Back in September, Lincoln introduced readers to the command line. Since then, we’ve run several posts on the subject.
Though this post isn’t officially a part of the “ProfHacker Guide to the Command Line,” it does offer one example of how being willing to try using the command line can be useful, even if it’s not a tool that one’s likely to use with any great frequency.
I was fortunate enough to get a NOOK Color at Christmas. Guest author Eric Bubar wrote a post back in August about using the NOOK Color as an iPad alternative. I wanted to do much the same thing, including being able to dual-boot the device—but I didn’t want to have to remove the microSD card to boot into the stock software (those little cards are easy to lose!).
So I did some research, then followed these directions to create a bootable microSD card running CyanogenMod 7. The handy thing is that the card can also load a boot menu (one holds the home key down while booting to bring it up), allowing the user to choose whether to boot into CM7 (the default) or the stock NOOK software.
I’ve been just as pleased with the results as Eric was. For Mac users, setting up dual-boot will require using the command line (taosaur links to more Mac-specific instructions in his guide—but it’s well worth the effort to get comfortable enough with the command line to follow the setup guide.
What about you? In what way(s) or for what task(s) have you found the command line useful? Let us know in the comments.
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