coming next: Meganoobs guides
Originally posted on my Blog:
manerosss.wordpress.com
Hi!
For a long time I was thinking about making a new post/video series. I really enjoy making tutorials, both in the form of blog posts or as videos.
One of the many idea that I had was about making many very short and easy tutorials on how to get started with GNU/Linux. This idea comes from my love for this amazing Operating System that gave me not only a huge passion, but also the great opportunity to make a living out of it, as I recently found an IT job (with lot of GNU/Linux involved).
So at this point in life I feel somehow in debt to all those communities creating and maintaining distributions, software, wikis, etc., and also to all these youtube channels, websites and bloggers that helped me out in pursueing this interest.
This means that I started out as a MEGANOOB!
From Meganoob to lesser Meganoob!
That is a guy in its early 20’ies with absolutely zero idea about computers, processors, operating systems, bios, and everything else that somehow burned a Linux distro on an USB stick and installed this distro on its laptop.
It seems that the story is nothing exceptional at this point but by looking back at it comes to my mind that I was really a disaster with computers ehehe.
It’s worth adding that before installing Linux on it I had Window$ installed which was EXTREMELY slow. At the time that laptop was also making A LOT of noise as it was probably full of dust.
The great idea to solve this issue was to open the laptop to clean it and at the time I was pretty sure that opening a laptop wouldn’t have been too hard. In fact I managed to open it after fighting a bit with all these screws and the plastic case..
Unfortunately I didn’t really thought about the complications of closing it!
So I ended up with a crappy slow Window$ laptop, with no more dust but without half of the case ahahaha.
Also I somehow managed to damage the monitor’s backlights…
At this point I was like: “wooops I think I fucked up”.
But that gave me the push to looking for alternatives on the internet (browsing the web was the only thing I was doing with PCs). There I entered in this world called “operating systems” and to my big surprise there where Window$ alternatives available, nice!! That day I learned many few words like Ubuntu, distributions, Debian, live-image, repository and so on…
Notice that I really had no idea about what the hell all these stuff where about but somehow I understood that this Linux was a viable alternative. Plus it was also free and open-source, hurray! (I knew the meaning of “free” very well)
So as I said after burning the ISO to an USB I proceeded with the installation. Holding a nice old-school lamp at the back of my laptop’s monitor helped me go through the installation as it was pretty much dark without backlights.
And after a few minutes, with screws and pieces of plastic everywhere, with my hand still holding the lamp I got Linux installed!
From there I grew a lot. So much that I can say that I’m not a Meganoob anymore!
Now What?
This is basically how it began for me. With a bit of curiosity I got into a world that it’s still full of new things to do, to learn and to explore, with pretty much endless possibilities and with the person’s willing to push the limits as the only limit.
Everything provided free as in free speech and sorrounded by communities and projects that are extremely happy to share their knowledge and encourage everyone to use their own work so that everyone can benefit from it and devolop further, with no central parasite getting all the power for itself and hiding knowledge.
This was surely not something I was used to in the western capitalist society I was born, where money and ego reign supreme.
For me it was a natural approach as I’m by nature more intrigued by alternatives and have a sane repulsion to what’s mainstream and routine. I was scared at first but I was way more scared to follow a blind mass of people doing things without thinking and especially without learning anything new that automatically guides to self-independence.
But what if you’re not like that? What if you are willing to enter in this world but the amount of things to research, to understand, to learn and to remember are overwelming?
How to overcome the massive amount of work that needs to be done by a newcomer?
Well, here come the Meganoobs guides!
Easy tutorial dedicated to total newcomers to make the first step into the GNU/Linux world (and BSD).
What is coming.
The first guides will be about what distro to choose and how to proceed to its installation, explaining as much as possible the differences between them (such as rolling vs stable disto), what Desktop Environment/Window Manager to choose (there are tons: KDE, Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, i3, Awesome, Openbox, etc.) and considering the diverse hardware and purpose (e.g. a very old-laptop, a modern gaming PC or a Raspberry Pi).
Then I would like to proceed by explaining the differences bettween graphical software and command-line software to then concentrate many tutorial on the latter, on Bash (the standard shell), on managing the installation/removal of software and on the updating of the OS and on some very famus and useful cammand-line software (such as vi/vim) where you’ll understand how powerful, complete and faster the command-line can be and how this knowledge can be useful on other platforms such as OSX or Android (especially Temux).
By then I will introduce different other software, mainly about consciously enjoying your free time by giving tips on how to developing your passions thanks to open-source software such as:
- Video Editors: Blender, Kdenlive, Shotcut, Openshot, Cinerella, etc.
- Audio editors and DAW: Audacity, FFmpeg, Sox, LMMS, Ardour, many drum-machines and synths and so on.
- Gaming and tools for recording/streaming: open-source games, Wine, Steam, GOG, OBS, SimpleScreenRecorder, FFmpeg, about video and audio codecs, etc.
- Tools to avoid censorship and protect your privacy: youtube-dl, mpsyt, VPN, and so on.
- PDF/epubs readers and where to get free books: MuPDF, Zathura, Evince, etc. plus MILLIONS of free books on archive.org, openlibrary.org, gutenberg.org, theanarchistlibrary.org, and many other websites.
- Video, Audio and Podcast players and Feed readers: VLC, Clementine, Newsbeuter/Newsboat, Amarok, mpv, mplayer, cmus, moc, etc.
- Image editors: Gimp, Krita, Pinta, DarkTable, ImageMagick, RawTherapee, etc.
- And much much more.
Conclusions.
This was just a short introduction about what is coming. As I wrote before the amount of data for newcomers is definitely overwelming, by with a step by step approach there will be no unreachable peaks and I’ll be able to enjoy the best open-source technologies while retaining your privacy and humanity in our world pushed to 24/7 panopticon-like control and to post- and trans-humanism.
I’m going to present these guides with a very critical point of view regarding to proprietary software, to the monetary system, and to waht the masses do.
So expect them to be full of critical thinking and food for thoughts!
TA SALÜDE
looking forward to this