Introduction

Well you may be mislead. This page is not about Linux. It's about *nix and how I'm getting on with the environment. Unix and subsets have been around on PCs for a long time - as far back as Apple ][ maybe. But I found the going hard and was not motivated to get into it.

This year, however, I'm supporting web development work with php on a University Unix server and well, I want to be comfortable in it.

I first got onto Terra Term Pro - I could have used QVTNet but Terra Term Pro does not seem to have much speed loss even though it is an SSH client. I wanted something similar to Windows Commander / Norton Commander which I have used for a long time. I found WinSCP. WinSCP does not allow much customisation of the current cursor colour but it has one major feature - it shows the file/folder attributes, the owner and the Unix group. WinSCP is slow maybe because it is an SSH client and if you drill down to a folder that you have no access rights to, it shows busy mouse cursor and hangs. I found Windows Commander to be a more powerful client - although it only does FTP, it is much faster, less buggy.

Next, making myself at ease in Unix.

I learnt about ls (equivalent to DOS DIR), cd (except cd alone does not display the current folder - it switches you back to your home folder, chmod (equivalent to attrib in DOS). There is more and less in Unix. The pipe works.

Need an editor? I started on VI but then found VIM (via Lockergnome's new Penguin newsletter). In fact GVIM 6.0 runs on Windows - a good idea to have it around so that you can gain experience with the keystrokes in any platform. VIM, I found, does colour syntax highlighting for a plethora of languages.

Next, I found PINE and PICO which are more natural to me - they are screen editors like you are used to like in Wordstar as opposed to VI/VIM which are single line editors more like DOS EDLIN. PILOT is also good because hey, it's a file manager.

You can get PINE / PICO on Windows platform so again, you can gain experience in Windows as you build up flying hours in Unix.