Brian Masinick
Does look interesting but at the moment such things are a bit above my head.
Those “magic incantations” are what 1) update the “indicators” to accelerate the process of package installation; that’s what sudo apt-get update does. 2) If there are any package updates available after doing 1), sudo apt-get dist-upgrade performs a distribution upgrade, meaning that it installs any new software that is available. 3) The program that helps the system understand how to boot (start up) the system is called a boot loader. GRUB is the boot loader that antiX uses. The command sudo update-grub makes sure that the system understands how to start up the system and if any system packages alter that mechanism, this update will locate and make the necessary adjustments so that the system will still find the correct way to start up properly. 4) sudo apt-get autoremove will automatically get rid of any old software that has been altered but not properly cleaned up after installation.
A simpler explanation is that by typing in a u and pressing Enter after this “incantation” has been inserted into the file ~/.bashrc, that is, $HOME/.bashrc, that simple u command will take care of most routine daily system management – to say it again, press u and then Enter, and that magic alias does the rest.
A beginner is not expected to know or perform these commands, but those who are really interested in more than just running a system without understanding what it does may want to learn such things. Some “permanently new users” will never get there, and that is okay too. I studied in high school, university, and on the job over a long period of time to amass these skills and they are second nature to me, but from childhood I’ve had an interest in math and science. I only began to appreciate history as I personally BECAME a part of history!
So this stuff is in my blood; understandable that I’m a very small percentage of those who get into this stuff at this level.
For those who can appreciate it, the Perl language is capable of writing weird incantations that only experts in regular expressions can even begin to wonder what they mean! The rest of humanity wonder what kind of Martian signals they represent!
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Brian Masinick
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