Aujourd'hui, je vous propose un poème dont l'idée m'est venue lors d'une randonnée (encore une). La marche est, au moins pour moi, une activité fort inspirante. Évoluer au milieu des arbres, respirer le grand air montagneux... Il n'y a rien de tel pour réfléchir et, parfois, pour panser les diverses blessures que la vie peut nous infliger au quotidien. Sur ce, je vous souhaite une excellente lecture...
La vie offre une vue vertigineuse
Une imposante ascension piégeuse
Le pierreux sentier est certes tout tracé
Mais le gouffre il ne faudrait point contempler
Car le ravin n’est jamais bien loin du chemin
Suivant chacun de nos efforts jusqu’à demain
Il ne faut surtout pas regarder vers le bas
Ou la peur du malheur t’immobilisera
Reste plutôt concentré sur ce beau sommet
Ne prête pas cas de l’infortune passée
Fixe ton regard droit devant vers l’avenir
Ou tu auras des regrets à n’en plus finir
Le passé devrait demeurer un étranger
Ses charmes de sorcier ne feront que blesser
Ceux qui observeront ce qui n’existe pas
Autrement que dans nos illusoires émois
Si vous avez appréciez, je laisse entre vos mains le pouvoir de me le montrer (si toutefois tel était votre désir). Autrement, puissiez-vous passer une bonne et lumineuse journée!
I am well aware that most of my followers are not Linux users, or even enthusiasts. Since most of you (I expect) are beginners or only curious about an Operating System you may have heard of only a few times, I figured it would be interesting to offer you some free advice on how to learn Linux on your own.
Books
There mostly is one book I want to recommend to you, but aside from that single reference I will add this : all books related to programming will help you in your quest. Whether it is about html, css, javascript, C, python, or any other programming or scripting languages, it will serve you on your path to knowledge.
There are myriads of books about Linux and which supposedly for beginners or rather advanced levels. Often, those either are too incomplete or there merely is too complicated (or unreadable) material within them. When you are a beginner, you need something appealing and reader-friendly. Well, I believe I may have found the proper book for you! I know this one would have helped me a great deal as a beginner.
This is the one book I would recommend the most. It is an encyclopedia and the best reference you could ever put your hands on. If you do not know a command or a concept, it is in this book.
In my opinion, all its editions are worth reading. This one was published in 2017, and it is the 5th.
Regarding what you can find online... well, you can get everything you like. From premium courses (which are not worth it, honestly) to free content (which will actually help you).
Here is an incomplete list (for there is no such thing as a complete list) of websites which may help you pave your path :
Blogs : Blogs such as mine are not rare online and you will find a lot of information on them. Tecmint and howtogeek are both excellent examples.
lbry.tv : This is a newer platform which aspires to compete with YouTube. Lots of people within the Open Source community, such as DT or Luke Smith, already publish their content there. Some others exclusively publish on LBRY, so do go there if you don't want to miss out on anything!
Github & Gitlab repositories : Both are goldmines. If you want to fuel your imagination or learn new things, they are filled with projects which cannot for you to take a glance at them.
WIKIS : I cannot stress this enough. If there are wikis for your Linux distributions, it is because they are meant to be read! All of a sudden, installing ArchLinux and/or Gentoo becomes SO MUCH easier. Both distributions certainly have the best wikis out there, so... You know what you need to do!
Forums& social networks : Stackoverflow is among them the most popular, but you will also always find help on Ubuntu's Help Center. Regarding social networks, despite my opinion of them, I know that Discord, Reddit, or even Twitter are overused by developers and other computer professionals. So, do check them out ? There is also unixporn, by the way...
MOOCs : They are extremely popular these days. There is one I would recommend for French speakers on openclassrooms.com. It is called Reprenez le contrôle à l'aide de Linux.
All the resources of programming (C, javascript, python, ruby...) and scripting languages (zsh, bash, fish...).
Feedly : Not bad to keep up with trends and follow topics you are interested in.
