Unit 2

UNIT 2

Working in Ubuntu with the command line!!!
Wow, I felt like I had a lot more control this time than at any other time! I guess the fact that I am operating in a sand-box like environment of this "Shell" as to working on an actual network, off of my own "box" gave me a better feeling of being grounded! Essentially, I just made a few directories using the mkdir command and then using the cd command, I jumped form one to the next. They had simple names like "Things_I_Like," "Yukky_Things," "Iron_and_Rust" and "Severans." These would be good directories to store images or documents. When I changed directories to "Yukky_Things" I learned, the hard way about what William Shott had been saying regarding the case sensitivity of Linux (due to a typo, the system didn't recognize my request as a directory that existed), I also followed his advice regarding using underscores instead of spaces to separate words. But I got stuck in "Yukky_Things" because there was nothing in that directory and I wasn't sure where I was, so I used cd command without any filepath, so I was taken back to the home directory (root directory in this case) and then used to ls command to see all four of the directories I had created. I had to use my computer for something else and got a little panicked as I didn't have my arrow cursor. Sadly, I had to reboot and the arrow came back, so I was able to hit the "pause" button in the Ubuntu interface. Still this is the most productive session I've had with a minimum of confusion.

UPDATE

 UNIT 2.1

I have somehow muddled my way into X Windows!

Like everything I have done in the command environment, I will be surprised if I can replicate stuff I have figured out. That said, I was able to open Writer, Calc and Impress and create files in those applications, saved in my "Documents" folder. However, as a librarian/curator of multimedia I made the fatal error of saving a file with the name "Untitled." If I am able to stop VMWare and reopen the app and find my files in the "Documents" directory, I will have impressed myself. I was really happy to be working in a GUI environment briefly, especially with apps that seem to copy the MS Office apps and their tools and menus. But I know this will be leading to bigger, better and more complex things over the course of 672.