Re: BASIC HELP

[joost@pc47.mpn.cp.philips.com]

On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, BOB'S MAIL wrote:

> I log on and get the '$' prompt and except for a few things like vi and
> emacs I can do nothing.  For example, I answered the queries for smail
> yet from root or /usr/bin/ I get the error message saying bad command
> when I enter 'smail' I even can list smail, see it listed and get the
> same error message when enter smail.  I list RXW permission I ls -l

In unix, the current working directory is not searched for executables,
unless you put it explicitly in your PATH variable.  By default, this
isn't the case on Debian systems.  Try "echo $PATH" and check that there
is no "." in the list of ":"-separated directories.  If you type "export
PATH=$PATH:." then your working directory will be in the search path.
Smail is actually in /usr/sbin and that directory is most likely not in
your path either.  Unless you're root, you won't really need any of the
programs in the /sbin and /usr/sbin directories.

Smail is not a user front-end program, but a mail transport agent that
runs in the background, waiting for programs to connect to it while it
listens on your system's TCP/IP port 25.  Only root can bind to that port,
so it's not much use trying to run smail as normal user anyway.  Not that
it would make much sense for root either to read or write mail using
smail, sendmail, qmail or exim directly.  What you want is a program like
elm, mutt, pine, mh, xmh or emacs.

> I have 4 Linux books and none of them say what I should do once I get
> the $ prompt!  Mounting a filesystem didn't seem to help but I may not
> have done that right.  There is something VERY basic I am missing, the
> books don't mention it. 

When you're at the shell prompt, you're not supposed to do anything.  You
can do a lot of things, but that all depends on what you want to do.  For
example type "ls" to see a listing of files.  Type "man ls" to read the ls
manpage.  Type "man bash" to read the shell's manpage.
  
> Please tell me what to do, or where to go to find basic tutorial help. 

Read a book about the bash shell.  Read a book about general unix.  Surf
to sunsite.unc.edu/LDP, www.ugu.com or www.geek-girl.com.  Look at the
Debian web site at www.debian.org, there are some documents somewhere. Look
in /usr/doc, every package has some files in a directory under /usr/doc. 
Install the doc-linux-text or doc-linux-html package and read some howto's
(especially the dos2unix howto,) or read them online on sunsite.  Install
the package dwww on your computer, to browse your system's online
documentation more conveniently.

Try a general book on unix first, that will give you an overview and make
you feel more comfortable.  If you already have some dos experience, read
the dos2unix howto, that might explain a lot in a relatively short time.

Cheers,


Joost