What can I do with a shell account? (Was: New Topic)

[Acaspita]

Hello Linux Users(je)
Here I am, in my new job, quite pleasant..., but the story begins a couple of years backwards from now...
Wasting time at home, installing a free distro if Linux Workstation (it was great!, a DOS super potential!!), reading manuals from Caroline Meinel's HappyHacker site, I reached the point that I needed a shell acount, but I merely had enough money to buy a modem!! (poor times :_( (jeje)). Kept dreaming, in my high school times, that working in a software company was merely that..., a dream...
Quite a couple years later, here I am, with a user acount to manage a guest unix account..., but
What can I do with it?
Which things can I explore?
What would you do if you were me? I don't know where to start!!!
Thanks!!
Acaspita

[mrrangerman43]

Welcome to Justlinux

Well I have no idea what you are talking about, can you be a little bit more speciffic.

Do you mean what to do with Linux? If that's what you are talking about, then just about what ever you want to do.

[saikee]

Acaspita,

I believe you may have installed a Unix-like system and it boots to a shell.

You could of course tell us more about the distro because you talk of it a Unix. Many Unix just offer you a terminal. If a graphic desktop is available then this terminal command is normally used to fire it up
startx

Also if you install a modern Linux, like a Slax 6, then it will give up a graphic desktop, root log in to the graphic desktop, auto-mount all your partitions, allow you to play music, watch video on data from MS partitions........

Thus you get much more out of installing a distro that suit you best.

[Acaspita]

Sorry I didn't told you what I wanted to do..., for example, today I explored mail command, and some of telnet, but it seems that this account doesn't provide me internet, since I sent a mail to a yahoo.com domain, but resulted in an error from them miler daemon..., but well..., my question is, then: What am I able to do, not using the conventional and boring commands, in this unix account? besides telnet? I don't know were to start. Want to learn something interesting about nets in unix..., help!
Thanks
Acaspita

[JohnT]

Once you log in, you can use the many facilities that Unix provides. As an authorized system user, you have an account that gives you:

*A place in the Unix filesystem where you can store your files.
*A username that identifies you, lets you control access to your files, and is an address for your email.
*An environment you can customize.

*3.1. The Unix Filesystem

A file is the unit of storage in Unix, as in most other systems. A file can hold anything: text (a report you're writing, a to-do list), a program, digitally encoded pictures or sound, and so on. All of those are just sequences of raw data until they're interpreted by the right program.

In Unix, files are organized into directories. A directory is actually a special kind of file where the system stores information about other files. You can think of a directory as a place, so that files are said to be contained in directories and you are said to work inside a directory. (If you've used a Macintosh or Microsoft Windows computer, a Unix directory is similar to a folder.). :o

[JohnT]

Suggestion:Change the title of this thread from "New Topic" to a title that is more in keeping with the subject matter......all topics on Justlinux were once new topics.You would probably get more responses.

[Acaspita]

Title Changed John! Now waiting while I keep looking for...!!!
Regards John:D
Acaspita

[shadebug]

You can do pretty much anything from the shell if you set your mind to it. I'm going to assume that this is a shell on your computer and not a remote one (if only because you claim that it has no internet access so it seems a bit odd that you could into it from the internet but couldn't reach the rest of the internet from it).

Now, I've never been much of a hacker, so the proper unix commands and the such tend to be beyond me, but i am a particular sort of lazy which means I spend a whole load of time in the command lineand there's very little you can't do with it.