On Your Local Machine
Without necessarily going online, you may find help aplenty on your local machine. The man command will give you access to the manual pages in your terminal. Just type man + $command_you_want_to_know_more_about.
The vimtutor will offer you a brief yet sufficient tutorial on how to use vim rather efficiently. Just type vimtutor in your terminal.
Of course, there also are info and help pages within your terminal. All that, you will discover by practicing over and over and by encountering countless error messages which you will end up becoming familiar with. Indeed, because time is your ally, if so you accept to make it...
Not So Usual A Sign-Off
If you appreciate my work, you know what to do... Do you not ?
Not long ago, I shot a video about the 5 most basic Linux commands a beginner should know. I began my learning journey with this lot, and I found it most satisfying. Of course, I spent little time in the terminal back then, compared to today, but I still felt like a magician. Have you ever performed an update from terminal ? It could not be easier, yet seeing the lines of text crazily going down in that black box is something I have never gotten tired of.
This Blog Post On Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pfD5xjANgU
5 Commands You Should Know
You will soon find out that there are a little more than 5 commands in this tutorial, but believe me, you will thank me for adding them into it.
Alright. Now, please, open up a terminal, and let's get started !
For those of you who do not know how : Press ctrl+alt+T or type terminalin your menu (or app launcher).
pwd
The very first command I decided to present you is pwd, because it is, in my humble opinion, the easiest of all. You give an input to your terminal, and a readable output comes back.
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy
If you click on the picture up above, you should see 3 things :
Pwd : Our command / our input for the terminal
/home/soimuen : My home directory. Pwd stands for print working directory. This means, Terminal, tell me where I am.
scrot : Don't mind this little guy, this is the program I use to take screenshots directly from terminal.
Pwd stands for print working directory.It literally means "Hello computer, can you tell me where I am?"
It is as simple as that.
ls
ls means list. You are simply asking your computer to list the files in your current directory, if you type a single ls. If you type ls Documents/, then you are asking your computer to list the content of the Documents/ directory.
Flags
Flags may be used with pretty much all the commands you could possibly imagine. A flag is a technical term to speak about an option which is added to a command. For example :
ls --all : this is how you added a flag to a command. You simply add "-- (dash dash) + [name of your option]"
ls -a : Most flags have a shorter way of being written. The flag above this one means "show me everything in this directory, even dotfiles". As for ls -a, it means the same thing, but it is quicker to write. Do not forget that a terminal user's philosophy is efficiency. To be even more efficient, I invite you to check out aliases.
cd
To move from one directory to another, you need to use the cd command.
As you can see in the picture up above, you can type cd in several ways. You may type :
cd Documents/ [cd + $directory_name]
cd .. [cd dot dot] : to go back one directory
cd ../../ [cd slash dot dot slash dot dot...] : to go back more than one directory.
cd OR cd ~ : to go back to your home directory
~ : to quickly go back to your home directory
mkdir
This simple commands stands for make directory. It allows you to create a folder.
Example :
cd Documents
mkdir Projects
cd Projects
mkdir Project-1
In the above example, we created a folder called Projects within our Documents/ directory and went into it to create another folder for our first project.
Of course you may also create several folders in one command :
mkdir Project-1 Project-2 Project-3 Project-Xth
touch
Let's create a file with the touch command :
touch index.html
Practical case : Let's create a new project directory for a website we wish to build.
cd Documents
mkdir Website-Project
cd Website-Project
mkdir js css
touch index.html js/script.js css/style.css
Here you go, this is the architecture of your first project. Is this not much easier than right-clicking every time you wish to create a file or folder ? I could do it all in one line, of course... I could even write a script and I would never have to type these lines ever again for creating a single website project ever again.
cp
cp stands for copy. It is the equivalent of ctrl+c & ctrl +v when running a GUI. Let's use the files we have already created in our Website-Project directory.
