The window blinds are down and a pale paper cube hanging from the ceiling illuminates the room. Channa dhal is cooking, break is baking, and my legs are tired.
I was talking with Claudia about our “computer book” project. For a while now, I’ve been working on a little text file that explains computer stuff to my wife, in case anything happens to me. Sadly, my computer feels like a cyberdeck when I try to explain it to her. I use Firefox for browsing the web and interacting on Mastodon, and that’s cool. Almost everything else happens inside Emacs and the shell. It’s impenetrable, unless you know Emacs and the shell.
The primary goal of the book is to enable my wife to do the following:
The secondary goal involves system administration:
Some preconditions for this:
Sometimes I feel like I either need some sort of control panel for all these things, or that she needs to learn all my system administration skills.
Now, system administration is not her hobby. I’m not even sure it is my hobby! But even so, she feels like she ought to know, even though she doesn’t love it. Which is why I started writing this book.
I wonder, however. Why did I think it worthwhile to learn all this command line stuff as twenty year old? Back then, perhaps it was the promise of Usenet and email. I don’t know, it was so long ago. With the web and browsers now no longer requiring this esoteric tech I wonder how one would even get started. How do you even feel a need for it, long before you apply for shell access on a public shell access server, or a Tilde Town?
Is there a game that plays inside the shell that teaches you the joy of a shell life? Is Telehack this game?
Or is this the over-complicated Dwarf Fortress variant of the game I actually want and the game I want doesn’t exist? Would it be a worthwhile project? If the target audience is my wife, should it be in German?
After a few short minutes of enthusiasm I feel deflated.
#Life #Administration #Text
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The “game” that taught me to use shell /was/ the computer and the OS. As an antisocial teenager (who grew into an antisocial adult), I was very into computers, and my socialist tendencies led me to be very into linux and the free software movement. Without that kind of interest and necessity to learn the shell, I doubt it is a compelling environment. GUIs (and probably TUIs as well) are a more intuitive interface to most than the seemingly-inscrutable command line interface.
In my opinion, the best you can do is to automate as much as possible and implement a simple control panel which reports information on the automated and manual processes in a clear and intuitive manner. There’s no need to be shell expert to *maintain* a well-constructed working system, especially if you can access a detailed troubleshooting checklist for those things which might reasonably go wrong. An essential daemon goes down? Click a button on the panel showing you those processes and view the commands to restart the daemon, written documentation, and instructions on how to find help when the checklist fails.
– jouka 2021-09-24 23:40 UTC
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I mean, MS-DOS is kind of a shell already. Mom taught her daughters to write BAT-files and Basic, both VB and QB.
Then I saw X and Linux in a magazine.
Tried hanging out in a hacker lab at school but that was... not a good time.
After struggling with it for a while, one of those dumb “Learn Unix in 24 hours” style books was actually really good. It had just what I wanted. Pipes, grep, wc, sed, awk etc.
– Sandra 2021-09-25 06:52 UTC
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So the “how” is kinda embarrassing. Taught by mom books. I didn’t have many friends.
As for the “why”, it’s just intrinsically rewarding.
I hate knitting but do so occasionally because I like the rewards of knitted stuff.
I don’t even like drawing and painting that much.
But shell scripting is inherently just fun.
– Sandra 2021-09-25 06:56 UTC
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I just read Teiresias’ account. I love the fact that there was (is?) a Slackware variant repackaged for the blind. Teiresias’ motivation to learn seems to stem from the same drive I had: getting online. I knew what it meant to be online and talking to strangers because when we were in Bangkok 1989 to 1991 I had received a 2400 baud modem from a guy my father knew at the office, and I dialed myself into a few bulleting board systems (BBS), and I heard about Fido Net, and eventually I realised that there were some people running a BBS that got a feed from an anti-virus group on Usenet. This Usenet thing seemed to be a mythical bulleting board of all bulleting boards and I wanted to know more! I took me a while until I finally did get access. It was only there that I learned about play by email games (PBEM), got a copy of the source code, learned about Emacs and DJGPP (the DOS variant of GCC), and finally of GNU/Linux, SuSE, and one day, Slackware…
How I Got Started with Linux, by Teiresias
– Alex 2021-09-25
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ZipSpeak is no longer a thing. There is Slint, (https://slint.fr), based on Slackware, not designed for the blind but with a strong accessibility focus. The person behind it, Didier Spaier, is awesome and tends to hang out in blind Linux groups. I too was drawn to usenet and fidonet; I miss that world very much.
– 2021-09-26 06:26 UTC
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You already have a means to this - As an emacs user you can make this all part of a literate orgmode doc where the code is the documentation and the process, to run right from the “book”.
– Kristopher Browne 2021-09-30 18:30 UTC