Re: Flaming Debian Newbies

[Bernhard Rieder <e9325898@student.tuwien.ac.at>]

Ed Cogburn wrote:
>         The man package is far to large to fit on the base system.  I had
> exactly the same problem when I installed Linux for the first
> time.  'man' was one of the few unix commands that I knew (thanks
> to a book I bought), but after installing it wasn't there.  Ouch.

You're right!
Even if it is there. Finding exactly the information You want isn't always
easy (especially for a newbie). And finding somethind on the bash manpage
(sleep AFAIR) is very difficult if You do not know exactly what and how to
search. How should somebody new to linux know that .... is a builtin bash
command and how should he find it?

Even the people who flame newbies sometimes need information that can be
found on a simple manpage and they are more pleased with a polite message
like: "have a look at the manpage for '...' or the '...-HOWTO' or
'http:...'" rather than with a reply like "RTFM you silly idiot" not even
telling on which manpage to look at.

I think giving help to others and sharing knowledge is one of the biggest
strengths of the linux community. Everybody started as a newbie so don't
flame them.


Bernhard

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