Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Finding Help
Linux is designed to be as user-friendly as possible to new users, even at the terminal com-
mand prompt. Although you'll learn the most common ways to use each command in this
chapter, not every option will be covered—to do so would require a much larger topic.
If you ind yourself stuck, or if you want to learn more about any of the tools that are dis-
cussed in the following pages, there's a command you should learn:
man
.
Each Linux application comes with a help ile, known as a
man page
—short for “manual
page”. It provides background on the software as well as details on what its options do and
how to use them.
To access the man page for a given tool, just type
man
followed by the command name. To
see the man page for
ls
, a tool for listing the contents of directories, just type
man ls
.
Using External Storage Devices
he Pi's SD card, which stores all the various Pi iles and directories, isn't very big. he largest
available SD card at the time of writing is 64 GB, which is tiny compared to the 3,000 GB (3
TB) available from the largest full-size desktop hard drives.
If you're using your Pi to play back video iles (see Chapter 7, “he Pi as a Home heatre PC”)
you'll likely need more storage than you can get from an SD card. As you learned in Chapter
1, “Meet the Raspberry Pi”, it's possible to connect USB Mass Storage (UMS) devices to the Pi
in order to gain access to more storage space.
Before these external devices are accessible, however, the operating system needs to know
about them. In Linux, this process is known as
mounting
. If you're running a version of Linux
with a desktop environment loaded—like the recommended Debian distribution's LXDE,
loaded from the console with the
startx
command—this process is automatic. Simply con-
nect the device to a free USB port on the Pi or a USB hub, and the device and its contents will
be immediately accessible (see Figure 2-2).
