First pratical lesson

Notes after today's training session.

Small index of most used shell commands:

Small index of commands useful for combining in pipelines:

Problems found during the lesson:

So apt-cache is a manipulator that doesn't manipulate. A possible improvement can be "query the APT package cache". * The language selector in Ubuntu Breezy doesn't really exit and keeps the package database locked. This seems to be fixed in Dapper, and probably had been fixed in some Breezy update. System updates here are a problem: my Dapper (with some Universe things in it) wanted to download more than 120Mb of data, and the Uni network was giving me 14Kbps. It's been a nice opportunity to teach about fuser -uva and kill. * dict, squid and many other packages from 'main' are not on the normal Ubuntu CDs: is there an easy way to build a CD with them? Or do Ubuntu CDs with extra packages already exist? I'll have to find out. * cupsys has documentation outside of /usr/share/doc, in /usr/share/cups/doc-root. * man works on all commands, except cd, which is an internal shell command and thus needs help instead of man. I should remember to ponder about autogenerating manpages from help output. * Is there an index-like manpage with a list of the core Unix commands and their short descriptions? It there's not, it's easy to generate:

    #!/bin/sh
    DIR=${1:-"/bin"}
    (
    find $DIR | while read FILE
    do
        if [ -x $FILE ] && ! [ -d $FILE ]
        then
            LANG=C COLUMNS=2000 man `basename $FILE` | \
                     grep ^SYNOPSIS -B 100 | grep ^NAME -A 100 | \
                     tail -n +2 | head -n +2 | \
                     grep -v '^[ \t]*$'
        fi
    done
    ) | sort | uniq | sed 's/^ \+//'

Try running it on /bin and /sbin: it's great!. Also, since it doesn't redirect stderr, it nicely exposes a number of manpage problems.

Lots of bugs to report when I come home: from here it'll take ages, and lots of money on the hotel internet connection, and some are Ubuntu-specific so I'd need to do everything online with Malone.

As usual, teaching is one of the best ways to find bugs.

I propose an Etch training session a month before release.

Other things to do:

Update: Matt Zimmerman writes:

I read your blog entry at http://www.enricozini.org/blog/eng/second-day-in-addis and wanted to respond as follows:

https://help.launchpad.net/UsingMaloneEmail

Update: