Showing headlines posted by gregladen

I would wager that you don't know where many of your most important files are. Can you access them with your file manager with little effort, print, copy, delete, duplicate, or otherwise work with these files? Probably not.

Markdown is a formatting "language"1 like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a "word processor" like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is "marked up" (or "marked down" as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page look like and you are using Firefox, just hit ctrl-U and a window with the raw HTML coding will pop up and amaze you.)

Continuation of a tutorial for non-geek Linux users, this time explaining what a "Distro" is and why it is important that you know about the Distro concept.

First in a series of posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions. Slowly and easily. Some of the posts in this series may end up being useful references, so consider bookmarking those.

Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux.

What is the short list of must-know topics that should be covered to prime a new Linux user who is smart, computer-savvy, but not a computer geek? I've started a list and need your help.

This is the third of four guest posts by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, James Hall.

It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who were not initially weaned on ed. And, it is especially hard to explain LyX. But I'll give it a go.

James Hall, of freeDOS fame, talks about how to run and maintain an open source project.

This is a follow-up guest post by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, about Free and OpenSource software. Here, James talks about the pragmatics of running an OpenSource software project, based on his experience with freeDOS.

Alpine is like pine, and Pine Is Not Elm. If you are still with me on this, you might be the kind of person who appreciates command line text base email systems . And if you are, and you are just installing alpine, this is how to make it remember your passwords.

James Hall is a very experienced software and system engineer who is probably best known for creating and maintaining the freeDOS project for several years. James is eminently qualified to provide an oriention to FOSS and to discuss its sometimes obvious and sometimes rather nuanced significance.

A social networking site can be a place where you have a conversation. If you automate the propagation of your tweets or updates to other sites, are you acting like that guy in the airport waiting area or the coffee shop talking loudly on his cell phone?

I thought I was done with the command line for the week, but then I did something cool that I thought I'd share with you. I use twitter to promote my blog, and I follow almost 3,000 people. That means that every few seconds there is an update on my "people I follow" list, and it is almost always something I am not interested in. This makes Twitter kind of useless for me. My want: Manually maintain a file of the names of people whose tweets I want to actually see. An a-list, if you will. Write a script that would use the a-list to generate a list of tweets culled from the larger fire hose list. ... I call it a-tweet. Short for show me the a-list tweets!

Macs have always used a three-button mouse. The fact that no one has ever SEEN such a mouse is not because mac users are delusional. It is because they love their computers so much that they assume that if a three button mouse is a good thing, then there must be one attached to their box ....

This is the first in a series of posts on just what the title says: The command line. The main point will be this: Stop worrying about the command line.