Thu Oct 24 13:17:13 2019 UTC

The base commands...

Give it a try

To take full advantage of your newly installed NuTyX, here are the ESSENTIAL commmands that you will have to use every day. This article explains some essential commands that are specific to NuTyX. We strongly recommend that you learn them.

NuTyX does not (yet) have a graphical interface tool for administrative purposes. You will need to use the terminal as your normal interface. If you are not yet used to it, that's not a big deal; we will explain the commands you need to type.

Since NuTyX is a Linux operating system, it's important to respect the case when entering commands. ALL the characters in a command are in lowercase.

Let's start by opening a terminal. Ready? OK, let's go

In some cases, a command consists of a single word without any options or arguments, but most commands have many options. We suggest that you to use the commands --help option to get an idea of what other options are available. Here, we will only check the most common ones:

commandname help

commandname --help

commandname -h

the help makes it possible to print out all the available options. --help or -h are alternative options for printing out the help text for a command.

Check if there are any updates available

The command cards sync will check the latest status of the available updates for your system.

The command cards diff will show a list of outdated packages.

sudo cards sync
sudo cards diff

synchronizing /var/lib/pkg/saravane/desktop from http://..
/var/lib/pkg/saravane/desktop//MD5SUM
..
Difference between installed packages and the depot of binaries:
Package                      Installed                   Available in the depot of binaries
gcc                          4.9.1                       4.9.2
glibc                        2.20                        2.21

Updating a package

To update a package, the command cards install -u followed by the package will be used. Of course it is necessary that an update is available:

sudo cards install -u gcc

Search a package

To search for a package, the command:

cards search search_string

will return all the packages which have the search_string in the name or in the description. For example, if you want to know what browsers are available:

cards search browser

should return something like:

(gui-extra) chromium 53.0.2785.116 The open-source project behind Google Chrome,
an attempt at creating a safer, faster, and more stable browser
(gui-extra) conkeror git A highly programmable web browser based on Mozilla XULRunner
(gui-extra) dillo 3.0.5 A small, fast graphical web browser built on FLTK
(gui-extra) firefox 48.0.2 Standalone web browser from mozilla.org
(gui-extra) midori 0.5.11 Midori is a lightweight web browser that uses WebKitGTK+.
(gui-extra) xombrero 1.6.4 Simple browser based on gtk and using the webkit engine
...

Add a package

To add a package, the command cards install is used, followed by the name of the software package to install:

sudo cards install xfce4

The download of the application xfce4 starts immediately. Once the package is downloaded, its dependencies will be downloaded as well. When the download is finished, all these packages will be installed in the right order. In this example, when the command is complete, you will have a working xfce4 desktop installed on your NuTyX.

Add a user

Adding a user under NuTyX is very simple. The command:

nu

will add a new user, you will be asked two questions:

Name of the user: james
Name or Description of the user: James Bond 007

You should ensure that the user name does not contain any special characters, spaces or capital letters.

Conclusion

As you can see the only two commands you really need to know are:

nu
cards

This last command has a more detailed explanation via its help option

cards help

I hope you have a lot of fun with your newly installed NuTyX.

Would you like to install more packages? Or why not build your own packages?

You will find all the necessary documentation here.