April 19, 2009, 2:35 pm
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”
Continue reading ‘Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line’ »
April 18, 2009, 4:11 pm
Commands enable you to do all sorts of powerful things on your computer. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at an everyday task that might be familiar to you.
Continue reading ‘Put Yourself In Command – with the command line’ »
June 5, 2008, 8:05 am
Irssi is a popular IRC client. Its a very popular client for small window managers like fluxbox. This short howto will walk you though the steps for setting up a jail that only has a few commands in it and will help create a much safer IRC enviroment for you. There are a couple things you will need to have installed before we get started. First you need irssi, next you will need jail. First step is to install jail and irssi, so that irssi will work from your regular linux or unix install.
Continue reading ‘Put irssi in a chroot jail’ »
June 4, 2008, 2:50 pm
Sick of all those fancy CD-burning apps not working for you? You need something that just gets the work done? Welcome to BashBurn – It just works!
BashBurn is a collection of scripts for CD burning in a Linux console (BashBurn might very well work in *BSD, Solaris etc. but it is developed and tested only under Gentoo Linux). BashBurn was previously named Magma. It’s not the best looking CD-burning application out there, but it does what you want it to do (And if not then probably didn’t want to do it anyway).
Continue reading ‘Burn CDs in the Commandline with Bashburn’ »
March 23, 2008, 2:32 pm
If you remember computers as far back as the late 1980s, you might remember how Peter Norton came to prominence with the three-floppy (was it three?) Norton Utilities suite. There were a lot of cool tools in that pack, especially Norton Commander, which suddenly made file management a breeze.
Midnight Commander (or just mc) is the GNU version of that utility, with an identical layout and similar color scheme. mc should be available in most linux distribution’s repo’s.
Continue reading ‘File Management in the Terminal with Midnight Commander’ »
