Your first steps on Linux

Ok, so you have managed to install Linux on your computer. You have started it and logged in. You now wonder what comes next.

Open a console

A console is text-based window where you can enter commands for your Linux. To start a console, type ALT_F2 and enter konsole. You should see a screen like this:

The background can be black, white, green, any color. So can be the font. "tweedleburg" is my hostname, it can be different for you. Anyway, most important is you can write into it. What you write are commands to be executed. For example the command firefox will start the firefox browser:

From now on, we will no longer use graphical files to show you what to do, but a box like the following:

tweedleburg:~ # firefox

ok? Super, let's go on. You can also auto-complete your command. Type

firef

and then the tabulator key once or twice. The system will show you all available commands starting with firef or complete your command automatically.

File commands

You can list the files in your directory using the command ls, for example:

tweedleburg:/etc/apache2 # ls
charset.conv         httpd.conf   mod_autoindex-defaults.conf  mod_status.conf     ssl-global.conf  ssl.key      vhosts.d 
conf.d               listen.conf  mod_info.conf                mod_userdir.conf    ssl.crl          ssl.prm
default-server.conf  magic        mod_log_config.conf          mod_usertrack.conf  ssl.crt          sysconfig.d
errors.conf          mime.types   mod_mime-defaults.conf       server-tuning.conf  ssl.csr          uid.conf

You can find out how much space is available on your disk by typing df -h (disk free, human readable):

tweedleburg:~ # df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             917G  205G  667G  24% /
udev                  2.0G  164K  2.0G   1% /dev
/dev/sdb2             294G  274G  5.4G  99% /mnt/sdb2

On the directories beneath the root ("/"), there are 667 GB free. But under /mnt/sdb2, there are only 5.4 GB available.