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Well, I think I need to take this post to explain what’s been keeping me busy before I get back to my lesson-type blogs.

What I’ve been doing has certainly been about Linux too.

I’m setting up a small business to provide virtual assistant services to people who have web businesses, but that’s more like a vehicle by which I can train interns to help me with my own work-load, and also to see to it that I’m not the ONLY one who knows how to access various websites that I’ve set up for missions and ministries. Since I’m starting this business on a shoestring, I’ve had to be careful not to buy more than I can afford at any given time.

I did get a good deal on computer desks on a Boxing Day sale at WalMart, but I’m still scrounging for free computers that others cast off, because I know that for the most part I can get them up and running with a Linux distro.

In fact, this will strike you as good news if you are a keen linuxer; I intend to run my business on Linux operating systems only, and will offer all my training courses on that alone. I hope to convert all my student/interns to favour Linux above all else! I want to train them to troubleshoot their own problems, and hope that out of these people will arise some who will take on the challenge of offering truly excellent technical support in our city of Saskatoon to all those who will start switching to Linux.

It makes me glow to think I may have a part in spreading a good thing!

However, this stage of fixing, and borrowing parts from one old computer to make another one operational, and the hours it takes to install operating systems like OpenSuse 10.3 (especially if there’s a glitch and I have to do it all over again)… whew, it does call for extra doses of patience!

Friends are becoming aware of my need and are offering me their old boxes from the basement, and that’s okay because when I get a system all set up, I’ll be happy to give it away to a needy person, once I have a good set of training computers set up.

Really, I’m only asking God for four right now. I think I can train best if I have small classes for now.

Once this business is roaring along, you may find that I’m giving more updates here, and will have more detailed reports to give on how to do various things. For now I’m begging more time to get it all set up. Please?

Thanks!

I was starting an entry on using pico in shell last time, but a long distance call came in and swallowed up all the time I had saved for this blog.

Things have got still busier for me in the last two weeks, as I’m preparing some offices for a business I will start in January. Literally, I’ve been away from my computer for about three days in a row, both last week and this week. That means I’m way-way-behind in a lot of things.

On top of everything else, my old computer refused to accept a new hard drive when I tried install it over Dec 1-3, so I had to give up and get another computer. Setting it up ate up a couple of days too!

So-o, I’m begging off here, and may not get back to this until January. Even then, my schedule may be rocky at first, as I’m going to be takiugn on interns, and until I’ve taught them the basics, I will still be very short on time for my usual blog entries. Once my internship plan is rolling along smoothly, I’ll be able to delegate some of my work to them, and get back to writing here and in other areas of commitment with more focus and time.

May you have a blessed Christmas and New Year, and may all the interruptions that happen to you, be for improvements and greater success in the end too.

I’ve had another personal experience from which to draw some good advice.

At our Canadian Thanksgiving my brother announced that he had bought himself a new computer because the old one had died. It would only go as far as BIOS and that seemed to indicate he had no hard drive any more.

Well, I’d been thinking of replacing a hard drive in my own computer but since I’d never done it before I was a little hesitant. Suddenly I had an idea. If Tom’s computer was now garbage I could take it home, find some cheap, second hand hard drive and try installing on that computer first, before I bungled up mine. If it didn’t work out I would not have lost anything but some time.

I took his old box and keyboard home and eventually had time to fire it up and see. Sure enough, BIOS didn’t seem to know it had a hard drive any more. It must be toast.

Another day, walking home from downtown I stopped in at a computer store I had not been to for years. They seemed to have used ones to sell. I was able to get a used 8 GB hard drive for $25. A little steep if hard drives are suppose to be less than a $1 per GB these days, but I decided to take it.

When I got to opening up Tom’s computer I discovered that the cable plug had fallen out of the old hard drive. Hmmm! That might explain a lot. I plugged it in, and found room just above it to slide in this one I had just bought right above the old one. I got them both plugged in and turned the computer on to see what it would do.

Well! Now it complained that the Master drive had failed, but in BIOS it appeared to know it had two drives.

I went back online in my own computer to research this, and was pretty sure it had to do with Master-Slave settings. It took another day or two to find the right diagrams for those little tiny caps you put over two pins. I learned that yes, when you have two drives, they can’t both be master. One has to have first rights to kick in, and the other takes second fiddle.

