RE: [newbie] To any linux newbies who really want to know their system well....
Sweet! Thanks Randy!!! Sincerely and respectfully, Hans N. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Randy Meyer Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 7:32 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [newbie] To any linux newbies who really want to know their system well I do. I threw out the other OS and put this one in. About a month or so ago. It's all I have right now. Just a lone personal computer with a new operating system. It was total system shock at first. Thank god for a distribution that took care of most of the details for me. I'm not suffering from any withdrawal symptoms. In fact, I haven't looked back and gnu/linux is so damn fascinating the first thing I had to do was read up on everything I could about it's history and all that I had been missing out from during those years. Now that I'm somewhat past the point of doing the obviously wrong things (like re-installing because I didn't even know how to start X up from the bash command line, which is a very bad place to be with no linux knowledge and no one within reach that has any), here is how I am educating myself about MY new LM 7.2 system and it's internal workings. If you have gotten past the installation and hardware issues and have some time to devote to this, it is well worth doing yourself. I'm speaking to the true linux newbies now, not the seasoned users, who know all of this and probably have done it already. Build a Bigger Search Index --- First of all, that Help icon (the one with the life preserver on it). On a new installation I think it is accessed only from the KDE Start menu. Add that icon to your KDE panel if it's not already there. You need to use it frequently. It can answer your questions if you know how to massage it properly. There is a ton of HTML formatted documentation that gets poured onto your hard drive during the installation. I use the Recommended installation and there is over 14,000 HTML documents on my drive. (OK, that's including the browser cache, i should do another FindFile after clearing the cache for a more accurate number). But the problem is this. There is a search engine that's built into the Help system, but the installed prebuilt index that it uses is very wimpy. At least after my installation, it only indexed the KDE documents. Which is fine for starters, but not if you want know what's really going on under the hood. So the first thing you should do is make a bigger search index that covers all the installed docs, not just the KDE ones. Use Applications/File_Tools/Find_Files and search starting from / for files that match *.htm* Click on the Directory column header to sort all the resulting matches by their locations. Now you can see where the majority of these HTML files reside. Note down these directories. For me it was /user/lib , /var/lib , /usr/share, and /usr/X11R6/LessTif/doc In the left pane of Help, where the search engine is, click on the "Update Index" button. In the dialog that comes up, add your noted directories to the "Additional Search paths" box. Click on the "Generate Index..." button and every textual word in every HTML file in those directories is going to be built into a searchable index that you can search by keyword. This takes quite a bit of time to complete. In fact, I thought that it had frozen up on me, there is no activity indicator in the dialog while the index is being built, at least not for the first two of the three stages. But I could hear my drive being accessed and just to be sure, I started up KDE System Guard and looked for it in the process list, there it was running and using up to 70% resources at times. All was well, that's just a lot of parsing and sorting to do. After the index is built, click on OK to finish the index updating. KDE System Guard is Your Roadmap Now that we have a robust index it's time to use it. First though, if you haven't already found it, there is an application called KDE System Guard that is invaluable for monitoring whatever is running on your system. It's in Applications/Monitoring in the KDE startup menus. Here is how I am using it to direct myself in my linux nuts bolts education. The System Guard lists all the processes that are currently running on your system. A lot of them are sleeping away not doing anything, just waiting to be given the nudge to go to work. A few are running, the ones with an "R" in the status column. But most are swapped out to disk, the ones with an "S" status. So you want to know what's going on under the hood in your system, this is a very good place to take a look. There are columns that are labeled PID and PPID. PID stands for Process ID and PPID stands for Parent Process ID. Every process gets a unique PID when it is started up, and the PID numbers are assigned incrementally. Now I want you to click on that PID column header and sort out all the processes in
Re: [newbie] To any linux newbies who really want to know their system well....
Hey Randy, this is an awesome email. You offer some very good ideas for how total newbies can start to get a handle on how their system is working. Some good ideas for people like myself too: Not a newbie anymore but still a real newbie! I often know just enough to break things real good ;-) Thanks for taking the time to write it and for sharing it with the list here. Abe Original Message --- From: Randy Meyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 06:31:53 -0600 I do. I threw out the other OS and put this one in. About a month or so
[newbie] To any linux newbies who really want to know their system well....
