Wiped my son's windows installation today!

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My 15-years old son has a PC which he hadn’t booted for years. It is a weak machine without a GPU. He mainly played Minecraft few years ago. I had installed Ubuntu to it as dual boot with windows. Well today I booted to Ubuntu (kernel 4.something), last login was on 2021 IIRC. So I asked him how to proceed and we agreed that he’ll start learning Linux.

At the moment I’m installing Debian 12 as a base. The goal is to install Batocera. I will assist him but let him do it. Let’s see if I can persuade him off from windows!

He uses win laptop for school and has never tried Linux.

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I am 16 and I also started using linux since 12!
Have learnt a lot!

I’m sure he’ll enjoy it!

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Wiped my son’s windows…

Can you come and do ours next, windows are always a task to do, too big and always a mark and i miss it double glazing can be a pain … hahaha … closest i want to be to windows now

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I will do it for you if you get the flights from and to Helsinki :joy:

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Do you have windows of glass or just iceblocks ?

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LOL! Not too cold at the moment here.

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Great choice! :wink:

Let’s hope the best!

It’s as easy as dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=64k status=progress
where /dev/sdX refers to the drive storing the installed Windows instance :smiley:

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Glad my students never learned that, closest they got was KILL -9

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I needed to dd if=/dev/zero of=[my_usb today]. It was not enough to use gparted to format it before I dd’et the debian net install .iso into it.

We made some progress, it now has Enlightenment DE and Steam installed. A 55gb game is downloading at the moment. All done in terminal :partying_face:

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Well done, not at that level myself and dont trust enough to get to it, prefer cheating and using gui

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I think it’s just that I’m more used to cli. I prefer cli over GUI. For me it’s easier to write the command than go thru settings → something → something with mouse.

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And you can script what you have done.
I always script things like updates. It has saved me many times.

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I usually just use history
and ‘!’ the command no. I used to have a lot of aliases but not any more.

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This is the first time I hear about this.
Just tried, and confirm, it’s awesome! :smiley:
Thanks!

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If you type a command without sudo and get permission error and need to add sudo in front of it just write ‘sudo !!’ It will be sudo 'last command ’

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Sometimes you need the output as well as the command. Especially updates.

I use ‘!nn’ a lot … also ‘!v’ to rerun the last vi … it means rerun the last command beginning with ‘v’ ,
and ‘!!’ for last command.

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Please can you explain more on the ! Symbol what it does and why, where would you use it. Not found it in my linux book

Same with NO

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Its all about a shorthand way of accesing the command history in a terminal.
It is available in the sh and bash and tcsh shells… not sure about others, but it should be there… it is a very basic idea present since the original Unix from AT&T.

When people sat at teletypes, they could not scroll back and copy commands… they needed this to access previous commands. It is still useful and efficient.

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Great article. I have only used !! and !nn.

One thing I sometimes do is that I use ‘su’ instead of sudo. The ‘su’ history is different than the normal user’s history and usually there’s only few commands. I use it if I’m doing something special which needs sudo/admin rights and if something goes wrong it’s easier to troubleshoot su’s history than try to find the commands from normal user’s history. I hope you get the point. Less commands when using su instead of normal user in history, easier to troubleshoot what’s wrong.

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I never ever use sudo… always su.
Apart from , as you say, a briefer history, I inevitably want to do more than one thing as root, and typing sudo all the time is a pain.
My safety precaution is to make the root window small and always place it on the bottom left of the screen.
Some distros make a red coloured prompt when you are root… I like that idea.

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