From Window to Linux

There are about 8 members in my developing team, some use Windows while some use Linux to develop. One day, our boss (project leader) told us it's time to migrate to Linux for some consistency purpose which can also avoid unnecessary redundancy testing process in both system.

Later on, we four junior engineers who use Windows spent almost two days struggling with this unfamiliar system (what we applied is CentOS 6.3). Before I only knew few basic commands such as use ls -l to view the list of directories/files and use cd to change directory...what a newbie in Linux.




Interestingly, although my working progress slowed down a lot and had a tough time doing anything which were very easy in Window. I feel refreshing about the new interface and these new ways to interact with the operating system. Actually, I like the look of this new user interface, it's delicate and simple.

With the help of team's senior engineers, our migration got speed up, when I saw my leader dancing his hands on keyboard to generate all the commands quickly (sometimes I could not even distinguish whether he types the whole character or uses tab...), I really admired and felt impressed. It reminds me of the old time I play StarCraft, when I first saw my WCG National delegate friend play (his id is SoBaD[Rush], haha), the speed he hitted keyboard, operated the mouse and switched between different views.....it was really an eye-opener for me. Like in StarCraft, we have many hot keys and commands, and it's one of the entry barrier divides Top players and the newbies. No matter how smart you are, time matters. I like this shared idea about the commands in Linux and StarCraft.

 Nevertheless, in this whole new world everything became not that easy. I had to struggle with easy tasks such as connect to printer, connect to ftp, install some softwares (need to learn about rpm, yum)....so much challenges are there!

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Some notes for what I have learned these days:

1.Install software
rpm -qa synergy  (whether you have installed this software: synergy)
rpm -ql synergy  (where is the related directories and files after you installed the software - don't laugh, couldn't find the way to launch the software I just had installed really drove me crazy for a while)
rpm -qi synergy (view the details of this software)

synergy is a program I was trying to install to share my screen, mouse, and keyboard on two machines at work, so I use it for example here. Unfortunately I still have some connection issue to run the synergy server on my CentOS 6.3 system...will share if I figure it out.

In addition, thanks for a rich Chinese Linux learning website -Vbird's Linux learning cuisine ( http://linux.vbird.org/ ). I invented the English translation name for it, hope Mr.Vbird doesn't mind :p. The website is one of the most famous Linux learning website in Chinese group. I ever read some of its articles few years ago, but only when you have an urgent need, you pick it up quickly and seriously...like what I'm doing now.

I also learned how to configure my yum repository from the website:
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
#baseurl=http://ftp.twaren.net/Linux/CentOS/6.3/os/x86_64/
The awesome thing is that the repository address it provides is not dated, I had tried many different addresses according to other resources found in Google but only Vbird's works, awesome.

2.Search information in your directories
grep -ir keyword *  (search which files contain keyword)
find /usr -name filename (find stuff with filename as name under directory /usr)
find /usr -name "*keyword*"  (find files which contains keyword in the file name under directory /usr)

whereis and locate?

3.Process management
ps -ef | grep keyword  (and then you could use kill -9 processId to kill a process forcefully, to kill it by the normal process is kill -15 processId)
pstree
top  (monitor all the tasks/processes in your system)

4.scp

5.vi   (edit a file)
Under command mode, few commands are very useful:
End key   (jump to the end of this line)
/keyword   (search a keyword in this file)
Ndd           (N stands for any numbers, type 5dd will delete the following 5 lines starts from the location of your cursor)
Nyy           (copy the following N lines starts from the location of your cursor)
Ng            (N stands for any numbers again, type 20G means you want to jump to the 20th line)
gg              (jump back to the first line of this file)

u               (recover the last step)
ctrl+r         (go to next step)
.                (redo the last command)

Honestly speaking, when you get to know a few most common basic commands in Linux (maybe just 100 commands can be quite enough in most cases), it's not difficult to develop or play around under Linux at all. Inevitably, you have to undergo a few painful days (about 2 weeks in my case) to pick up these 'keywords' or even the concept. Later on, life will become good again.