[Gllug] Flavours end - Linux begins?

[Chris Bell]

On Mon 18 Nov, Dermot Moynihan wrote:
> 
> At 20:39 17/11/02, you wrote:
> >On Sun 17 Nov, Dermot Moynihan wrote:

> >
> >    The problem with books, and any other documentation, is that they become
> >outdated so quickly. It took me some time to discover just how much
> >documentation comes with the individual packages, and where to find it on
> >disc.
> >Other documentation may be available with the distribution, but not
> >installed by default
> 
> well, I've been rooting around and found little. Some of the stuff with 
> SUSE is practically illegible, specifically four 'free' books. Some of them 
> are actually written in a very poor font with white print on a black 
> background. Weird. And useless. If it wasn't for all the good things I keep 
> hearing about SUSE (Linux format just gave it 9 out of 10) and, not 
> forgetting the £60 I spent on it, I'd head for something else. I'm coming 
> to the conclusion if you know how to use it it's probably, naw - possibly, 
> great. But for a beginner, jeez.
> 
> >. For very good reasons
> 
> to give us a hard time :)
> 
> >the default location of files,
> >and their internal structures, can change between versions, so even that
> >documentation can be slightly out of date. I have set up two monitors side
> >by side so that I can read the documentation from one computer while I work
> >on another.
> 
> David Bowie style :)
> 
> 
> thanks for your time, Chris.
> Dermot

   I am trying to learn the Debian distribution, and there are mainly
symbolic links in /usr/doc, with the majority of the documentation in
/usr/share/doc as either uncompressed or gzipped, plain text or html, files.
I use "ls" or "ls -l" to list each directory layer in turn to make sure that
I do not miss anything, and pipe the output into either more or less so that
they do not just fly past the screen:

ls -l /usr/share/doc | less

   Most items are listed under the package names, and are themselves
directories, but do not miss the Linux Documentation Project howto and
mini.howto series. Plain text files can be viewed using less, or zless for
gzipped files. There are also the "man" pages, if you do not know the name
of a relevant man page, type

apropos <string>

to get a list of man pages whose header contains <string>, each will be
listed as <name><#> which is then accessed using

man # <name>



-- 
Chris Bell


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