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Re: Newbie comments & queries



dman et al

.za stands for Zuid Afrika which is from the Dutch who founded the colony at 
the Cape Of Good Hope.

One of my colleages in the book trade specialises in cookbooks.  Amazingly he 
replied that he had a book on Linux. You can guess which one that is!  He had 
given it away to another dealer but hopefully will get it back for me.  I 
looked at the Linux Bible on line by Steve Hunger and thought it looked 
comprehensive.  With the local computer shop, who is right next door, we may 
set up a linux server for the local school, so that book could be of good use.  
Sadly, it will be a case of the blind leading the blind.  I will try and get 
one of my colleagues in the US to get me a copy of the Linux Bible in exchange 
for some stuff i am sending him just now as $49.99 is heavy stuff with our 
currency in freefall against the $. Every time I switch on the news I am worth 
less.

Last night I went through the info documentation system which i thought would 
be a good start.  Then read and played with the ls command.  I uncommented the 
lines in the .bashrc in root to give me colours for ls. I must also do that for 
my normal login shell.  In directories where there are lots of files they whizz 
off the top of the screen but piping thru less or more strips off the color. If 
you add in a --color switch then more is OK, but less gives out hidden codes.  
Lots to play with there.

Have gots lots of paper, and printer ribbons.  Found a whole box of ribbons for 
my printer free (what a luck) which the clothing chain store just down the road 
dumped when they bought a new printer.  So have  printed out a couple of HOWTO 
files - the Config-HOWTO and the Printing-Usage-HOWTO.  Some good bedtime 
reading there.

I print these out via the lpr command, having done gzip -d to undo them.  I see 
the .gz file is not there anymore, so did a gzip to zip up the .txt file again 
after printing. Lots of work but zcat redirected to /dev/lp0 does nothing, 
either from root or my normal login

I also find that the lpr command does not accept the -i command to set a 
margin, perhaps that is my printer? I can try another.

Several of you have been positively eulogic about emacs so have been having a 
look at the beginners guide.

Where has my floppy drive gone? I can find it nowhere. I can find no command in 
mc to change drive (come back PCTools, all is forgiven!) There is nothing in 
/floppy and nothing in /dev/fd

I have 16Mb Ram.  according to top I have 13.7 of which 11.8 is used and 1.9 
free. Where has this all gone! I am not doing anything yet.

Enough
Regards
Ian
    Ian Balchin
    Grahamstown, South Africa.



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