aliases will free me from the mouse
 

I hate clicking those little icons. I got ubuntu because terminal is awesome, and I've finally found a way to efficiently run everything from a full-screen, transparent terminal with no menu bar. I'd like, for example, to be able to type:

$linuxquestions

and alias that to the command:

$firefox www.linuxquestions.org&

I have tried the following command as per all the instructions on the internet:

$alias linuxquestions firefox www.linuxquestions.org

all I get is this:

bash: alias: linuxquestions: not found
bash: alias: firefox: not found
bash: alias: linuxquestions.org: not found

what am I doing wrong? This would be so awesome if I could make it work- my former windows self couldn't have imagined the efficiency.

speaking of which- what is the command to bring up thunderbird? maybe i'll just switch to evolution, but I couldn't figure out if thunderbird even had a command

That should be more like this:
P.S. Thunderbird can usually be run with 'mozilla-thunderbird' (At least on Ubuntu Breezy.)

YES!
this is going to be awesome!

I appreciate your help a lot

I've also been looking for commands for openoffice
somebody suggested something about sopenoffice or something, but I can't get openoffice to run from terminal

uh oh

nobody told me that all my aliases were going to be deleted when I opened a new terminal. I went and made about 20, and now they're all gone! how can I avoid this?

thunderbird command worked, if anyone knows commands for openoffice and gaim (i.e. $gaim -away), please tell me!

For me (on FC3) it is
then you add what you want it to run:
-calc
-base
-draw
-writer
etc.

solved the permanent aliases problem, for anyone else who is following with similar problem:

$gedit .bashrc&

add your aliases along with the default ls alias:
alias ls='ls --color=auto'

still haven't figured out the openoffice or gaim commands- phobozad, yours didn't work for me

On many systems, OpenOffice can be run with 'soffice'. I could have sworn Gaim was just gaim, but I haven't used it in a while.

on suse/kde:
are two ways of starting open office from the commandline.

/edit: more general, to find the command to open OpenOffice:
Which gave me the command:

thanks, apropos was excellent and is good to know!
"gaim" indeed works to open the program; I was hoping there was some way to control a running gaim with commands