AFTER YOU HAVE LOGGED IN, try this just to get your feet wet.

If you are NOT in a graphical interface, you should just see the prompt where you can type commands. If you want to start the graphical interface, generally you type

startx

If you are already in a graphical interface, open a terminal and start typing away. There are many different terminal programs. Generally, you can find them in the menu systems that your system provides. I right click on the background and a menu pops up with a terminal option. There are also terminal programs in the program menu bar (look on the bottom or top for a button bar or such). If you can get a "run" dialog open somehow, you just have to type

xterm

to run one terminal emulator program called Xterm.

First, type the command

pwd

That will print your working directory. It tells you "where you are in the file system". On the KU unix systems, pwd for me shows /homea/pauljohn because my account name is pauljohn and my space is on the first drive "a" they set aside for user HOME storage.

Next, type the command

env

That should spit out a bunch of settings you don't understand. It is your "user environment." Gaze at them for a while, especially things like PATH and HOME.

Look at a list of files by typing

ls

at the prompt.

That shows only "visible" files. Hidden files start with a period.

To see them type ls -la.

Look around in the files you see. If you want to see what is inside one of them, but not edit it, you can do it with the either the "less" or the "more" command, as in:

more filename

or

less filename

"more" and "less" are two, competing versions of programs that do the same thing. If your output seems "stuck" at the end of less, hit the letter "q".

-- PaulJohnson - 08 Dec 2002