Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Liam Proven]

2009/3/5 Philip Stubbs :

> No. I guess my memory could be wrong, but I am certain I was using a
> VAX VMS system running some form of X windowing system and it had the
> xman program. I can picture myself at the machine I used, and in that
> part of the office all the machines were VAX VMS based. The only other
> machines were some state of the art 25 MHz 386's :-) and a couple of
> IBM RS6000 boxes running AIX. It was a little while before they would
> let me play with the IBM's as they were the new toys.

Oh, well, VAXen did indeed run X.11, AKA X windows... But on VMS, not on Unix.

>
>> Your general point - that reading man pages is a good way to learn - I
>> entirely agree with, but your example is incorrect.
>
> Thanks for that. For some reason, I find it interesting to hear how
> people tackle learning to use a computer or Linux for the first time.
> As we have discovered, my memory may not be that great, and I can't
> remember what I went through to learn some of the stuff that I now
> take for granted. I find it really hard when people ask questions to
> things that I think should be self evident. Having a complete newbie
> document what they find, and how they struggle with and overcome
> issues helps me to keep a fresh perspective. Also, it helps to make
> clear what aspects are not as transparent as they could or should be.

This is a very common thing, I find. Most people do not know how they
learn stuff. I used to train people for a living, and it amazes me how
little people know about what they need to know.

Show me a 20-step operation, and my notes will have 25 or 30 steps,
just in case. I *know* I will forget stuff.

But I show people 20-step operations and they write down 3 or 4. And
lo and behold, next week, they can't remember how to do it.

I find it very hard to understand, but then, I find people hard to understand...

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Alan James Jenkins]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Guys you really make me wish that I was old enough to have done all of
this. The only way I can get close is by playing with the oldest servers
I could find in my college when I ran it for them for a while (VMS
based). One thing I still find funny about that OS is the Crash command.

Sean Miller wrote:
> Sun did us a course in Solaris at Foster Yeoman (we were the first UK
> Oracle 7 production site, beat that!) and I have to say that Unix and
> VMS were about as different as chalk and cheese.
> 
> But I worked it out and became a Unix expert as I'd been a VMS one...
> 
> Sean
> 
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

Sun did us a course in Solaris at Foster Yeoman (we were the first UK
Oracle 7 production site, beat that!) and I have to say that Unix and
VMS were about as different as chalk and cheese.

But I worked it out and became a Unix expert as I'd been a VMS one...

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Philip Stubbs]

2009/3/5 Liam Proven :
> 2009/3/5 Philip Stubbs :
>
>> Read man pages. The first UNIX like system I used was a VAX-VMS
>> system.
>
> Er, VAX-VMS was not remotely UNIX-like and did not have a "man"
> command, nor "ls", "cd" or any of those.

Ok. I can't remember what the command on the VAX system were. I
suggested those commands as being something useful to know for a
person using the command shell on a Linux box for the first time.

> Indeed back in the day I used VAXstations with VMS and DECwindows -
> there's one downstairs, waiting for a new hard disk, in fact - and I
> don't think they even had an "xman" command.
>
> Were you perhaps thinking of Ultrix or something?

No. I guess my memory could be wrong, but I am certain I was using a
VAX VMS system running some form of X windowing system and it had the
xman program. I can picture myself at the machine I used, and in that
part of the office all the machines were VAX VMS based. The only other
machines were some state of the art 25 MHz 386's :-) and a couple of
IBM RS6000 boxes running AIX. It was a little while before they would
let me play with the IBM's as they were the new toys.

> Your general point - that reading man pages is a good way to learn - I
> entirely agree with, but your example is incorrect.

Thanks for that. For some reason, I find it interesting to hear how
people tackle learning to use a computer or Linux for the first time.
As we have discovered, my memory may not be that great, and I can't
remember what I went through to learn some of the stuff that I now
take for granted. I find it really hard when people ask questions to
things that I think should be self evident. Having a complete newbie
document what they find, and how they struggle with and overcome
issues helps me to keep a fresh perspective. Also, it helps to make
clear what aspects are not as transparent as they could or should be.

