COSMIC.VOYAGE(1)

NAME
cosmic.voyage - humanity's stellar diaspora

DESRIPTION

cosmic.voyage is a public access unix system (pubnix) and part of the tilde (tildeverse) community of micro-instances offering free shell accounts. It exists primarily to author and promote a collaborative science-fiction universe. A secondary goal is the promotion of command-line skills in *nix systems. The use of plain text tools and command line interfaces is both a thematic choice and technical practice.

STORY
Our users write stories as the people aboard ships, colonies, and outposts, using the only remaining free, interconnected network that unites the dispersed peoples of the stars.

The Quantum Entanglement Communicator or QEC is the a device that bridges the vast distances of space with near- instantaneous communication. Unfortunately, it provides only a limited bandwidth to the ancient relay hub in the SOL system. It is enough for only simple, plain-text messaging.

The ships in our story have all left Earth behind at different times, and in some cases they've left from different realities. The QEC bridges all these gaps, uniting ships across time and space in the strangest of ways. Records are stored chronologically on the relay hub as they are received, but their source transmissions are often wildly out of sync.

GETTING STARTED

New users are greeted with a welcome email upon the creation of their account that provides information on creating a ship, the structure of files and folders, and instructions for creating logs to the QEC. This welcome email can be read using the programs alpine or mutt.

New users may also find it useful to use the interactive menu system by running the menu command.

Finally, users may find up-to-date comprehensive guides on the system wiki by running the wiki command.

NOTES
This is a full Ubuntu environment and allows users to do far more than simply write stories. Feel free to take advantage of the tools available here to experiment with other aspects of the command line. We have many programming languages / compilers installed.

Users are also allowed to run reoccuring or scheduled tasks using cron-jobs. If you do this, please include `/usr/bin/nice -n 19' before any tasks you run to minimize the system load over time.

BUGS
There are probably many bugs in this system. Please report anything you find by mailing tomasino@cosmic.voyage or finding us on irc.tilde.chat in the #cosmic room.

AUTHOR
Cosmic Voyage was created by James Tomasino, but the works of fiction for each ship are the results of the individual authors on this system. Run the roster command to see who is responsible for each ship.