New Linux User » command line

So Many Distros, So Little Time: Some Linux Distros Recommended by “Eleven is Louder”

Clair Ching — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:55:47 +0000

A blog entry on Eleven is Louder reminds me of the fact that there really are a whole lot of distros and that there are some really good ones worth checking out. Argh! So many distros, so little time. I used to check out distros but mainly the ones that run on live CDs because I didn’t really want to mess with the hard drive and I just test them for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.

Among the list of distributions worthy of checking out are:

Blag has a very interesting name. This distro is fascinating because it shows what free software can do. A problem, though, is that the hardware support on this one isn’t as good as what new users might be used to and could be daunting. Not for the faint of heart, I guess. But it doesn’t mean you can’t try.

Enlisy might be interesting to those who want to really try hacking it because its tools are written in Python. However this has no live CD, so you have to really install it first. Looks like a good thing for those who want to have a minimal system that’s meant to be tweaked to convenience or one’s needs/wants.

Someone mentioned INX too. It’s a Live CD which is meant to be used by newbies to the console. The name itself says so: “INX is not X” which implies that it’s all about the console. Various tools are available on INX that help you deal with various tasks on the command line. Don’t worry because on the menu, you could actually get to learn more about it because you get access some basic tutorials as well as a tour of GNU screen. Hopefully you won’t get lost around it.

Excited to try out new distros? Then you probably share my sentiments on this matter.

Post from: New Linux User

In the Beginning was the Command Line

Clair Ching — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:18:54 +0000

Every Linux geek I’ve met recommended an essay called “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson. I suppose that it’s a bit dated because some of the things that were true back during the time it was written don’t necessarily hold true anymore. In any case it really is an interesting read because it gives new Linux users insight and humor at the same time.

From that essay, you could learn something about Linux and other operating systems as well. I didn’t really know about BeOS until I read that essay. And there were other analogies that Neal Stephenson gave that made it easier for me to learn about Linux as well as free and open source software. You also learn about, well, the command line. I think that what he wrote here made me appreciate it a bit more.

For example,

The command line interface makes it easy for programs to dribble out little comments, warnings, and messages here and there. Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

And I have noticed my friends who would try to figure out errors by running applications with a graphical user interface on the command line. As the program runs, one could see on the command line what’s going on. Unlike in the GUI, it simply quits or exits. In that sense, the command line does win.

Also, in Neal Stephenson’s essay you will find comparisons between Linux, Windows and the Mac OS. I think that this was pre-OSX so it might look a bit weird to you. But he also mentions differences in how these operating systems are perceived by users. He also mentions how these operating systems are being marketed. Perspectives and paradigms associated with computers and these operating systems are noted. In some ways, I think that these perspectives still reflect society today. Windows and their marketing strategies, as well as their not so polished products that sell quite well; Apple and how different their business is from Microsoft; and how much Linux gives freedom to hackers.

For me, this essay gave me some kind of historical background as well as social and cultural aspects of operating systems. I hope you would enjoy reading it too. Check out these links if you want to read them:
In the Beginning was the Command Line 2004 (with annotations)
In the Beginning was the Command Line .zip file download.

Post from: New Linux User

Weekend Reads: Office Suites, Command Line Applications and ioQuake 3

Clair Ching — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:38:37 +0000

Eleven is Louder summarizes what office suites are available for us that are open souce software. Of course it has OpenOffice.org in the list. However, it reminds us that Lotus Symphony does exist and that there are other suites like the GNOME Office Suite as well as the KDE Office Suite. I’ve tried using the GNOME Office Suite before but for the sake of compatibility I am using OpenOffice.org especially because I have to collaborate with co-workers on documents. I know that OpenOffice.org is commonly included in various Linux distributions and this blog entry shows you that you have options. No need to feel stuck. Some people think that OpenOffice.org is way too clunky and annoying so other choices could possibly be better for them.

Another blog entry from Eleven is Louder is all about Command-Line Applications and it has an interesting list. It includes the following and more:

rtorrent – for torrent downloads
cdrtools – for burning CDs
cdparanoia – a CD ripper
oleo – a spreadsheet application (I am really amazed that there is one on the command line!)
zgv – a picture viewer with good svga support
hnb – a hierarchical notebook

The last read of the day comes from Tux Arena which talks about the complete guide to configure and customize ioQuake 3 in Linux. For those of you who love first person shooter games, this could be interesting to check out. I was never really into first person shooter games on the computer because I get dizzy just by looking at the screen. Those of you who are fans will appreciate this guide because it has the details on what to do so you could have new maps, weapons, character models, etc. This particular article has screenshots included for better visualization.

