Victory in our time

Admittedly I'm a little giddy right now. I have just spent the last couple of hours sucessfully "playing" around in Ubuntu and it is exhilarating.

I really enjoyed the VIM tutorial, I found it to be well written, easy to understand, and incredibly helpful. As suggested, I took my time with the tutorial (about and hour) and repeated the exercises a few times to make sure they were familiar. Admittedly I still went online and printed up a "cheat sheet" to have handy should something slip my mind.

Next I used Nano to configure the shell to automatically show hidden files at both the ls and dir prompts. I had no problems with the "show hidden files" configuration but the dir prompt did not work, so I used "history" to display my command history and realized I had typed "lis" instead of "ls". Once a library student.....

Then I configured my sources list so Ubuntu would find an install available software and upgrades. Again, when I entered the command to install patches and upgrades I was presented with a blank screen, so I ran the history command and realized I had left out a space. I fixed the error and installed the patches/upgrades without an issue.

What I learned from these specific exercises (which has also been stated by Bruce, and the tutorials) is that Linux is finicky and it's very important to ensure your commands are precise. Duly noted.

After completing the required portion of the assignment I decided to test the waters with some of the commands we had been studying. I went into Vi and created a file called "Experiment" I then closed VI and tried $ cp Experiment Experiment2" [Enter] $dir and saw that indeed this command had written Experiment 2 and copied the contents of Experiment to the file. I then typed $ rm Experiement 2, $ dir, and checked to see that Experiment 2 had been removed. Finally I tried $ mv Experiment Experiment 2 [enter] and then $ dir and sure enough Experiment was now listed at Experiement 2. I went ahead and removed Experiment 2 and cleared the screen. For the fun of it I took at a second look at the history just to see what had been done and then went back into VI to play around with creating and manipulating files.

I will add that while I read the readings before the assignment I felt intimidated by the material because I really felt like I wasn't absorbing any of it. After my experiments this afternoon I went back through and skimmed some of the readings and really felt that I had a far greater understanding of the material because I was able to associate it back to the activities I had just completed.

All in all a very fun afternoon! I can't wait to move on.