The first couple of setting configurations I tried still gave me that “master drive has failed” message. Then I learned online that if I set both of the drives to “Cable Select” then the hard drive plugged in at the end of the ribbon cable would be the Master. That would work, I decided. The newer 8 GB drive would be at the end, so if the other drive wasn’t working right, I could still check it, but not need to count on it. (Tom had hoped to get some email addresses off the old drive).

I decided to try installing a Linux Distro, so I could partition and format the drives. It seemed concerned about mounting a Win96 drive, which threw me off a bit, until I remembered that the used drive I had bought had come out of an old Windows computer. In the partitioning stage I was able to change the setting so it would be formatted as a Linux drive. Presto! Then things began to roll forward!

Unfortunately I had my back turned, facing my own computer when the first CD was done, and didn’t get the second on in on time, so the installation was interrupted. I needed to get on with some other work, so I’ve left it. But now the extra Distros I had ordered from ShipLinux have arrived, and I’m hoping to try installing Ubunto over lunch today on Tom’s old computer.

If I can salvage those email addresses for Tom he’ll be a happy camper, and I’ll have a spare computer for an internship plan I have in mind for the new year! That makes two happy campers here!

Moral for you: old computers can be salvaged and yes, you can install a hard drive yourself!

I was going to go on with the lessons on using command line commands in the shell, but I’m pressed for time so I’ll just share another personal experience that may be of help to you.

I’ve had a problem the last few weeks with doing my regular Saturday update to my Suse 10.1. I suppose mainly because I’ve learned NOT to try to update the kernel. The Yast Updater doesn’t want to let me update the files I’ve marked because I won’t proceed on certain other files where it finds discrepancies.

What to do?

Well, I went online to see what reviews and news there was about Suse 10.3 now that it is out. Does it have the same problem with the Zen Updater, or is that fixed? I was happy to see that is not a problem any more.

So then to find a place to get this Suse 10.3. I could, of course, download the ISO file and burn it to CDs or a DVD. However, I’ve tried that in the past, and found it took hours and then was not always successful in the burning the ISO to disk. I’ve ordered from online stores which do the burning for us, and sell the disks at very reasonable rates. They are lightweight and easy to send in the mail.

Linux is always free, but people can charge you for the physical disks and the mailing, and any special services they give you. You do NOT have to pay large sums to put any Linux distro on your computer.

Sigh! I could not find the budgetlinuxCD site I have bought from before - he must have taken down that site.

So I did some Google searches, and compared prices. I settled on the site, shiplinux.com for their lowest prices and the chance to get several distros at once. The Suse 10.3 DVD was only $2.99. If I spent $10 I would get free shipping. So I clicked on three other distros, Mandrivia 2008, Fedora Core 7, and Gentoo Live CD. (only $1.49)

However, I discovered a problem with the shopping cart. I was required to register and check my email to use the shopping cart. No email arrived to confirm my registration, but I decided to try to make my purchase. Before I got to the payment step, it stalled with a message that my choice for shipping, US mail, was invalid. Yet I had not made a choice.

There was an area to attach a note to my order. I tried that and explained what had happened in case that would go through to the site owner. No go.

I waited until Monday in case the owner was out of town over the weekend. (Though a shopping cart is suppose to work even when unattended). I tried again on Monday, and still came to the same blockage. So I went to the Contact page and send a message. When I checked my email later in the day I had one from the owner, saying the problem had been fixed, and I should try again, and for my trouble he would throw in an extra distro free of charge. I suggested Centos 5.

Now I’m waiting for them in the mail. I’m thinking they should be here early next week.

The moral here? Shop around, and if you run into a problem with your purchase have the patience to report it, for you will likely get extra for your trouble.

I need to interrupt my series of Linux lessons in this blog to give you some lessons learned through personal experience.

First, do not update the kernel in Suse 10.1 - at least, not on this computer!

I had that experience one weekend the beginning of September. I normally do my backups and then an update through Yast on Saturdays while I’m buzzing around the house doing my cleaning, etc. When the updater pointed out there was something new for the kernel I thought nothing of it and left it checked. Sunday morning when I rebooted my computer I had serious problems! I couldn’t login to Suse 10.1

Thankfully I could still get into my older Suse 9.3 on the second hard drive. After two long days of trying to solve the problem, and finally realizing that the first drive was toast, I re-installed Suse 10.1 on the second drive and managed to keep my files intact. Praise God!