I hope you would enjoy these reads!

Post from: New Linux User

Learn to Write Your Own Twitter Client in Python

Clair Ching — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:49:58 +0000

Akkana Peck has an awesome guide to writing your own Twitter client in Python. The timing of this article is perfect because I’m now using Empathy and I currently don’t know of any plugins to let me follow and post to Twitter.

What do you need?

python-twitter (source:http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/)
SimpleJSON (source: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplejson)
Tkinter or python-tk

Twitter

Akkana Peck’s guide teaches you what to write, line by line. Hers might be a simple Twitter client but it’s functional. Her guide teaches you what packages are needed, what the commands are for, and which variables are customizable. The guide also notes which lines of code must not be indented or else it will be part of the loop that might end up going on more than is expected.

If you don’t want to use clients that require Adobe Air, her Python scripts are quite interesting and useful. I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of having a graphical client like Gwibber because I find it too heavy to load on my netbook. The Python scripts seem logical for me to use because I am not always on Twitter and I mainly like to follow people instead of posting tweets myself. All of them are actually available on her site and because those scripts are all available for tweaking, you might end up learning a lot about Twitter and improving the client scripts to suit your needs. (Admit it, you’re probably hooked on to Twitter too! And so you must have a personalized Twitter client.)

Akkana Peck also happens to have written a guide to GIMP. It’s interesting because she had beginners as well as professionals in mind. Might be great to follow her on Twitter as well as check out her other written works.

Good luck with Python programming your client. I could imagine that the guide she wrote could be the start of your own Python programming exercises, especially for those who want to learn on their own time.

Post from: New Linux User

CenterIM Brings Messengers to Your Terminal

Clair Ching — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:53:07 +0000

I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.

Centerim

Pros:

CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
You can have several conversations at the same time.
The screen shows the keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate through the application.
By default, the sound is on so you could hear the ‘ping’ sound when you receive a message.

Cons:

You need to set your terminal to have a dark background because the default colors are hard to see on a white background. If you’re not used to controlling the background of your terminal, then it might feel weird to you.

Going through conversations could feel weird when you’ve got a lot. Pressing the Esc key twice made me go back to the list of buddies I’ve got online so it was easier then.

Enter is not enough. You have to press CTRL-X to enter the message. The “Enter” key just skips a line. It might feel unnatural at first but you could get used to it.

It’s interesting actually. So if you’re looking for a way to chat while you’re on the command line and you don’t want to use an IRC client connecting to a Bitlbee server, then CenterIM is more of a good fit for your needs.

To learn more about CenterIM, here’s the CenterIM website.

Post from: New Linux User

Configuring Newsbeuter

Clair Ching — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:13:05 +0000

I’ve recently talked about using Newsbeuter and it has been interesting for me because of how focused I am on reading whatever content I get online through it. However, knowing that I need to somehow fix some things so I could work better with it, I decided to make a config file that does that.

My needs are mainly for saving articles in one spot, indicating which browser to use and indicating where podcasts must be saved. I am still happy with the keyboard shortcuts that are available by default and the colors look good in my eyes. But it’s faster if I could configure the other settings

one could enqueue a podcast so it could be downloaded

For Newsbeuter, you just need to make a config file in ~/.newsbeuter called “config” Yes, it’s as simple as that so you could easily remember where it is the next time you want to tweak it.

We could take a look at the sample config file on the Newsbeuter help:
# a comment max-items 100 # such comments are possible, too browser links show-read-feeds no unbind-key R bind-key ^R reload-all

The ones on the left side are the things to be customized and the ones on the right, or after a tab, are the settings of your choice. For my needs, it’s actually simple:

browser firefox download-path ~/Podcasts player mplayer save-path ~/Documents/FeedArticles

You need to look at the table of configuration commands that you could tweak.

One more thing I like about Newsbeuter is that it does have a counterpart for managing your podcasts. For example, I have a list of podcast feeds in Newsbeuter and I have selected to ‘enqueue’ some of the episodes (done by pressing ‘e’) then I could run “podbeuter” on another terminal and view the list of enqueued files. I could toggle the download of all these files on Podbeuter. Podbeuter is included when you install Newsbeuter and it really is meant for managing your podcasts. It will also use the same config file as Newsbeuter’s so there’s no need to worry about that.

