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One of the truly wonderful things about Linux is the community that has grown up around it. There is a stereotype of arrogant technophiles who look down on ‘noobs’ or ‘newbies’, and there’s no sugar-coating it – you will run into some of those online or in real life from time to time, but that’s life for you. Most Linux experts I’ve encountered will at least try to help you if they can, and that is a great thing for anyone trying to learn how to do things in Linux. This month’s column will start teaching you how to get your own help on Linux, which in many ways will give you ‘the keys to the kingdom’. We’ll start with a discussion of ‘man pages’.
Une des choses vraiment merveilleuses à propos de Linux, c'est la communauté qui a grandi autour de lui. Il y a un stéréotype de technophiles arrogants qui regardent de haut les « petits nouveaux » (noobs ou newbies, en anglais), et ils ne mâchent pas leurs mots - vous en rencontrerez certains de temps en temps, en ligne ou dasn la vraie vie ; mais c'est votre vie. La plupart des experts de Linux que j'ai rencontré essaieront de vous aider s'ils le peuvent, et c'est une excellent chose pour chacun d'essayer d'apprendre comment faire des choses dans Linux. L'article de ce mois commencera par vous apprendre comment disposer par vous-même d'une aide sur Linux, ce qui de nombreuses manières vous donnera les « clés du royaume ». Nous commencerons avec une présentation des pages du manuel (« man pages »).
Man pages Man pages used to be the foundation of almost all Linux knowledge transfer. Linux itself, and most of the applications in Linux, has man (short for ‘manual’) pages. I once had an issue with LILO, a common Linux boot loader (this was back around 2003), where something within LILO had gotten bollixed up enough that I could no longer boot into Linux. Sorrowfully, I resigned myself to having to reinstall the operating system, all my applications, and the loss of all my data. At that point in time, I was dual-booting my system (as I usually still do), and most of my critical data lived on the Windows side of my computing life, but reinstalling Linux and its applications was still going to be quite a lengthy and tedious process that I was not looking forward to. I posted something online about the issue, and I got back a few responses that basically said haughtily, “Go read the LILO man pages.” Well, that wasn’t really practical for me, and, for many people, it would be even less so today. The man page would be a complete description of LILO, not the solution to a specific problem, or even solutions to a number of specific problems. They would not be practical for solving a specific issue.
Les pages du manuel
Les pages du manuel sont habituellement les fondements de presque tout le transfert de connaissances sur Linux. Linux lui-même et la plupart des applications dans Linux ont des pages « man » (raccourci pour « manuel »). J'ai une fois eu un problème avec LILO, un chargeur classique de démarrage de Linux (c'était vers 2003), quand quelle chose dans LILO avait été tellement bâclé
This handful of ‘Linux snob’s’, if you will, really put me off. Fortunately, I then got a LOT of responses from much more helpful people who let me know that, with the particular problem I had, all I needed to do was boot from a diskette (THAT’S dating me), and actually just run LILO from a command-line (no parameters, just ‘LILO’ then <Enter>). Sure enough, that solved my problem easily and handily, and illustrated for me that the community was mostly very helpful. Reading through an entire man page to become familiar with LILO top to bottom wasn’t really something I had time for, at the time. The Linux community came through for me with a very simple and quick fix. Oh, and just to date me even more than the floppy disk reference, the flavor of Linux I was running at the time was … Caldera. Try looking that up online to see why Caldera OpenLinux is mostly remembered by Linux veterans with contempt or outright hatred (or, at least, publisher SCO is remembered that way). It’s a long story, but an interesting one, to be sure.
Ending our little digression here, the man pages can still be a valuable asset in Linux if you’re looking to learn (they’re less practical for solving a specific current problem, like I had with LILO). To access the man page for a specific function or application (let’s say, ‘LESS’), go to a terminal window (look for ‘Terminal’ in the Dash – click the topmost icon in your Launcher and type in ‘term’, that should suffice, then click the Terminal). At the command-line, type ‘man’ and the command you want to learn about, in this case: man less Then hit <Enter>. Linux will bring up the man page for ‘less’, and you can read all the details on how it works. Man pages do tend to be a ‘deep dive’, but they’re still a great resource if you want to learn, and particularly if you’re using something on the command-line (which can be, at times, a much more efficient way to do certain things than the GUI is, although obviously less intuitive). In man, you can use arrow keys to move up and down if the page doesn’t fit on one screen (it usually won’t). You can hit ‘h’ on the keyboard for man page help, or ‘q’ to quit from the man page reading utility and return to a command prompt. Just for fun, you can use man man to see the man page on the man page reader. Linux recursiveness is a long-standing tradition in the community.
Man pages are also available for many Linux applications. Try: man libreoffice from the terminal to see one example. Ubuntu Help/Ubuntu Desktop Guide Ubuntu has a built-in Help utility that is probably much more practical for learning Linux today than man pages. Go to the top right of your screen and click the Ubuntu ‘gear’ icon: Select ‘Ubuntu Help….’ and Ubuntu Help will open. It will appear as a box with a question mark inside a circle on the Launcher if you find yourself needing to switch to/from it. Ubuntu help has a Search function (click the magnifying glass), and a bookmarking utility (click the star to peruse or add bookmarks). You also have arrow keys in the top left to let you navigate back and forth. The Ubuntu Desktop Guide is a great introduction to Ubuntu Linux and is a very good place to start your journey to Ubuntu Mastery.
Google Is Your Friend Given how much traction Linux has online in general, it will come as no surprise that there are almost endless resources available via Google search. You can search for answers to particular questions or problems, you can Google for general information on Ubuntu, Linux, or even Unix (most Unix information will still apply). You can also find a plethora of Linux tutorial information on YouTube, either via a Google search incorporating ‘YouTube’ in the search parameters, going to YouTube and searching directly from there, or, as often as not, by simply clicking the Videos tab in your Google search results, where you will usually find plenty of YouTube ‘hits’. We’ll also talk a bit next month about online forums, which will undoubtedly make up a significant portion of hits that you will encounter in most Google searches on Linux topics. Here are a couple to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA3vmx0GaO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVquJh3DXUA
The Unix Hater’s Handbook It’s a bit of an ‘oldie’ at this point, but a very entertaining source of Unix knowledge (almost universally transferable to Linux) is the rather lengthy ‘Unix Hater’s Handbook’. You can find it available for download here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120120031001/http://m.simson.net/ugh.pdf The Unix Hater’s Handbook takes an amusingly sarcastic look at Linux’s quirks and peculiarities, but beyond the humor, there’s a LOT of good information in it, presented in a surprisingly entertaining way. It was edited in 1994, from online posts in the Unix-Haters forum, by Simson Garfinkel, Steven Strassmann, and Daniel Weise. The information in it is mostly relevant to command-line functionality in Unix, but it can serve as a surprisingly good foundation of general Linux knowledge. Plus, it’s good for more than a few chuckles. Next month: Getting More Help in Linux (or More Getting Help in Linux, I suppose).