Before you start to read this document, you should know some important things about how to read it.

1. Things that you should really read

First there are some part of this document that you should really read, to understand how Frugalware works and how to administer it.

Important references to read:

  • This introduction ;)

  • How to use pacman-g2.

  • How to manage services.

2. Running console commands

Throughout this document, there is boxed text which shows you console output. These are important and require quite some attention since most of the time you are expected to run them and get the same output.

$ echo foo bar
foo bar

This is how a console log look. Let’s look at its details so you understand what it means.

The echo foo bar part is what you should type and it’s the command. The following line foo bar is the output of the previous command.

<<<>>>

You may wonder what differentiates the command from the output. You see that in front of the command there is a $. This indicates that it’s a command line, but there is more meaning in this symbol. This symbol can change depending on the user privileges required to run the command.

Here is the list of the common prefix for the console commands:

  • $ indicates that any user can run the command. Most of the time it means you have to run it with your own user account.

  • user$ indicates that the specified user’s privileges are required to run this command. Usually this is necessary for security reasons.

    You can get an interactive shell for this user, replacing user with the desired user name, by issuing:

    $ su - user

  • # indicates that the root user’s privileges are required to run this command. Usually this is required to manage the system configuration.

    You can get an interactive shell for root running:

    $ su -