Thats all.

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[John]

Sean Miller wrote:
> Flippin' hell... he developed the iPhone???
>
> http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/news/article1/
>
> Arrghhh where did I go wrong?
>
> Sean
>
>   
Hi everybody, I have quite enjoyed learning about this, even though it 
did go off topic, it was quite interesting. Thanks for the link, I have 
downloaded it, and am reading it now.

Thanks again, you have a big help.

John.

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

Flippin' hell... he developed the iPhone???

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/news/article1/

Arrghhh where did I go wrong?

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

This page of Hugo's is fascinating...
http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~altman/mp3mobile/

We have REALLY gone off topic now.

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

Hugo's parents had a house, Burcott Manor (I think), just outside
Wells and his bedroom was like most companies' server rooms of the
time.

Complete with his PDP whirring away and various Acorn Archimedes boxes
and things serving BBS software.

We wrote a BBC-micro based BBS package called "Datahost+" together
some years earlier, when he still lived in Street.  It was a Viewdata
bulletin board solution - Hugo's own BBS was called "The World of
Cryton" (I believe that was something to do with Red Dwarf the TV
series?) but at one stage we had many sysops using it.

Hugo moved from viewdata to text-based boards, and at the same time
wrote a really great suite of software for accessing bulletin boards
and the like for the Archimedes... erm, I forget what it was called
(Arcterm, perhaps?) but he was clever in that he created a free
version to get folks onboard and then released the paid one, a model
that happens far more now than it did then.  He also had a shop in
Wells called "The Serial Port" for a while, with a stylised version of
himself as its logo.

As I said, a very clever man and a definite inspiration for me.

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Steve Flynn  wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Sean Miller  wrote:
>> I remember driving my friend Hugo Fiennes in, perhaps, the late 80s to
>> pick up a PDP 11 running Unix.  I remember him joking about "she sells
>> c-shells" etc.
>
> I've jsut spent 10 minutes trying to work out why I knew that name. Empeg.
> I was THIS "." close to buying one of the prototypes back in um...
> 1997 (ish) I think.

Yup, that's the guy!!

He started building his in-car MP3 player in his Mazda MX5 when I
still knew him, then he moved away and later it became the EMPEG.

Now works for some large MP3-player company... Rio or similar...

Lost touch long ago but he's an amazing man...  we were at school at
Millfield together in the late 80s.

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Steve Flynn]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Sean Miller  wrote:
> I remember driving my friend Hugo Fiennes in, perhaps, the late 80s to
> pick up a PDP 11 running Unix.  I remember him joking about "she sells
> c-shells" etc.

I've jsut spent 10 minutes trying to work out why I knew that name. Empeg.
I was THIS "." close to buying one of the prototypes back in um...
1997 (ish) I think.


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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

I remember driving my friend Hugo Fiennes in, perhaps, the late 80s to
pick up a PDP 11 running Unix.  I remember him joking about "she sells
c-shells" etc.

The PDP 11s that we ran at work, however, were RSTS.   PDP 11/84s I
believe, clunky old things with programming being primarily in BASIC.

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Tony Travis]

Liam Proven wrote:
> [...]
> VAXen ran Unix - indeed, Unix was developed on VAXen. But the native
> VAX OS, although much much later rated POSIX-compatible, was VMS which
> is nothing like Unix in any way.

Hello, Liam.

Wrong! - Unix was developed on pdp11's: I used it on a pdp11/23 + 11/34.