The weekend of our Canadian Thanksgiving that happened again. Everything was coming along so nicely, what harm could there be in a kernel update? This time I could login, but my sound was gone, and I couldn’t connect to go online! It didn’t take quite as many hours to come to the conclusion that I had to re-install my Suse 10.1 again, but it sure is tricky to see to it that the system files are replaced, but not my personal files.

I tell you, I shouted “Hallelujah!” when I saw I had succeeded!

Well, this week I’ve had another lesson, albeit something different. Last Friday night my favourite internet radio station suddenly went dead. I clicked on their blue button several times, and no-go. It was nearly time to shut down for the night anyway, so I didn’t make much of it. But the next day and for the next four days. I could NOT get that station. Everything else was working fine.

For about a week or so they had been offering about five formats for receiving their streaming audio, now I discovered they offered only Windows Media and Adobe Flash. Well, this is a linux system, so the Windows Media does me no good. I did some hunting on their site and found a notice that they were now offering only these two most popular formats. Oh no!

Well, I checked and found I had a flash player, but to be very sure I went download the Adobe Flash player. I’m new to installing individual programs in Liinux so after trying two of the three ways described there, I was getting rather frustrated. Besides I was beginning to pine for my BBNradio.org. I missed it a lot!

I had other obligations so I didn’t work on the problem continuously. I could still switch to another internet station and get nice music there (though after a while I realized they were replaying the same stack of CDs over and over again).

I snitched a half hour here, and another there, over a couple of days, and discovered that I had the Adobe Flash player installed; all I had to do was move or link two files from the player to Firefox. Yes, but where were they? I couldn’t find them.

Finally, Tuesday evening I got back earlier after supper than usual, so I prayed about it, and went to look on the forums for dialogues with others who might have had the same problem. Within about 15-20 minutes I’d found such a forum thread, followed the instructions for locating those two files,libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt and how to create symbolic links (sim-links).

Just in case someone else is hunting for this information I want to spell out the steps here.

1. Open your super-user file manager where you have to log in with your root password.
2. Navigate to the directory /usr/lib/browser-plugins/
3. Since you are really in Konqueror you can divide the window into two by clicking on Window on the top menu, and then on “Split view left/right” (or Split view Top/Bottom if you prefer).
4. In the second window navigate up one and then to firefox/plugins/
5. Now grab with your cursor the file in the first window, libflashplayer.so, and drag it over the divider line to the firefox/plugins/ folder - right-click and hit “Link here” on the popup menu.
6. Grab the other file also, flashplayer.xpt and drag it over, and also right-click and hit “Link here” on the popup menu.
7. There. Close the file manager Close your Firefox if it is open and re-open your Firefox.
8. Try a site and link that calls for your Adobe flash player to jump into action. See if it doesn’t do it nicely!

I am happy to say I have my BBNradio.org playing again all day or as long as my computer is on. Just be patient and keep learning to do better research for your linux solutions. They are out there.

Before I ever tried or owned a computer I read about them, and decided that what I needed most for my writing career to take off and prolific was to have a computer. That would put an end to pausing to throw the typewriter carriage back to the left at the end of each line. And glory be - I wouldn’t have to crumple a sheet of paper and start over every time I made a typo! I could fix it all perfectly first and then print my articles, stories, and documents. Ah-ha! the end of white-out and correcto-ribbons! I went through so many of those.

Well, when some people get to a computer they often look for the games, and they do nothing but play boring games. However, you may be one of the many millions, who like me, want your computer to be a writing machine. Guess what, a linux operating system is ready to help you with this in a handful of fine ways.

If you are looking for a fancy word processing program, most distributions of Linux come with AbiWord, KWord, (part of the KOffice suite) and the OpenOffice.org which is every bit as good or better than MS Word. But there are some smaller, lean/mean text programs hidden in the system too. Let’s discover those just now.

There are 3 or 4 plain text editors that will pop up in your console when you issue a brief command, like;
vi (brings up the vi editor). To get out of it, use this command: ESC :q
It has more complicated commands to learn. It’s the oldest and had loyal users.

joe (brings up the joe editor). To exit use Ctrl+K+X to save and quit, or just Ctrl+C to quit without saving. It uses the control key (^) plus two other letter keys to get around. Like Ctrl +K+H gets you help and a list of all the commands.

pico (brings up the pico editor). To quit this one, use Ctrl+X This one keeps the command clues at the bottom of your screen all the time, so you don’t have to memorize them. You’ll note that here it is just the Control key plus one other letter, so it is more simplified.

