When I first installed my ubuntu system, I was staring at the screen and did not know what to do…..

I
know that there are a lot of people that are in the same boat as me and this will demystify some of the
things that are necessary to KNOW when you have a Linux system.

1. Distro
I am not going into which distribution is good for you… RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, puppy …
http://www.linux.org lists available distributions.

I will also not go into how to install multiple OS on a machine, or configuration parameters like swap
partitions, etc…

Understand that directories are (/) forward slash. Linux does not use drive letters. The forward slash (/)
is the root folder (like my computer in Windows). Additional hard drives, CD, USB drives etc are
mounted.

2. User Management
After installing you create a user account for yourself.

Where are my files

Your personal area on the disk is a folder after your user name in the /home folder. It is analogous to the
my documents folder in Windows.

By default Linux does not allow users to mount drives. Only root can do it. By changing /etc/fstab file
one can change that

/dev/fd0 /mnt auto noauto, user 1 1

3. Common Commands
While there are GUI’s for most things there is still some requirement to use the shell. I include some
common commands one runs in command shell, Terminal window

Command Descriptions Switches

Ls List files and folders in current folder -l : Give details
-a: show all files (including hidden)
-h: file sizes (KB, MB…)
Cd Change folder Cd ..
Cp Copy file and/or folder -r: recursive, copy directories too
Mv Move file/folder
Rm Delete file or folder -r : recursive
-f: don’t prompt for confirmation
 Mkdir Make a directory
Less Display a text file page by page
Sudo Log in as super user (root)
Chmod Change file permissions Chmod 755 file
The number is based on 3 types of
permissions (Read=4, write=2 and
execute=1). So 755 means use has
read, write and execute permissions
(4+2+1=7)
Whaoami Output the users name
Pwd Current working directory
Passwd Change my password
Arch Display basic computer hardware information
Exit Leave the shell
Man Display the instruction manual

4. Software installation
While there are some inbuilt software in the standard install, but computers are all the more powerful
with applications. E.g. standard installs don’t have a powerful word processor, spreadsheet, etc…. To
install in windows, a user normally double clicks a .exe file which goes through the installation process.
Virtually all of the Linux software is open source. So developers (bless their hearts) take the source code
and compile it making it so that it will execute on Linux systems and put them in large publicly accessible
repositories (repo’s).

Most of the time, a user will install applications using APT (Advanced Package Tool). The most common
command is apt-get. In a shell type

sudo apt-get install matlab

All software management is done as root (with administrative privileges) so you have to be root as sudo.

sudo apt-get update

Below is a list of software that I installed to make my linux box usable and powerful to use.

Software What it does

Audacity Sound editor
Blender 3 D imaging tool
Firefox Web browser
GIMP Image editor
LibreOffice Equivalent of Microsoft office
OpenOffice Similar to office
VLC media player Media player for video