However, the US Government sponsored research at Berkeley to port pdp11 
Unix onto VAXen, and make use of its virtual memory architecture (the 
pdp11's had 'segmented' memory architecture). This is why the kernel is 
known as "vmunix" (vm = virtual memory) and this was adopted by Linux as 
"vmlinuz", where the 'z' denotes a compressed kernel. In fact, I had one 
of the original 'free' academic BSD4.1 source code licences, which I 
used to compile and boot BSD Unix on a VAX750 and 780 - Happy days :-)

Bye,

Tony.
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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Tony Arnold]

Ian,

Ian Betteridge wrote:
> I approve of this wild topic drift :)

Yes, me too! I was a grewat lover of OpenVMS (to give it its proper
name) and all things VAX and Alpha. I still have an Alpha workstation
running OpenVMS running under my desk!

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Sean Miller  > wrote:

> What did they call PF1?
> 
> Was it "the gold key" or something?

Yes, it was the gold key. I think on some keyboards it was actually
coloured gold. It acted as a kind of meta or shift key.

> It was the basis of pretty much every editing command we used to do in
> edt/tpu... cut was PF1-4 I think etc. etc.

The beauty was you could quite easily redefine which keys did what,
which was a problem providing support to a user who had completely
re-arranged his/her key functions!

And, of course, VMS invented clustering and did it (and still does) much
better than any system since (IMHO).

Regards,
Tony.
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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Ian Betteridge]

I approve of this wild topic drift :)

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Sean Miller  wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Sean Miller  wrote:
> > Quite right, none of this Unix nonsense... we used to have VML and God
> > knows what else... oh, I guess we'd better mention "edt" or (if you
> > were really advanced and modern) "tpu"...  if you couldn't do it with
> > the numeric keypad on a vt200 terminal then it wasn't worth doing...
>
> What did they call PF1?
>
> Was it "the gold key" or something?
>
> It was the basis of pretty much every editing command we used to do in
> edt/tpu... cut was PF1-4 I think etc. etc.
> - Show quoted text -
>
> Sean
>
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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Liam Proven  wrote:
> 2009/3/5 Philip Stubbs :
>
>> Read man pages. The first UNIX like system I used was a VAX-VMS
>> system.
>
> Er, VAX-VMS was not remotely UNIX-like and did not have a "man"
> command, nor "ls", "cd" or any of those.

Quite right, none of this Unix nonsense... we used to have VML and God
knows what else... oh, I guess we'd better mention "edt" or (if you
were really advanced and modern) "tpu"...  if you couldn't do it with
the numeric keypad on a vt200 terminal then it wasn't worth doing...

Blimey, memories flood back...

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Sean Miller]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Sean Miller  wrote:
> Quite right, none of this Unix nonsense... we used to have VML and God
> knows what else... oh, I guess we'd better mention "edt" or (if you
> were really advanced and modern) "tpu"...  if you couldn't do it with
> the numeric keypad on a vt200 terminal then it wasn't worth doing...

What did they call PF1?

Was it "the gold key" or something?

It was the basis of pretty much every editing command we used to do in
edt/tpu... cut was PF1-4 I think etc. etc.

Sean

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Liam Proven]

2009/3/5 Philip Stubbs :

> Read man pages. The first UNIX like system I used was a VAX-VMS
> system.

Er, VAX-VMS was not remotely UNIX-like and did not have a "man"
command, nor "ls", "cd" or any of those.

The directory-listing command was not "ls", it was DIR or indeed any
abbreviation of DIRECTORY. To change directory, instead of "cd", you
used SET DEF. The help command was HELP, not the obscure "man". And so
on.

VAXen ran Unix - indeed, Unix was developed on VAXen. But the native
VAX OS, although much much later rated POSIX-compatible, was VMS which
is nothing like Unix in any way.

Indeed back in the day I used VAXstations with VMS and DECwindows -
there's one downstairs, waiting for a new hard disk, in fact - and I
don't think they even had an "xman" command.

Were you perhaps thinking of Ultrix or something?

Your general point - that reading man pages is a good way to learn - I
entirely agree with, but your example is incorrect.