These are still fairly new to me. I need to try them a bit more often, but I do see that they can take the place of a lot of scribbles on scratch pads, if I need to make quick notes in a legible form, and not wait for a big hefty wordprocessor to open, or I don’t want hidden codes to format my text body.

There are a number of other such plain editors in Linux that use a graphical interface. The first time I installed Mandrake I discovered GEdit by Gnome. I liked it a lot right away. It reminded me of Textpad which I’d been using in windows, and I was instantly at home in it. Then I discovered KWrite and Kate which are part of the KDE desktop suite of programs. Presently I use Kate the most. It’s the first program I open in the morning for my journaling and writing hours, and it’s the last program I close at night. I usually have a row of tabs (files) open at once, and switch back and forth willy nilly, doing all I need to do except when I have to produce a formatted document for someone else.

Documents done up in a word processor will always have hidden codes for even the most basic punctuation. If I copy and paste those passages into a web page, I’m bound to have strange greek-looking symbols tossed into the page. Then I’m stuck with the unhappy job of going through the coding to find the punctuation marks and spaces, and doing them over in a plain text document.

Some people do all their web design from scratch in a text editor. I guess I still like the features of Quanta Plus best (it has Kate incorporated into it), but we can talk about that another time.

For now, don’t hesitate to try out various plain text editors. Sooner or later you’ll find one that fits you like a smart glove!

The weekend of September 9-10, just a week after Labour Day, was a tense time over a kernel panic. Actually, I believe my primary hard drive crashed and died. But that’s in retrospect.

So I’ve decided to interrupt my series of lessons to share my experience, because there are some key lessons there for you if you are new to a Linux computer environment.

On Saturday, between doing cleaning chores inside and out of the house, I usually do a backup and update my computer. Those take time, so they can do their thing while I’m doing other stuff. This time I did my upgrade first and noticed it was delivering a new kernel. There was a note to reboot, but I was busy so I put it off all day. Forgot about it in fact, until Sunday morning when I tried to open my computer for my prayer journalling.

What?! Not able to login? What’s this screen full of error messages?

I didn’t have time to deal with all that, so I shut the computer down and hurried off to church. Later, about 5 PM I decided to find out what was up.

I was able to get to a login screen, but only got into my older SUSE 9.3 operating system which is on the second hard drive. I dug in for some hours of research on those error messages. The SUSE 10.1 edition I had installed last fall was just locked to me. Finally, about 11 PM I went to bed, when I realized I was too sleepy to make good decisions. Because I’ve lost files in the past because of hasty decisions, I was trying to be patient and deliberate in the things I tried.

Monday I went back at it right after breakfast. I tried various things I had learned the night before, including repairs from the installation DVD. When I found myself going in circles, I logged back into the older working system, Suse 9.3, and did more research. I even brought my meals to the computer to break this deadlock the sooner.

Well, I took time to go out to welcome the gift of a used garden shed when it arrived. But then I was back at this computer.

About mid-evening I came to the conclusion that the computer wouldn’t let me fix anything on the older primary hard drive. When this computer was given to me several years ago, the owner told me the hard drive (10 GB) might go on me. I had no problems with it. It was bigger and faster than the 6.2 GB drive that came with the computer I bought in 1999, and which started my online adventures. But a few years ago when high speed came to my small town, and I realized that this computer had the required ethernet card I decided to transfer the 40 GB drive I had bought for the older computer to this one, and make this my main computer. Up to now I’ve had no problem running at least two operating systems on here, (and now I’m VERY glad I did!)

My solution in the end, was to re-install SUSE 10.1 again, but make sure all of it, especially the bootloader, were on the bigger newer drive. (The installation process would NOT let me touch the old hard drive).

My BIOS doesn’t show that 40 GB drive. I guess the old one is old toast now, and I should get help to switch the larger one to the Primary position. But whew, at about 12:30 am I knew that things were going to work, and I went to bed rejoicing that I was able to keep my personal files untouched for both systems through all this. The following morning I just had to find time to change font sizes in all areas back to what I like.

