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.