Prologue

Welcome to UNIX For Beginner ! Although lots of good blogs about UNIX are out there, most of them assume that you have a degree in computer science, would love to learn every strange and useless command UNIX has to offer (and there are plenty), and enjoy memorizing unpronounceable commands and options. This blog is different.

Instead, this blog describes what you really do with UNIX — how to get started, what commands you really need, and when to give up and go for help. And we describe it all in plain, ordinary English.

We designed this blog to be used when you can’t figure out what to do next. We don’t flatter ourselves that you are interested enough in UNIX to sit down and read the whole thing. When you run into a problem using UNIX (“I thought I typed a command that would copy a file, but it didn’t respond with any  message . . .”), just dip into the blog long enough to solve your problem. We have included sections about these kinds of things:

• Typing commands
• Copying, renaming, or deleting files
• Printing files
• Finding where your file went
• Using the Internet from UNIX
• Storing and updating a Web site on a UNIX computer
• Connecting and communicating with people on other computers

In this blog, we updated the information about Linux (the popular free version of UNIX), beefed up the information about the new KDE and GNOME window systems, and added information about Internet applications and hosting an Internet site on your own (or someone else’s) UNIX computer.