During the install i ended up entering my user profile twice and once as a ‘guest.’ This ended up being a hassle because now I was suppose to switch users all the time at login and shutdown. It took me another couple of days to discover where to change the settings so that my old user profile logged in automatically, and the others were deleted.

Well, except for the ‘guest’ user. I keep that one in place so that if ever I’m showing someone else how my SUSE 10.1 system works, I can log in there, and they never get to see my personal files. It just provides me a bit of security for private stuff.

But yes, I lost some time over one full day and a bit more, but now I’m back into my old busy work routines again, and wiser for the experience.

Main lessons to learn here;
Patience, patience! Don’t rush or you may lose important data
A dual boot computer with more than one system on it can be a huge blessing for problem solving.
Faithfully, regularly do back-ups. You never know when you may have to-reinstall your system, and though that is not too hard, your personally created files are NOT on the installation disk.

Oh, another thing; during the re-install, I was very careful not to set any partitions for reformatting that had my files on them, even though I did resize some to make room for the /root and bootloader. That proved to be extremely wise in not losing them. Not everyone may realize that if you are new to installing Linux.

When I switched to Linux I learned a lot from the mistakes I made. Old habits from Windows were my downfall in several instances. For example, when I ran into a problem and things seemed frozen, I hit Alt-Ctl-Del keys to simply sigh and re-boot like I was used to doing in my Windows 98. Wrong thing to do! Or, when I forgot how to shut down, I just turned off the computer. Wrong again!

Linux systems have their own process for shutting down. You may have set up your system at installation to allow you to simply click an item on your KDE menu and then “Shut down” and it all happens for you. But if you want to see the process, you must be in a terminal, switch to root user with the “su” command, and then give it the proper shut down command:

shutdown -h now

At least, that’s if you are the only user of the computer, meaning you are not on a network, and you don’t have a dual boot (with another operating system on this computer).

Your computer will give you a message like this: Linux is going for system halt NOW Then it will show you every step of the process as it closes down all the functioning programs. Mind you, it is a good idea to close all the programs yourself before you give this shutdown command. Still, it has various technical duties, and since Linux is transparent, you will see lines zip by in your terminal showing what your system is checking and shutting down. When it is finished it will give you another message such as; System halted or Power down.

There. Now you can press the power OFF button. No sooner.

I remember one time when I had just pressed the power off button as I was at a loss to know what to do next. When I tried to power up again the computer kept asking me for commands to fix things, and since I didn’t know what they should be, I couldn’t get back into my system! I was locked out for days! I had to use a different computer to go online and cry for help.

If you only want to reboot the computer, give this command instead; shutdown -r now

However, believe me, you won’t need to reboot nearly as often as you did in Windows!

If you are connected to a network of computers you can do damage to the other computer on the network if you give the above commands. So you can plan a certain time to shut them all down at once with this command: shutdown -h 20:01

That will turn everything off at 8:01 pm. Or if you only need to everyone five minutes notice, try this one; shutdown -h +5

Let’s say you have two or more users on your computer. You do not have to shut down or reboot to switch to the other user’s system. In fact, you could run programs in several user modes. I just read that you can use the Alt+F2 keys to pull up a window that allows you to do that. Hmm.. . I didn’t know that. I have switched to root whenever I open a program and it requires me to log in a root before I can proceed. No problem. I haven’t really had a need to switch to another user, but I think I saw a place where I could click on something to do that. I’m sure there’s more than one way to do this. Just rest assured that other operating systems don’t allow this, but Linux does. If you need to, the Alt+F2 is an easy one to remember.

Next time we’ll look at some text editors. We’ve got a smorg to choose from!

I’m as curious as the proverbial cat, and I’ve just found out what some of the directories and folders in an Linux operating system are for - so of course, I’m eager to share this information with you. That’s assuming you are as nosy as I am.

Still at the command line in your terminal… or if you’ve left, you open the terminal window again with a click on that monitor screen.

Let’s explore some of the system directories and see what’s in them.

At your command prompt type; ls
(that’s a small l, not the number 1 and it means ‘list the files in this directory”)

This should give you a list of all the files.

You can swiftly switch to other directories by typing; cd [and the dir] and hit [enter]

For instance, if you type; cd /user
you will be in a directory with files that are needed by all the users on this computer.

