Beyond the Sky

Linux By Example (LBE) started at July 2006, until today, it contains almost 100 examples on over 100 of GNU/Linux commands. The first version of LBE was tested at http://mysurface.no-ip.org/blog, and lately the entire blog shifted to http://lne.blogdns.com/lbe. We registered a web redirection service at co.nr to get a redirection with easy remember's web address, the URL is http://www.linuxbyexample.co.nr

The idea of showing gnu/linux command by using examples is to guide new user to have better understanding of the basic usage of a command and adapt to use it instantly. We are always recommend users to try out the command for more capabilities by go through the manuals. But usually a useful command always come with a very technical and lenghty manual. These manual sometime scares a new user away, because they couldn’t instantly find an example for just trying out. Manuals are meant for reference, example are meant for learning. We learn well by refering to various examples.

I always pity the beginners who are so lost when start off linux command line, who asking questions in IRC or in forums and get the respond "RTFM". RTFM stand for "Read the F**king Manuals", which ask people to "man command" in an annoying manner. The word "F**king" indicate that manual are not easy to read, they are technical, lengthy and some of them are not complete. Anyway, Not all of the manuals are so difficult, some of them have simple example to hands on, some of them are straigh forward and easy to follow. Some lengthy manuals always scared beginners away, because they are not yet cope well with "man". LBE present you various examples and "human" explaination on how you can use the command line. The purpose of LBE is not to stop you from reading manuals. Instead, LBE aims to guide a new user to start off, and lead them to read the manuals when they need further functionality of a command to meet their requirements.

Besides to give an alternative way to understand and use the command line, LBE also gives you ideas on how you can use the command line to do your job. By reading LBE, it does introduce you a useful tools (command line) which you never aware of, or it introduces the other usage of a command line, which you never think of. Combos! How linux user combine few commannds to create wonders. You may discover alternative ways of doing the same job in comments and you are welcome to give your suggestions.

LBE is not just a blog, but it is a space for Linux users to share their knowledge, experiences on using command lines. Please help us to build up the database, we need more linux user for that. You can register as contributor at LBE and can email me personally if you have any question.

What we have besides that?

Mailing List
You can subscribe to get the news and further discussion anything regarding LBE.

Search Plugin
You can add LBE mycroft plugin to your browser search bar. Check out at sidebar of LBE main page and click the link to install.

Random Example
You can get a random example, this return a randome post on our example pool.

Uses xmessage

#!/bin/sh
# Say bye to shutdown your pc

#uses xmessage to ask first.
answer=$(xmessage  "Are you sure you want to shutdown? " -buttons yes,no -print)
if [ $answer = "yes" ]
then
        # Do shutdown at here.
        #Ubuntu probably needs gksudo instead of sudo
        sudo init 0;
fi

Uses zenity

#!/bin/sh
# Say bye to shutdown your pc

#uses zenity to ask first.
zenity --question --title "Shutdown Confirmation" \
--text "Are you sure you want to shutdown?"

if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
then
        # Do shutdown at here.
        #Ubuntu probably needs gksudo instead of sudo
        sudo init 0;
fi

Cool! I met a lots of oss users who station at Penang, Its about 26 people who attending our meetups. Too bad, geeky is not there, he missed the party. But never mind if you missed this meetup, we have recorded down the talk show into mp3. I separate it into 2 session:

Aizat's talk. 01aizat.mp3
Vicky's IDE session. 02vick.mp3

The mp3 is also uploaded to foss.org.my , will update the official download URL when it is ready. For time being, just download from the mirror server

And grab the Presentation slides from foss.org.my, pgoss

Photo is still with Vicky, will soon be available.

Cheer!

I never see any female myosser stay around at myoss channel, That makes me wander whether do female uses linux? I do some googling on topic linux female user and find this page from ubuntu. Where guys share their experiences of their wife using linux, its quite interesting.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-156133.html

Main point,
1. Cute penguin does drag girls attention of using linux.
2. Red Hat might be too gay to some female user.
3. Don't offer to show your ubuntu to girls, you might get slap.
4. Girls may digs Mandrake, because the ducky look penguin of mandrake looks cute.

http://www.linuxchix.org/ is a linux woman community. Check it out, they even have #linuxchix channel in freenode.net.

{Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, KDE, Debian} Woman exist.

With all those webpage, it proves that, there are only minority female linux user. By the way, don't search for "linux girls", that is not about the topic of linux female user, instead are something nasty that the geeks want.

When Ubuntu gets into fame, it also gets into flame. Bellow are the some complaints, some comments from the Ubuntu users, linux users (never use Ubuntu before but still they comments), others users ( tried once, try live cd, saw his friends using ubuntu, new ubuntu user, migrate from windows)

Why Ubuntu doesn't works like Ms Windows? Why I click Setup.exe it doesn't work?

Ubuntu is not windows, they though every OS is the same beside GUI. For them, Windows = OS. Maybe they not even know what is OS means. At least they now gets to know what is OS and what is Linux.

Ubuntu may wants to consider to put some user guideline, such as welcome page to lead the MS Migrant to get use to it. The guideline must be loaded when ubuntu is first installed, and it must able to drag user's attention.

Ubuntu by default does not come with GCC.

Ubuntu doesn't allow customization during installation like Fedora/Red Hat.

The target audience for Ubuntu is it only new user? or Microsoft Windows migrant? If this is true, this is bad. A lots of user why they want to come to linux is not because they have nothing to do and want to try new stuff, or follow the trend. They uses linux because they have their purpose, such as they need to get apache up, they need to do programming under unix/linux, they need to use certain tools to conduct their science research. Within a guided custom installation, it will scares people away. For example, I heard linux is come with gcc, after I install ubuntu, why gcc is not there? Okay I apt-get install gcc, why still i can't get my souce code compiled? OMG so many libraries is missing.

Wish that ubuntu developement team may consider to put in customization option to the installer. Anyway this will lead ubuntu cd to grows to few cd, if that is not the case, Ubuntu might consider to release developer version, where it will comes with all core libraries and compilers and remains some tools for customization.

Ubuntu uses sudo instead of root account, it is so confusing

This is not a big deal for me. I like sudo, I install sudo to my fedora machines and make it works under there which it doesn't come by default. For those who rant about this, you can turn sudo off, or you can forgot about sudo, because su - works under ubuntu.

Again, this can be put under installation customization, such as turn on sudo option.

Stupid name and brown color

This are the most stupid reasons to dislike Ubuntu, but the thing is I discover a lots of people gives these reasons. "Why do you think ubuntu sucks?" "I don't likes its name and color. " "WTF" What to do, its people's preferences.

No firewall rules by default

I like the way Red Hat deals with configuration, such as using service, chkconfig, have iptables script by default and ease of changing. All of this, I make it happen to my ubuntu, I copy out iptables from fedora using iptables-save and place it to my ubuntu. I wrote service scripts to load daemon from /etc/init.d. But some of them replies said that some programs fails to run because of restricted firewall rules, which it should not happen in ubuntu, because it is design for new linux user. But again, windows have firewall too, did it blocks your software?

To update the system you need to do apt-get update; apt-get upgrade where yum just a simple call yum update it does all the thing.

When I see this line appear in the forum, I take my opportunities to reply "Ya, yum does all the thing without user asking for it, thats makes yum extremely slow and thats makes yum sucks."

Ubuntu is for noob, consider Gentoo or Slackware.

Nah! ubuntu is not as friendly as other distro for newbie, consider PCOSLinux

Slow boot time ...

buggy ...

Whatever, too many to list here and a lots of them are not true.