Welcome to shells.gnugeneration.com, GNU Generation provides shells to the free software community.
What is included?
- Access via SSH
- User home pages (~/username)
- Availability of VirtualHosts for free software projects (or related)
- Compiler access
- IRC clients
- FTP clients
- Email (username@shells.gnugeneration.com, mutt is provided)
- Lynx & links for text based web browsing
- Talk, finger, and other common daemons are present
- And more...
- The shells are not for running multiplayer game servers or anything else that is bandwidth intensive, we do not have large amounts of bandwidth, otherwise we would be running a porn site, duh.
How do I get one?
Requests for a shell account should be sent to:
swivel@shells.gnugeneration.com please include your _real_ first and last name, home address, a current email address which we may reach you at (mainly to notify you of your shell account creation), and a breif description of why you would like a shell here, we dont have alot of resources in general (bandwidth, cpu, storage etc) but theres enough to share with those who will put it to constructive use. (e.g. not for transferring warez/mp3's/any material copyrighted in a way that does not permit you to have or redistribute it, or hax0ring etc.).
How do I use it?
You must login to the server using a SSH client. SSH is the only protocol supported for shell access on the server, we do not allow telnet as this protoocol is unencrypted and transmits your login+password in plain text form over the internet.
- GNU/Linux (or any other system using the common commandline SSH client)
You probably already have a SSH client installed, try the command:$ ssh username@shells.gnugeneration.com
Make sure you replace username with the name you have been assigned. - Windows
You will likely have to download an SSH client, PuTTY is one which works well and can be downloaded here.
Once you have a SSH client installed and running, just entershells.gnugeneration.com
as the host you wish to login to. You should be queried for the username and password (which you should know). Also make sure you select SSH for the protocol to use, if you leave telnet or anything else selected, it is likely to not work. - Others
Any operating system which you have a SSH client working on and a internet connection should be able to login to the server. If you are unsure about your operating system having a SSH client, try a search on google for "SSH client your operating system name"
Once you have logged into the server, you should see something like this:
Linux shells 2.x.x #x xxx xxx xx xx:xx:xx xxx xxxx i586 unknown Welcome to shells.gnugeneration.com. Abusers of this system and/or network will not be tolerated and will be removed swiftly. If at any point, you have to ask yourself 'I wonder if this is abuse?' Whatever 'this' refers to, probably is, and should be stopped immediately. Direct questions, comments, reports of abuse to your system administrator: swivel@shells.gnugeneration.com This host is resolveable as: pengaru.com shells.gnugeneration.com You have mail. Last login: Sat Apr 26 14:24:11 2003 from x.x.x.x user@shells:~$This is known as the shell prompt of an interactive login. From this prompt you can execute commands. To logout you can type
user@shells:~$ exit
If you wish to read/write/send email, you can run mutt, by typing
user@shells:~$ mutt
If you wish to setup a web site, just create the directory "public_html" and place an index file inside it. You do this by typing:
user@shells:~$ mkdir public_html user@shells:~$ cd public_html user@shells:~$ cat > index.html Hello world ^d user@shells:~$Please note, the ^d represents pressing control-d, in unix, the terminal communications layer interprets this combination as EOF (End Of File). You just used the cat program to create the file index.html, and write the line Hello world into it. The ^d is used to tell the cat program the file which it is reading (your input) has ended (EOF).
You can now load http://shells.gnugeneration.com/~user in a web browser, and you should see:
Hello world
This is a very simple test and just to get you familiar with the location of your web page. Don't forget to replace user with your assigned name.
At this point, you should try some searches for Linux tutorials, or pickup a book on Linux and/or unix. The shell you are likely to use is bash, there is a good book from orielly and associates called learning the bash shell. Understanding how the shell works and how to use it's more advanced features will make using the Linux server a joy, and if you do not have a Linux machine at home, you just might find yourself wanting one once you discover the power of a full featured unix shell such as bash.
If you find yourself in need of advanced text editing on the server, try your hand at using the vi editor. Searching google for "vi tutorial" should provide some decent results.