Command line questions

[Tom Lombardo]

You're awesome, Mike - thank you very much!

Michael Scottaline wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Jul 2003 01:22:02 -0700
> Tom Lombardo <tlombardo at caserdoo.com> insightfully noted:
> 
> 
>>I'm starting to get a handle on using the command line, but the book I 
>>have fails to answer a few questions:
>>
>>1.  How can you open a program like OpenOffice from the command line?
> 
> ==========================
> Depending on the "path" you might have to type the full path to the executable
> command:  ~/OpenOffice.org/ooffice (or something like that, depending on the
> version.
> =======================
> 
>>2.  using just the command line, how do you install a program from the 
>>.tar or .gz file you get from the download?
> 
> ================================
> tar zxvf downloaded.program.tar.gz
> 
> now cd to the newly created directory
> 
> ./configure
> make
> su
> [password for root]
> 
> make install
> =============================
> 
>>3.  How do you uninstall a program? (I need to wipe my copy of 
>>RealPlayer clean and re-install it.)
> 
> ==========================
> depends on how it was installed.  RPM????  From source??????
> =========================
> 
>>4.  When you get good at using the command line, do you get to the point 
>>where you don't even use the GUI (I have RedHat v8)?
> 
> ============================
> My window manager of choice (for now) is ratpoison.  No menues, no icons.  I
> have a few hotkey combinations in my .ratpoisonrc file to open some frequently
> used programs (e.g., sylpheed, pheonix, Textmaker, emacs, xmms, etc), then the
> rest from command line.
> ==========================
> 
>>5.  If you launch applications and all the rest from the command line, 
>>does the machine run faster overall?
> 
> =========================
> Depends on the machine, but if you can avoid the more bloated desktop
> environments like KDE or Gnome, yes your machine will likely run faster.
> HTH,
> Mike