I do. I threw out the other OS and put this one in. About a month or so ago. It's all I have right now. Just a lone personal computer with a new operating system. It was total system shock at first. Thank god for a distribution that took care of most of the details for me. I'm not suffering from any withdrawal symptoms. In fact, I haven't looked back and gnu/linux is so damn fascinating the first thing I had to do was read up on everything I could about it's history and all that I had been missing out from during those years. Now that I'm somewhat past the point of doing the obviously wrong things (like re-installing because I didn't even know how to start X up from the bash command line, which is a very bad place to be with no linux knowledge and no one within reach that has any), here is how I am educating myself about MY new LM 7.2 system and it's internal workings. If you have gotten past the installation and hardware issues and have some time to devote to this, it is well worth doing yourself. I'm speaking to the true linux newbies now, not the seasoned users, who know all of this and probably have done it already. Build a Bigger Search Index --- First of all, that Help icon (the one with the life preserver on it). On a new installation I think it is accessed only from the KDE Start menu. Add that icon to your KDE panel if it's not already there. You need to use it frequently. It can answer your questions if you know how to massage it properly. There is a ton of HTML formatted documentation that gets poured onto your hard drive during the installation. I use the Recommended installation and there is over 14,000 HTML documents on my drive. (OK, that's including the browser cache, i should do another FindFile after clearing the cache for a more accurate number). But the problem is this. There is a search engine that's built into the Help system, but the installed prebuilt index that it uses is very wimpy. At least after my installation, it only indexed the KDE documents. Which is fine for starters, but not if you want know what's really going on under the hood. So the first thing you should do is make a bigger search index that covers all the installed docs, not just the KDE ones. Use Applications/File_Tools/Find_Files and search starting from / for files that match *.htm* Click on the Directory column header to sort all the resulting matches by their locations. Now you can see where the majority of these HTML files reside. Note down these directories. For me it was /user/lib , /var/lib , /usr/share, and /usr/X11R6/LessTif/doc In the left pane of Help, where the search engine is, click on the "Update Index" button. In the dialog that comes up, add your noted directories to the "Additional Search paths" box. Click on the "Generate Index..." button and every textual word in every HTML file in those directories is going to be built into a searchable index that you can search by keyword. This takes quite a bit of time to complete. In fact, I thought that it had frozen up on me, there is no activity indicator in the dialog while the index is being built, at least not for the first two of the three stages. But I could hear my drive being accessed and just to be sure, I started up KDE System Guard and looked for it in the process list, there it was running and using up to 70% resources at times. All was well, that's just a lot of parsing and sorting to do. After the index is built, click on OK to finish the index updating. KDE System Guard is Your Roadmap Now that we have a robust index it's time to use it. First though, if you haven't already found it, there is an application called KDE System Guard that is invaluable for monitoring whatever is running on your system. It's in Applications/Monitoring in the KDE startup menus. Here is how I am using it to direct myself in my linux nuts bolts education. The System Guard lists all the processes that are currently running on your system. A lot of them are sleeping away not doing anything, just waiting to be given the nudge to go to work. A few are running, the ones with an "R" in the status column. But most are swapped out to disk, the ones with an "S" status. So you want to know what's going on under the hood in your system, this is a very good place to take a look. There are columns that are labeled PID and PPID. PID stands for Process ID and PPID stands for Parent Process ID. Every process gets a unique PID when it is started up, and the PID numbers are assigned incrementally. Now I want you to click on that PID column header and sort out all the processes in order from #1 on up. This is pretty much a roadmap of the sequence processes were started up during system initialization. You can see from the PPID column which earlier process started up any other process. This way you can work your way back in the chain. Notice anything? There are a lot of processes started up from PID #1, which
Re: [newbie] To any linux newbies who really want to know their system well....
Thank you!!! You have no idea how much you helped me! Now i'm going to start becoming a linux guru ;) Gerry
