🚀 go-pugleaf

Beartooth wrote:
>     Several of you seem to overestimate me : I've never
> written a line of code, and if you showed me a page of it, I
> wouldn't be able to tell you what language it was in. I
> really think I need systematic instruction ... :-(
> 
>     And I thought surely it'd be available in Northern
> Virginia, and someone would know about it.

You might try NVCC; they have a yellow newsletter that comes
in the mail every two months or so, describing non-credit
classes of short duration that seem designed to teach you
how to do something with a certain technology.  

The key problem, however, is that it sounds like what you 
want to learn is somewhat different than what you need to
know now in order to make your system work.  I mean that if
you can get X configured and running, then you can relax and
start learning the shell, its commands and scripting, and 
you can learn more about the programs that you want to use.  

But configuring X, if you don't know much about it, can indeed 
be daunting.  So I suggest that you see this problem as two 
separate tasks: (a) getting your system running to the point 
where you can use the GUI and (b) exploring the software 
available.  A third task would be more detailed programming, 
but you probably want to put that off until you have solved 
the first two.  My guess is that in addition to X, you'll
need to configure the system to connect to the internet.

Here's my suggestion:  Go to a Linux installfest to look for
help with the X configuration.  Hopefully someone there can
get the thing running.  Then look at NVCC or some other,
possibly online, source for shell commands and simple scripting.

Hope this helps!

Peter
-- 
Peter N. Schweitzer (MS 954, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, VA 20192)
(703) 648-6533  FAX: (703) 648-6252  email: pschweitzer@usgs.gov
<http://geology.usgs.gov/peter/>