Linux starting points........

In recent years a number of corporations have poured millions of dollars into creating Windows-like user interfaces for Linux, and into persuading the various major distros to adopt them.

See this article, for example:

http://troy-at-kde.livejournal.com/14690.html

There you have the owner of Slackware and his cronies being wined and dined by kde at a supposed "conference", which is just a way of disguising an expensive vacation. A bribe.

Primarily, I'm talking about kde, to a lesser degree, gnome. There's also one called xfce, and maybe a couple of other even lesser ones.

Henceforth, I'm just going to refer to kde, but I mean all of them.

Why are they doing this? Because they are threatened by people running a free operating system who actually understand how it works.

By people who don't need _them_. Who aren't _controlled_ by them.

You can let them lead you by the nose to kde and pretend that you are running Linux, but you won't be. You'll be letting kde run Linux for you. You'll be letting the corporations _behind_ kde
run Linux for you.

Ironically, it takes just as long to learn to use kde as it does to learn to run Linux from the shell, the commandline.

Myself and many others do this, and we can do anything that someone running kde can do. And a lot more.

The kde technocrats want you to think that Linux is so complicated that no mere mortal can comprehend it, and when you add kde to Linux (which more than doubles its size) it does indeed become too complex to deal with. How about that? :-)

But tens of of thousands of ordinary people managed to run Linux just fine before kde existed. And they didn't have anywhere near the documentation that's available now. Tens of thousands of
people _still_ run Linux from the commandline.

If you are thinking that running Linux from the commandline means spending all of your time typing in long commands, then you are quite mistaken. If you are thinking that it means you won't be able to run your favorite graphical applications and use a mouse, you are quite mistaken.

Two parallel courses of study are involved here: Learning the basics of how Linux works, and learning the basics of the shell,bash being the most common one these days.

We are all different; we are all individuals. We each need a unique user interface tailored to _our_ specific needs. And it is _easy_ to create one with just a little knowledge of bash.

Here are three excellent documents to get you on the path of freedom and power, to learning Linux instead of some artificial user interface:

The first section of this one is actually an introduction to the real basics of bash, how to use the command line. It's section on mathematical tools is not so hot.

See: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.linux/msg/208349400085e7a3

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/GNU-Linux-Tools-Summary/GNU-Linux-Tools-Summa...

How Linux actually works:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/intro-linux.html.tar.gz

Basic shell scripting, etc:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/Bash-Beginners-Guide.htm...

These are basic reference documents:

This one is dated, but still very useful:

http://rute.2038bug.com/rute.html.tar.bz2

Don't let the word "advanced" throw you. There are many basic things covered in this fine work:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.html.tar.gz

These are good reference sites:

http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Dictionary/html/index.html

http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/index.html

There is a free, online school for newbies out there, but I've
checked it out and wasn't much impressed.

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I'm looking for people to teach the newbies, and for newbies who
want to learn to run Linux from the command line.

I am not interested in getting involved in running arguments
about the points I've raised.

If you disagree with me, simply post your opinions and others
will read them. You are entitled to them.

I will not be responding any more posts of an argumentative nature.

The usenet has thousands of people who will argue anything from
now until eternity. That's their thing. I have better things to
do.