MX Linux Forum

Thanks for the responses and for not flaming me to oblivion.

If I could reply in a general sense without quoting everyone I would like to say the following.

I’m glad that the goal of Linux has never been “world domination”, that’s part of what makes it attractive.

Before I ever posted my question about “lower case” user names I had already spent many hours searching this forum and the MX help files and FAQ and other Linux forums and doing general online searches – and I do mean many hours – in “learning my operating system”. All to come up with “nothing definitive”.

A user name is probably the most basic and simplest of all things one can do on a personal computer – because it’s mandatory for everyone. Just the fact that I am the first one to ask about this “feature” in MX that does not allow a second user name to be added with a capital letter unless the terminal is used speaks volumes about who is currently using MX Linux, and it’s those that excel in “a lower case terminal environment”. There is nothing wrong with this or with the original “Unix Model”, but I hope that you will see that there is also nothing wrong with my observation as it applies in this current day.

The final thing that I have to add is a general thought about “gifted persons”. The most gifted people in any field are usually not the best teachers – because what they do just comes naturally and they don’t have to think about what they do – they just “do it”.

My questions and comments come from someone that is “not gifted” in a terminal environment, so when the answer to my question about not being able to access my external drives came back to me as a three paragraph answer with references to “gvfs mounts” that I can easily manipulate - I don’t consider this “learning my operating system". I consider this “learning to code”.

And it’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s that it’s just not my gifting.

Thanks again for all the replies.

There's no "gift" involved in learning to use console commands. It's a matter of research, reading documentation, etc. to learn how they work, then just learning and experience after that. The only gift that might be involved is one of attitude. People who've convinced themselves ahead of time that they can't use the command-line are going to have a harder time than those who just dive in and start learning it without thinking about it too much. It's really just another tool.

I just have a collection of useful commands pasted into a text file that I can call up any time.

Got it!

Thanks to all.

It's totally disorganised, and probably not so applicable for MX, since it's a mish mash of arch/pacman stuff, plus ad-hoc stuff like commands for manually adding vboxusers group and setting up shared folder in virtualbox , creating symlinks, etc. It's more to do with the fact that I multiboot many distros and may forget relevant commands needed for each.

Plus, some internet radio url links for my favourite stations because for some distros, the default nomenclature for radio stations in lollypop doesn't work.

asqwerth wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:04 am I just have a collection of useful commands pasted into a text file that I can call up any time.

It's a personal cheat sheet. Doesn't everybody do that? It's like taking notes while studying.

komer wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:37 am

asqwerth wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:04 am I just have a collection of useful commands pasted into a text file that I can call up any time.

Could you, please, share that text file?

Mine is fairly organized. I have a personal "bin" directory in my path (actually /scratch/bin/ to which is a symlink at /home/username/bin that points to it) where I keep personal shell scripts. One of those shell scripts is "m" (/scratch/bin/m) that brings up a personal menu in the terminal. /scratch/bin/menu.txt is just a text file that I maintain with vim (or use any text editor). It's an attachment with this post. Lots of ancient stuff because I never delete from it, just add or edit.

Also, I keep a text file on my desktop just for a scratch pad. It's named Notes.txt and I'll attach that also. Hopefully nothing secret in there.

Also, FYI, you can also type "help" into a terminal and pull up a very useful list of shell commands. I think this is pretty universal across versions.