Your Grandmother Is Bald and Wears Dentures

No one ever tells you that your grandmother wears a wig and that her teeth are false.  You just grow up thinking that her hair looks kinda plastic, like your doll’s, but that makes perfect sense because she’s like a big plastic doll that you love to play with anyway.  Then one day, you learn the truth.  It doesn’t matter how, you just do.  That day becomes a line that separates your life; not knowing/knowing. From that day forward, you’re tempted to start picturing in your mind what she looks like bald and smiling with gums.  Of course, that’s too horrific, so you don’t stay there too long, but for the rest of your life, it creeps in.  And the older you get, the more of a reality it becomes. 

Facing the command line this week was like that image creeping in.  Only I stayed there and faced it.  It was pretty ugly. (With all due respect to my grandmother who couldn’t have been ugly to me if she had three heads and looked like an angler fish, I just loved her that much) But I faced it, because the command line, without the shine of the GUI, is the heart and soul of the system and since its my new toy to play with, I don’t care that it looks a little strange, I just wish it was a little easier to get along with.

I have to confess that I had a lot of trouble with it this week.  I referred to other websites and viewed youtube videos to reinforce the lecture.  I thought if I approached it from different angles it would come together.  Tuxfiles has become a good resource for me.  The explanations are simple.  The CBT’s with Arthur are also helpful especially if you stop and start them while practicing on the VM.  I picked up nice tips like type “clear” to get you to a clean fresh command prompt . 

I admit I was confused by the Computerhope Add Linux/UNIX Useradd Sheet;

SYNTAX

useradd [-c comment] [-d home_dir] [-e expire_date] [-f inactive_time] [-g initial_group] [-G group[,...]] [-m [-k skeleton_dir]][-p passwd] [-s shell] [-u uid [ -o]] login

useradd -D [-g default_group] [-b default_home] [-f default_inactive] [-e default_expire_date] [-s default_shell]

 It listed a whole lot of switches that we didn’t use in our command line:  $ sudo useradd -g newuser -G users -m newuser and I guess I’m just not far enough along to piece together what should be in there and what shouldn’t.  These sheets are probably excellent references for someone following the sequence, I keep getting distracted by the teeth in the glass.

Someday, I’ll probably start to see the beauty in the design of the commands. I did watch a youtube video of someone hacking into a system and obtaining someones user and password, changing it and then accessing their files.I can see there is an art to it, although that hacking was like graffiti art .  It did show me however that the order exists andit can be mastered.

 Downloading the Webmin and acessing Ubuntu was pretty much without incident.  Following installation instructions has been far easier for me than compiling and excuting command lines, even when they are configured for me. I did grasp that you have to be the root user to make these changes and in Ubuntu we have to use sudo to become the root user.

 I think I just would have felt more comfortable  with my work this week if I could snap off a command line through a little more instinct and a lot less refering to my command charts.  But the truth is out and my life has been now separated between not knowing the command line exists/knowing it exists and I can’t really go back.  I still like the shiny new GUI but I just can’t shake what lies beneath.  I can’t resist looking.  Underneath is the truth, but maybe I just can’t handle the truth.