Let me tell you about a Linux nightmare I woke up from this morning. Yeah, I know, the Linux chef had a Linux nightmare. If you're looking for how to spell schadenfreude, it's schadenfreude. To be more specific, it was a Linux command line nightmare.

You see, in the dream, I was locked up somewhere, with bad hombres of one sort or another having trapped me and whoever I was with in some dungeon-like room. Maybe they were aliens, like real aliens. Doesn't matter. There was no way out but there was all sorts of junk lying around. So, I started looking through the junk for something to help in making my/our escape. For reasons I can't explain, the others in the room with me were in no way helpful, having already told me that escape was impossible and anything I tried was pointless. Furthermore, trying to get away would only make our captors angry.

They warned me. They gave me an explanation. But still, I persisted . . .

Yeah, yeah.

Anyhow, I found this tiny computer, like a Raspberry Pi, and I told people that since we had power and the computer had wireless capabilities, I only needed to boot the thing up and send out a message for help. This computer had a tiny screen and a small keyboard so I booted it and went to work. Then there was trouble, as the Thomas the Tank videos my son watches all the time invariably point out. The computer booted fine, but I couldn't remember the right wireless commands to use in order to connect to a router that I somehow knew was out there. I remembered iwconfig and iwlist and a few other things, but there were no man pages loaded and I couldn't remember the right flags to use in the command. I tried a "-h" and "–help" but, for some reason, this distribution didn't return anything I could work with. I kept trying things, racking my brain for the right format, trying to remember how to set an address or query for dhcp. The harder I tried, the worse my ability to remember any of these commands became.

And then I woke up, my alternate/dream self still locked in that room with a bunch of people who knew nothing about Linux and me getting progressively more confused and frustrated.

For the record, in the real world, "iwconfig -h" works and so does "iwlist -h". Stupid dream!