massive field, and I find all of it interesting... but programming seems to be my biggest interest. I've been teaching myself C++ for some months now, and, like Linux, I find it seriously frustrating at times, but also incredibly exciting and empowering! The most difficult thing for me right now is staying focussed on one topic, and not getting intimidated by the vast amount of stuff I don't know... I have a really bad habit of opening two dozen wikipedia tabs and getting sidetracked into reading about hardware, IP, math, etc, when I really just need a practical solution to why my widget-counting program won't compile! [img]<___base_url___>//public/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif[/img]

 

 

 At the moment, my goals for learning linux are simple: I want to become a competent user and continue exploring. In the future, I'd like to use a linux platform for developing, and contribute free software of my own some day.

 

 However, I have had some hesitation about learning to develop with C++ in Linux. As I said above, I have a real problem with trying to learn too many different things at once, and as a result, I am not progressing as quickly in C++ as I would like. I'm pretty comfortable using Microsoft's Visual Studio (I have access to some pretty nice Windows machines), so I have to wonder if I should just stick with that for now while I build my C++ foundation, and explore Linux from other angles. The main problem being, I have heard that the GCC toolchain is likely to be overwhelming for a n00b, and while people have some good stuff to say about the Linux C++ IDE's, they always seem to qualify their praise with "but ___IDE still has a long way to go". The counterpoint to these considerations would be that I will learn to use Linux much faster if I make it my primary OS, instead of just tinkering with it at the end of the day. 

 

 

 Many, many thanks to all the people who help run this site and / or contribute their knowledge to it! 

[inittux]

Hello Odougs and Welcome to the forums! :)  Glad to have you here!

 

Great to hear you are wanting to explore and learning linux. Getting used to a whole new OS is probably gonna be a learning process, it is for everyone. I'll try to give you basic intro, which I hope that will help you out some.

 

The Directory structure in linux always starts as root (/)

User home dirs are in the following location /home/username

Most of the important configuration files are in /etc

Most of the binaries you as normal user can execute/use are in /bin or /usr/bin but if the location is in your $PATH then you can use the command without having to use the full path:

 

]$ $PATH
-bash: /usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin

 

Some commands which are used alot:

 

cd change directory

pwd print working directory, being the directory you are currently working on

ls  list the files in your current directory, but you can add a path to that if you want to see the files in another location

mkdir make a new directory

rmdir remove/delete an empty diretory

rm  remove a file , rm -rf becareful with this one!! and NEVER do this as root: rm -rf /*

touch create an empty file

 

You have two types of users:

- normal users--> having none admin privileges

- root user --> being  root# (via su -  ,then root password) or having access to right root via a command such as sudo

 

Linux as online manual, you can do man command.  ie: man ls and it will give you all the options of the command.

or you can search for keyword in the  manual man -k keyword

 

You can install/remove files via:(as root user)

- apt-get install packagname or aptitude install packagename

- apt-get remove packagename or aptitude remove packagename

- in ubuntu you can also use the software center to add and remove software

 

or install it via .deb file: dpkg -i package.deb

 

Hope this helps you out some! and if you have any questions feel free to ask!