Try: cd /boot
These are the files related to starting up your computer and system.

Try; cd/root
Now you are likely to run into a warning that you don’t have permission to go there. If you become the super-user or “root” person, you will have access, but this is locked up so that only those who know what they are doing can go there. (This doesn’t touch the fact that you might be a novice and be the owner and root of a system you don’t fully understand - yet).

Another directory like that is sbin. Try it just so you will remember; cd /sbin
Yes, it wants you to be root. Okay. If you are root and know the password, then you can still get to see those files. Type: su (that stands for Super User) and hit enter. When it says password, type in your root password, whatever it is; ********
Hit enter, and lo, you can now try the other command.; cd /sbin
and you will be in promptly.

These are the files that run your whole system, so you only want to peek, not do anything with these files just yet.

Here’s a few more to explore; cd /tmp
This is the directory for temporary files. They are suppose to disappear when you shut down the computer. I’ve noticed that isn’t always true.

Try; cd /var
Your computer stores files that have variable lengths and sizes in here.

Try one more; cd /lib
This stands for libraries. Many programs share the library of files they need to run, and they are all found here. The programs depend on these files, so sometimes they are referred to as dependencies.

Let’s go back home to your user’s files - the ones you have created and most often are looking for; cd /home/[yourusername]

Once there, let’s say you want to find the hidden files that start with a . dot - type; ls -a
Interesting, eh?

Oh, there are some more directories if you have things like a floppy drive, a cdrom drive, a DVD drive, etc.
/floppy
/mnt
/cdrom

However, we will explore those some more next time. We’ll also learn how to shut down and reboot you computer without messing up.

Thank you for your patience as I’ve been off on very practical and heavy-duty responsibilities with my Dad’s estate and with moving myself and all my stuff into a wee little house in the city.

I am now buckling down to work again. So I’ve just been checking to see what I was doing here before, and where I left off. As I see it, I was working my way through an online course in Linux on the linux.org site, and then summarizing the key thoughts or lessons I feel are important to share with others on this learning curve.

There is so much you can do in Linux that is much like in Windows. You click links or icons and things happen. But there is much more open to you if you are willing to learn some basic commands at the terminal. I confess, I have mixed feelings about that. I want to be a smart guru type too, but knowing what cryptic codes to type at the command prompt is plain scary.

Let’s plunge in. It’s bound to get easier once we understand some of it.

You click on that icon on the perimeter of your screen that looks like a TV or monitor. Up comes a window with a command prompt. (Do you recall working with a DOS computer yeas ago? This is a lot like that. Only instead of a C:/ prompt, you now are in a BASH shell. That’s an anacronym for “Bourne Again Shell” - named after someone.

You’ve most likely set up a user for yourself, so the prompt is likely to be your user name, and your IP address, like this; ruth@207-47-212-213:~>
It can be other things too, depending on your setup.

Let’s try out some basic commands. AT that prompt type;
cd /

That brings you to the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at the system tree) of all the files in your computer. Most commands have to be made while either at the root of your system, or in the directory where you want to affect the files. So we’ll be needing that “cd” command quite often.

But if you now try this command;
cd /root
which is different from the one above…. you now get a “Permission denied” response. Huh? What’s with that?

It means that you can’t get into that directory without first switching into your role as root user. We’ll get to that in a bit. Here’s some other basic commands you can use as an ordinary user;

ls
(that’s a small L and an s) It stands for “list the files please.” If you include a switch, -a, as in;
ls -a
it will provide you with a list of all the directories and files in that directory, including the hidden ones that start with a period, .

Now that you can see what’s in there, type;
cd /bin
See? That has got you inside the bin directory. Now type;
ls
Hmm! Before the list was all in blue (directories), now we have different colours for the files.

Incidentally, I’ve learned that bin is a very important part of our linux system. You might associate that word with garbage bins. Think of it instead as storage bins in your estate’s warehouse or special pantry. Your wealth is carefully sorted out and stored there.

Do you want to know where all the “gears” are? Your configuration files? Okay, you can back-track by typing;
cd ..
which gets you back out of bin and then you can type;
cd /etc
But a short-cut is available too. Just type;
cd /etc
and there you have leaped into this other folder. To see what’s there, you type, naturally;
ls
Whew! here’s a lot of files!

We’ll pick up and learn more next time…. I don’t want to overwhelm you all at once.