Example :
pwd
/home/$username/Documents/Website-Project
mkdir html/
cp index.html html/index.html
Now, we have our index.html file in 2 places : within the html directory and at the root of our project.
mv
mv stands for move. It is the equivalent of ctrl+x & ctrl +v when running a GUI. If we use the above example (with cp), we can do the same maneuver with a slight difference.
pwd
/home/$username/Documents/Website-Project
mkdir html/
mv index.html html/index.html
Now, we have our index.html file in 1 place : within the html directory. The one at the root of our directory was deleted and then pasted into html/.
To rename a file you may also use the mv command.
Example :
ls js/
script.js
cd js/
mv script.js index.js
See what I did there ? I merely renamed script.js to index.js. Easy, right ?
rm
Alright, let us now clean up all that we did in our examples. rm stands for remove.
cd js/
rm index.js
That's for deleting one file. However, you may delete several files or folders at the same time just like when using mkdir or touch. You may also remove directories with the -r flag.
cd ../..
rm -r Website-Project/
Here we go, our working directory is clean again! You will find an image down below to sum this all up.
Signing Off & News
If you want to be among all the amazing (and proudly mad) people in this community, you only need follow this blog (via email or WordPress). If you aren't following this blog yet but trust its future content will rock as the one which preceded, subscribe and get notified whenever I publish a new article.
Regarding my Patreon, I am currently working on customizing it. I would like that platform to become my main means for you to be able to support my endeavors, if you ever wish to do so. It sounds to me like the most honest way to work with you. I will soon publish a blog post about Patreon and a poll I created there (which you can find by clicking here).
I am not yet a superstar on YouTube, but you may still subscribe to my channel to support me. I am working on some new content, which I hope you will enjoy. I also intend to begin shooting French videos some time soon.
I am motivated to make my Patreon journey a success. With you! It really cannot work without you! I wish to stay away from advertisers for as long as I can, but since I also need to survive, I need your support.
What is Patreon
Patreon is an online platform which allows you to interact with and support your favorite content creators. I am quite certain you all are familiar with it, or have at least heard of it.
Why Patreon
Well, first off, because it is the one platform I knew first and I have heard great reviews about it over the years. That wouldn't necessarily get me to trust it entirely, but I'd work with it like I do with WordPress. It would simply be another way to blog and earn an honest living from my passion.
No Ads For As Long As I can
I am saying "for as long as I can" because Derek Taylor, from DistroTube, said something that made a lot of sense to me the other day. He explained why his videos are monetized and I believe he is right. Which is why, one day (when it is worth it), I intend to activate ads on my videos. With worth it, I mean when I am capable to produce quality content quickly enoughand for more subscribers than I currently have. It is not worth doing with 4 or 5 subscribers.
Here is DT's reason : according to him, Google has nothing to gain from his channel if he doesn't show ads. Having nothing to gain also means Google has nothing to lose in removing his channel. I suppose it is not much to display some ads in exchange for a free service and it also helps him pay the bills, right ?
I Am A Patreon Beginner
I am still quite new to Patreon. As a result, my page is not fully customized and I need your advice. We are a community and not only do I run this blog because it tickles my fancy, but also because it has the potential to help and inspire you.
I have created a poll on Patreon, because I need your opinion. I need you all in order to move forward with my projects. If you are interested, please click on this link.
If you wish to have a glance at my Patreon page, please click on this other link. I intend to become more active in the weeks to come and publish some of my content there.
I also wish to settle for 2 days (perhaps 3) in the week to publish my posts. I believe I will publish posts at least on Mondays and Fridays, and sometimes on Wednesdays. This should allow me to write posts for Patreon and shoot YouTube videos, since I have almost exclusively been working on my blog these past few weeks.
Signing Off
If you want to be among all the amazing (and proudly mad) people in this community, you only need follow this blog (via email or WordPress). If you aren't following this blog yet but trust its future content will rock as the one which preceded, subscribe and get notified whenever I publish a new article.
I am not yet a superstar on YouTube, but you may still subscribe to my channel to support me. I am working on some new content, which I hope you will enjoy. I also intend to begin shooting French videos some time soon.
As a minimalist, I like utilizing the most lightweighttools and programs. I want to have a simple lifestyle, and playing music directly from terminal echoes this volition. When it comes to choosing which piece of software is right for me, I will rather believe in performance and efficiency than in a falsely appealingdesign which will consume all my RAM in the background.