So, things I do in the shell.
Media playing: mplayer will play just about any sound file you throw at it and if you have framebuffer set up right (which I've never managed) you can actually watch films straight from a shell.
Web Browsing: Using Links and its various offspring such as elinks you can browse the internet quite comfortably. Once again, if you have framebuffer set up you'll be able to get images working too.
Office: This one's a bit trickier but installing catdoc gives you tools for reading word documents and excel spreadsheets from the command line, which can be extremely useful. It won't let you write new ones but I've never had a problem sending people ascii or cvs files, for which you'll want a nice text editor, like vi or emacs (though I won't say which, that's something you have to discover for yourself).
File Browsing: Once you know your way around you'll find that browsing for files from a gui is just plain slow. Make yourself familiar with the likes of cp, rm, find, ls, grep and anything else I can't think of at the moment and life may well be made that much more interesting
Remote access: Need to use another computer? Well you already know about telnet, but what about ssh or ssh's file transferring cousin, scp? That said, if you just want to downlaod files, you could do worse than learning how wget works (lack of wget is almost always the one thing I miss the most when I'm forced to use a windows box)
Instant Messaging: Now, there's two ways about this, the easy way and the cool way. The easy way is to instyall centralicq and it will give you a lovely semi-intuitive interface with most of your favourite IM protocols like MSN, AIM, Yahoo and ICQ. The cool way, however, is to use bitlbee. In this case you need an IRC client first, my suggestion would be irssi because I enjoy the immense scripting power it has. An IRC client is a fantastic idea anyway since it allows you to communicate via IRC, but what bitlbee does is allow you to use pretty much any IM protocol from that IRC client. You can install it yourself or use a public server. Personally i'm behind a firewall which blocks a lot of IM traffic so I use the testing server, from where I can connect to ICQ, MSN, AIM, YIM and Gtalk.

That's all i can think of right now with regards to actual functionality, but let's say a few words about pimping out that shell of yours.

As I've said, if you can get framebuffer working, which may be quite an ordeal, depending on your distro, then you can get full colour graphics going and you will declare yourself awesome. But let's think slightly less *****ious.
First off is twin. Now, I've never used twin but it's always intrigued me. Essentially it gives you a window manager from the command line, so if you crave some windowing action, this might be the tool for you, but I don't, linux has full fledged window managers which are smaller, so it always ends up seeming a bit of horn tooting.

The most important one, for my money at least, is screen. Screen is the magical wonder program to cure all the worlds ills (on that note, you can totally get console versions of distributed computing applications such as folding@home). Unfortunately it's tricky to explain just how awesome it is without showing somebody, but I'll try anyway. Screen is a detachable shell. That is to say, if I'm on my computer at home, merrily chatting on IRC, I can leave the house and get onto another computer elsewhere. From that computer I can ssh in, attach screen and the same IRC session I was using before will be there. As far as the people I was talking to are concerned, I'm still on my home computer and I never logged out. This may seem like so much pointless showboating, but it has legitimate reasons. Lets say you actually spend most of your time working in a window manager, perhaps you do lots of graphical work, but you've discovered that most of the things in your life can be run much more efficiently from the command line. So you have your music, chatting and whatever else you want, running in one of the shells. Now, you could use ctrl+alt+f# to switch between shells and have six different programs running at once, or you could use screen. As I've said, screen lets you detach and reattach sessions so they can run in the background. This means that you can open screen from gnome-terminal or whatever your terminal of choice is, and you can use the exact same instance of irssi or mp3blaster that you have running in the shell. The realy cool bit about screen, however, is it allows you to run an unlimited number of shells and cycle through them. you can even split screen it and have two different shells displayed at the same time (you could actually show the same shell twice, too, but that just gets a bit weird). The reson why this might be important, however, apart from saving you all that effort of switching back to the shell to see your messages, is that if X crashes, your computer doesn't. Lets say you have a new graphics card update and need to restart X, if you're using all the fancy graphical apps, they'll all stop, no more music, no more chatting, no more nothing, you have to log back in andd start them all up again. With screen, however, they're all running in the background, so you can go use them in the shell or you can just reattach when you get back into X and carry on as before.

Well, that was a whole load of stuff and I'm pretty sure it failed to answer your question, but I felt like saying it anyway

[Acaspita]

Awesome ShadeBug!:D Right now I`ve got a lot of things to explore!!!:D Salutes!