Hi first can i introduce myself. as this is my first time sending a question into this site. my name is Patrick Hogan and i live in Ireland i am 72 years old and live alone. i use my computer quiet a lot. and i just love to work on my computer. and in addition i love Ubuntu. i have gone away from Microsoft some years back and have never regretted the change. now my question is this. i would love to be able to use the terminal a lot more. i do have some magazines on Ubuntu.but i find that they a bit hard to follow. when using the terminal. now is there a more detailed and easier to read magazine or a dvd that can take me through in good easy to follow instructions. i find when i type most commands into the terminal all i get is command not found. i have tried using [sudo] but it will not work in all cases. i would love it if some one might be able to help me in this area. so thank in advance for any help that i may get.Patrick

That is usually a result of either not being root user (sudo) or not having specific software installed. Hard to say without more details. The link below is a beginners Guide for Bash which should be helpful.

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/

I just love it when I run into a grumpy geezer that is older than I am.

I have to links that I think you may find useful. The first I think is the best.
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/cli.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...linux_cli_101/

Nothing written on this subject is written strictly in English. It is all mixed with Geek, a language that is hard to become fluent in.

I suggest that you pick one area of computer management that you are particularly interested in and concintrate on learning and using CLI commands for that. This will give you a start. When you start getting to know and understand some of those commands then would be the time to learn more.

What I am getting pretty good at is commands having to do with package management. Not expert by any means but I am getting to the point that I can handle that pretty well.

I use a text editor, usually gedit, to keep commands and a personal explaination for those commands in files relating to different things. The largest is package management for me.

This is, at least for me, a good thing to do because I can at least understand the explaination.

One thing that Ubuntu does not do that all other distros that I know of do is to give you a root password and a root terminal.

You can, however, avoid excessive use of sudo by opening a terminal and;
This will require your password and then open a root prompt for you (user prompt=$, root prompt=#). This will last untill you return to the user prompt which you can do at any time by hitting Ctrl+D. Ctrl+D is also the best way to close your terminal as it will not fill the terminal history with "exit" commands.

Here is a simple guide to basic Linux terminal commands that helped me when I first started using Linux:
http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php
I also learned a lot from the tuxfiles.org site that Widget linked to.

http://slackbook.org/html/index.html

Oh my, that does look good. That is going into my "noob" bookmark folder.

Going to read it myself as I really qualify as a noob too.

One of these days I am going to have to install Arch and Slackware too. Just because their wikis have been so helpful.

Missed that bit all together though.

Hi Patrick,

Have a look at http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ Each issue of the magazine has an article on using the terminal. Download the back issues and you will have some light reading and a way to learn to use the terminal a little at a time.

Ken

p.s. If you post some specific commands which are causing problems I am sure we can help.

1 members found this post helpful.

very useful to me also.