[PLUG] Screwed

[Steven Susbauer]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2006, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> On Sun, 18 Jun 2006 21:47:46 -0700
> AthlonRob <AthlonRob at axpr.net> dijo:
>
> > John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > > when you're in a man page and it says "END" you hit Ctrl-z
> > > to get out, right?
> >
> > No, ctrl+z suspends the active terminal application.  Use fg to resume
> > it.  bg to resume it in the background.  You hit "q" to get out of less
> > or a man page once you're done with it.
> >
> > Don't use ctrl+z unless you want to suspend the application you're using
> > to do something else...
>
> In my mind, I wasn't in an application. An application is OpenOffice.org Writer. It is Sylpheed. It is Firefox. It is NOT a terminal window. But that is really irrelevant.
>
> My bitch is that YOU know how to get out of the situation, but I did not. I am an ordinary user. It would have taken maybe ten seconds for the developer to have added a line after "END" that said how to get out of it. Instead, the developer assumed I had your knowledge of Linux. As a result I am now faced with the problem of how to clean up a godawful mess. I refuse to accept the blame for poor documentation.
>
> OK, I'm going to shut up now and go to bed. In the morning perhaps I will be in a better mood.

Typing help (or really, h) would have gotten you to a nice menu with a
bunch of help on it. The second line of which says " q  :q  Q  :Q  ZZ
Exit." In the meantime, you may want to invest in a free online command
line tutorial, or a book such as "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands,
Editors, and Shell Programming" by Mark Sobell, either of which would
probably introduce the pager, and in general how to use the command line.
You will find that often
the command line is required for some operations, and often a lot better
at doing them (wysiwyg editing aside) than a gui counterpart. On my own
system the xserver exists to give me a pretty background while a terminal
window is open. One window, because I like GNU screen.

You may have better luck in the future with using aptitude, as it is a lot
better at getting deep dependancies that apt-get misses. I believe it is
the recommended way of doing a dist-upgrade (though recommended by who, I
don't know). Aptitude has a weird little interface if you just run the
command, but I believe you can
type the same commands as when you run apt-get as well (so, in this case,
aptitude dist-upgrade). I haven't used Debian in a long time so I can't
actually check.