feroldi / ricing

a book about ricing unix-like systems

Ricing your system

You know those awesome crunchy, sharp rices, with incredible tasty sauces, so tasty you can feel the intensity of their greatness in your soul? Well, although I do like rice, I'm not talking about actual rice. I'm here to lead you to the sacred palace of unix ricing, the supreme art of transforming your trivial computer system into a powerful, useful, and beautiful place.

Some things to take in consideration before opening this book:

• This is a book about understanding the parts of your system, and customize them as you please.

• You won't find anything related to GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) in here. That's primarily because GUIs aren't standardized or "equal" on all unix machines. However, terminals are and for this fair reason I'm only going to treat CLIs (Command Line Interface) and TUI (Terminal User Interface.)

Don't be afraid of the terminal, my little reptile dragonfly! No knowledge is wasteful, this book will teach you the wisdom of unix systems. Although GUIs may seem important to a wide array of individuals, using the terminal is even more of a valuable experience for those who opt out of using it. Learning to find your way through them will reveal to you why we use them so much. One sensible reason was already mentioned. Let's rephrase it for the sake of clarity: it's a standardized interface on all unix systems; if it is POSIX compliant, then you can assume you can use your CLI knowledge there, no matter the distribution or unix-like variant. Not relying on GUIs is a good thing because the same tasks can be performed using the same tools you're already used to, on any other system.

The same files and tools you're gonna see along this book, are gonna be usable by any of you, readers. Isn't that great?

Summary

I don't have a summary yet, but I'll provide one once this book gets some more pages.

More file formats

In case Markdown won't do it, you can generate other formats by just running make in the repository directory. By default, it generates HTML files, and the result is placed at build/html/.

$ make
PD  chapter1/item2.md build/html/chapter1/item2.html
PD  chapter1/item3.md build/html/chapter1/item3.html
...

You can choose whatever format pandoc accepts. For example, if you want man-pages instead of html, just change the OUT variable:

$ make OUT=man
PD  chapter1/item2.md build/man/chapter1/item2.man
...

Note that these files will be placed at their respective folder, which has the format as its directory name.

Contributing

Take a look at CONTRIB.md before doing anything if you want to contribute. Also, do it with love. That's important. Love.

Donating

I hadn't thought of profiting from it, but someone asked me if there was any way people could donate if they wanted to. So if you're feeling quite kind today, you may donate to this bitcoin wallet:

131pw3Pr8pkWxr8vxEEuAhHqfiLM9QnrVE

I'd be grateful.

Oh, and if you feel like helping me on writing content to this book, just send me a PR, or send me an email, or whatever.

License

This project is licensed under MIT License. See LICENSE.

ricing's Issues

Any plans on a LaTeX version alongside Markdown?

I'm sure many readers as myself would love to be able to print out a nice looking PDF but I do understand that Markdown is the best language to use for Reddit and Github in terms of formatting friendliess. This is probably too far-future thinking but pandoc sounds like a program of interest for you; it takes one textual input and produces many different outputs i.e. Markdown+LaTeX, so you need not worry about duplication of effort or doing extra work (besides reading the manpages of course :)

[Maintenance] No updates?

Hello! Just wanted to know if the project is on hold or cancelled. I am really willing to contribute. Thanks!

Code guideline

Is there any coding guideline when contributing, like one sentence per line or textwidth of 80?

[suggestion] replace code indent

Hey,

just wanted to mention that replacing the indents with fenced code blocks gives the addition of syntax highlighting (Source). This may come in handy in the future items, where code might come into play a lot more.

I could make a PR with every indentation replaced this way.

Cheer,
random

Edit: created the pull request since it wasn't that much to change
#16

configuring fonts

More formats?

I think it would be kinda cool if the book were available in more formats (for example, LaTeX, HTML, roff, and so on)

If you want, I can hack some scripts together to automate it. Just a thought though :)

Translation

Do you have a plan on adding translations? I could contribute a german translation for your work so far.

Makefile to generate other formats using pandoc

usage:

$ make OUT=html
PD  chapter1/item1.md build/html/chapter1/item1.html
PD  chapter1/item2.md build/html/chapter1/item2.html
...

Introduction

Hello thelostt,
Wouldn't the book be better if it started with an introductory chapter0 instead of chapter1 that jumps directly in the core of the subject.

What I'm thinking of is simply copying/linking the content of the README.md to chapter0.md.

What's your take on that?

[I-new] X Resources

Adding in relevant info about X Resources to file item2.md.
Teach the reader differences between files like .Xdefaults and .xinitrc, explain the xrdb tool, and talk about the simple syntax of the aforementioned dotfiles and what you can do with them.

has this been abandoned?

I really like how you're explaining things from the ground up. Not just what tools to use, but things like file structure etc..

Seems this hasn't been updated in quite a while, just wanted to say there is still interest.

Suggestion for linking - my repo

In my dotfiles repo I have an install script - maybe you could use it as an example for your chapter 1
https://github.com/SuperCuber/dotfiles/blob/master/install