Introduction

You may consider this article as somewhat of a "part two" of the Command line programs for everyday use in linux article I wrote a few days ago. It's all about going step-by-step to get you, the user, proficient at the command-line and become envy material for your friends. The distribution chosen for this is Ubuntu, but these commands that are about to be exposed will work on any other Linux system you might encounter, and you will be warned when there are exceptions. What you will get is a how-to about how to accomplish various tasks using the command-line. And one of the advantages is that you can use these commands regardless of desktop environment or lack thereof. You are only required to have a minimal Linux knowledge base for this article, so get to your terminals and let's start. If you want to share your experiences with us, please visit our Linux Forum.

The tasks

The reasons you might want to go the command-line way can be coercion (your graphics driver started driver decided to stop working all of a sudden) or, better, because you don't want to rely on the distro-specific tools Ubuntu offers. Or you don't have a GUI at all because you want to install Ubuntu server and ... GUIs and servers don't mix that well. You don't want to be in a situation when you're deprived of the graphical UI and you start panicking because you have no idea how to do anything at the command line. This article is here to help you.

Configuring wired and wireless networking

In my experience, that's one of the most common scenarios when the new user starts sweating in front of a terminal: you have to start the system and realize that you have no Internet connection configured. What to do and where to start? The command you're looking for is ifconfig, and of course I recommend reading that manual page. But what you'll read here should suffice to get up and running, unless you have some exotic string-and-tin-can way of connecting to the outside world. First let's see if your network card (we will start with wired networking) is recognized by the system:

 # ifconfig -a