Post from: New Linux User

Read Feeds from the Terminal via Newsbeuter

Clair Ching — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:20:27 +0000

I’ve been looking for a better way to read my RSS feeds and I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to take it away from the web UI of Google Reader. As much as I love Google Reader, I realized that I’d like a different way to read my feeds these days. Google Reader has been overwhelming, so to speak.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Enter Newsbeuter. It is a terminal-based RSS reader which you could easily use and tweak according to your needs. For one thing you could export your OPML file and use that as a basis of your list of feeds. At the same time, you could also go start from scratch and all you need is a text files with all of the feed URLs of your choice. If you’re looking for a way to tag these feeds, don’t worry. Your text file can indicate the tags to be used for them. You just need a file called “urls” in your .newsbeuter directory and you’re good to go.

What I like about reading in Newsbeuter is that I could focus on the news and not look at the pictures yet. Sometimes pictures take too long to load on my computer and it gets irritating when there are too many pictures loading. At least if I could get the textual content right away, I could decide to open the article in a browser later on to view the pictures, etc. I also like how Newsbeuter is quick. One more thing that Newsbeuter has going for it is the keyboard shortcuts used. You’ve got “o” to open it in a browser, “q” to quit reading an article, “s” to save the article as a text file, and so on. There are also many things you could tweak so that you could use it according to your needs. I have yet to tweak it so I could easily manage podcasts.

It’s been a week since I started using Newsbeuter and I really like it. So far, I can’t see anything else that might replace it.

Post from: New Linux User

Clive for Downloading Videos

Clair Ching — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:45:04 +0000

Do you ever get a lot of video links from friends over IM and you wish you could actually just save them first? Well, you could download them via clive on the command line.

clive downloads videos from YouTube

It’s really nifty if you could save them and video them later, without having to browse it on the internet first. At least, for me, I think this is really cool.

Another awesome thing about clive is that it could download videos even from Google Video, CCTV, among others. See? Even other sites with video streaming could be a source for extraction via clive. How nifty is that? Also, the command to use when you want to download a video is easy to remember:
clive
It will save the file from wherever you run it. If you run clive on your home directory it will save the file there.
And in case you still find it a bit difficult to remember there’s a front-end for clive and it’s called abby. It might be easier to use if you prefer something graphical.

I suppose that files downloaded as mp4 would benefit those who use ipods. And at least it’s way better than getting stuck with only flv files. I tried playing the videos I downloaded and they were quite alright. This looks like something I might be using a lot in the coming days. My friends and co-workers give me interesting video links from time to time.

Post from: New Linux User

Surf the ‘net on the terminal via w3m

Clair Ching — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:01:37 +0000

Looking for a way to surf the ‘net on the terminal? Use w3m!

I’ve used w3m time and again because it’s quaint that way. I usually use it as an Emacs macro/extension. It’s nice! I could read webpages while in Emacs, aside from the terminal.

You could look it in Synaptic if you’re using Ubuntu. You could also check it in apt. Or your package manager.

There are really nifty commands from the w3m manual:
w3m [options] [filename|URL] -s — this one is for displaying pages in shift JIS so if you’re viewing a Japanese page, chances are you’d find this good as an option
w3m -T text/plain [filename|URL] — if you want to get the source HTML.

Who says you can’t do anything from the command line when there are so many tools you could use?

Post from: New Linux User

Get good command line habits

Clair Ching — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:33:59 +0000

I must confess. I have bad command line habits! I make directories and subdirectories, one directory at a time… Meaning, I make a directory then cd to that then make a subdirectory from it. However, I learned today that I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the article: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits. It lists down the bad habits and the good ones.

Part of how the bad command line habits have been formed when I think about the way it is on the graphical user interface, like what steps I have to take. These days I’ve been mainly reliant on Gnome so I have lost practice using the command line.

Another snippet from the article:

Stop piping cats

A basic-but-common grep usage error involves piping the output of cat to grep to search the contents of a single file. This is absolutely unnecessary and a waste of time, because tools such as grep take file names as arguments.

If you have been doing these same things, it’s time for us to learn these good command line habits together!

Post from: New Linux User