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Philip Stubbs]

2009/3/4 John :
> I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but I was just wondering, are
> there any websites or books that are Ubuntu specific, that are easy to
> read and understand. I want to try using my Terminal more, and I think
> I'm now ready to start learning.

Read man pages. The first UNIX like system I used was a VAX-VMS
system. I would open the xman application, and just browse the
commands. Also, if you see an instruction to use a command followed by
some cryptic codes, look at the man page for that command a learn what
the switches mean. If you are completely new to the terminal I guess
the first few commands to learn are:-
ls
cd
df
du
mv
cp

Once you can use them, you are well on the way to being able manage
your files from the terminal. As I said before, if you don't recognise
what those commands do, then type "man ls" at the command prompt to
read the man page.

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Colin McCarthy]

2009/3/4 John 

> I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but I was just wondering, are
> there any websites or books that are Ubuntu specific, that are easy to
>
> read and understand
>
Before spending any money on dead tree books take a look at
http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com it's a free to download pocket guide for
Ubuntu.
It might answer some of your questions.
And as others have said hunt down your local LUG for help and support.  LUGS
are a great community :-)
Colin
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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[red]

Hi

There is a Unbuntu Linux for dummies that been wrote with 8.04 in mind 
however try to download
unbuntu pocket guide it free, I can't think of top my head where I got 
it from

I am still learning so enjoy and get to a LUG group with question wrote 
down and fire it at them or go to unbuntu irc and do same there!
Simon Wears wrote:
> There are books on Ubuntu (such as Ubuntu Kung Fu, and I think there's 
> Ubuntu For Dummies) available in book shops. I've only seen them in 
> the (for lack of a better term) BIG Waterstones - in particular the 
> one in Manchester city center. If your looking for a dead-tree type of 
> thing, I suggest having a look in your local bookshops for one on the 
> shelf, and having a flick through to see if they have what you want. 
> I'll take a guess (since I haven't read them) that these kind of books 
> arn't CLI orientated books though, as they're aimed towards beginners 
> who need to know GUI stuff too. Not too sure about websites.
>
> The way I learnt was to start using Terminal for things such as 
> installing programs with apt-get, or dpkg,and unpacking archives etc., 
> and whenever I did something I would look for a way to do it in the 
> CLI. I've managed to pick up a few things doing only that, and it's 
> given me a basic understanding of how terminal works. You could always 
> try things that way (or if your system can run a virtual machine of 
> Ubuntu, you may want to do it in there so as not to break anything 
> accidentally!).
>
> Hope that helps a little!
>
> -- 
> Simon Wears
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>

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu....

[Simon Wears]

There are books on Ubuntu (such as Ubuntu Kung Fu, and I think there's
Ubuntu For Dummies) available in book shops. I've only seen them in the (for
lack of a better term) BIG Waterstones - in particular the one in Manchester
city center. If your looking for a dead-tree type of thing, I suggest having
a look in your local bookshops for one on the shelf, and having a flick
through to see if they have what you want. I'll take a guess (since I
haven't read them) that these kind of books arn't CLI orientated books
though, as they're aimed towards beginners who need to know GUI stuff too.
Not too sure about websites.

The way I learnt was to start using Terminal for things such as installing
programs with apt-get, or dpkg,and unpacking archives etc., and whenever I
did something I would look for a way to do it in the CLI. I've managed to
pick up a few things doing only that, and it's given me a basic
understanding of how terminal works. You could always try things that way
(or if your system can run a virtual machine of Ubuntu, you may want to do
it in there so as not to break anything accidentally!).

Hope that helps a little!

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Re: [ubuntu-uk] Learning Ubuntu

[Stephen Garton]

Hi John,

On 21/12/2007, davisjo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> I am early 60 and thought I should learn something new. Being an avid "night
> schooler" I saw a course of evening class tuition in Ubuntu and enrolled.
>

Out of interest, where was this course?

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