Discover Music On Console
What is MOC
MOC stands for music on console. It is a music player for terminal, as you may already have guessed. It is written in C and based on ncurses. Even though it is not super beautiful right out of the box, it remains a user-friendly program that is relatively customizable. With customizable, I really mean that you can change or create your own themes.
Its Default Theme
MOC Default Theme
As You can see, it is rather ugly. Usable, but ugly nonetheless. It does not look very appealing, I will give you that. Let's pimp it up a notch!
This is really easy. I swear ! You simply need to start MOC with a theme which should be in /usr/share/moc/themes.
Let's do an ls of that directory :
ls -l /usr/share/moc/themes
For that of you who noticed that I wrote lx instead of ls, do not worry! It is one of my aliases.
As you can see, there are several themes which are already available :
black theme
darkdot theme
example theme
green theme
moca theme
nightly theme
red theme
transparent background
yellow_red theme
To try one of them : Type mocp -T /usr/share/moc/themes/$name_of_theme
Red Theme
Nightly Theme
Black Theme
Yellow & Red Theme
Green Theme
Moca Theme
Example Theme
Transparent Background
Darkdot Theme
You may have noticed that some themes are very similar to each other. Like the darkdot theme and the transparent background theme. Except for the default one, all themes are rather nice and clean. Wouldn't you agree ? Tell me in the comments!
Commands to use MOC
MOC is not as powerful as some music players for terminal, such as musikcube, or ncmpcpp + mpd, but it does a wonderful job in a minimalist way.
You can control your music within MOC with the help of letters. If you press a with your cursor on a file, said file will be added to your playlist. If you press a again with your cursor on a folder, it will add all the files within that folder into your playlist.
If you press enter with your cursor on a file, it will play it. You can then toggle pause and play with your space key. If you need to entirely stop your music, press s.
To access the options between square brackets in the bottom-right corner of MOC, you need to press shift+letter. Shift+s for shuffle; shift+r for repeat.
To play the next or previous file, you respectively press n (like next) or b (like back). You can also switch layouts with l. You can save a playlist with V and delete a file from it with d.
There is also a help command. As usual, there is mocp --help, but you can also ask for help from within moc, with h.
Of course, you may press q to quit. Be careful to turn off your music however, since MOC is set up to work in the background by default.
As for the rest, I will let you find out for yourself, if you are interested. I have given to you all the necessary commands to be more than happy, but if you absolutely need to dig into it some more, do feel free to do so !
Other Music Players For Terminal
Since my intent is not to advertise the programs I use, but really to feed your curiosity, I have made a list of alternatives which may fit your needs better.
cmus : another nice one which runs with vim keybindings (wait... why aren't I using it already?)
ncmpcpp + mpd : it stands for ncurses music player C plus plus + music player daemon
I highly recommend cmus, which is written in C (like MOC) and... well, I recommend all of the above, to be fair. I may write a full review about cmus soon, and the next two if I ever decide to install them. Cmus, like moc, will satisfy both beginner and advanced users, for it is simple to install and to use, and it comes with more features and possibilities of customization that moc does not offer.
I love music players for terminal and I remember taking a lot of time picking my first one. What about you ? Did you go with the default or did you look for one which would best suit your needs ?
Signing Off & News
If you want to be among all the amazing (and proudly mad) people in this community, you only need follow this blog (via email or WordPress). If you aren't following this blog yet but trust its future content will rock as the one which preceded, subscribe and get notified whenever I publish a new article.
Regarding my Patreon, I am currently working on customizing it. I would like that platform to become my main means for you to be able to support my endeavors, if you ever wish to do so. It sounds to me like the most honest way to work with you. I will soon publish a blog post about Patreon and a poll I created there (which you can find by clicking here).
I am not yet a superstar on YouTube, but you may still subscribe to my channel to support me. I am working on some new content, which I hope you will enjoy. I also intend to begin shooting French videos some time soon.
