[FM Discuss] Book idea: useful command lines

[dwp]

Hi Sylvain: Your idea is very good. I am quite troubled, and my mind  
strained, by the encyclopedic approach to command lines.

I did an exercise a couple of weeks ago for my own edification to  
learn about the not-well-explained subject of copying between a USB  
drive plugged into the OLPC and another drive; in this case the SD  
card under the OLPC. I used the "what you see and what you do" approach.

I got  the screen of the OLPC to display on my MAC by running the VNC  
Server Activity on the OLPC and a VNC Viewer (in this case on a MAC  
"Chicken of the VNC"). Both computers were on my router wirelessly.

As i entered commands in the OLPC Terminal Activity, the result would  
appear on my Mac. It was a simple matter to use the Screen Capture  
(CTRL-SHIFT-4) to select the entry and response to the command. I  
copied (dragged) these over onto the Word Document in which i wrote  
narrative.

I was also able to  show the concept of Path through directories  
(which i still have trouble with, never worrying about these things on  
a MAC:), by going through a sequence of ls -al commands, each one  
adding another level down. Then i found I had to use the NANO editor  
(which is included in the Terminal Activity) to view and edit a file  
in one directory that i found.

Sorry I can't attach my example, but i am limited to 126KB in a  
posting and it is 1.7MB . Happy to share this technique though. I  
guess it could be applied to FLOSS manual writing using the XINHA  
editor (or whatever is currently settled on). I'm not sure where to  
appropriately put it in the FLOSS scheme of things. .

Regards: David