With a view to installing a decent news client, I chose to d/l Knews, extracted it from its tarball, and read its INSTALL file. The first command to be issued is "xmkmf", which is unrecognized by SUSE v9.3. As nowhere a clue where to find it, I conclude that it is an exotic command not available to me. So much for Knews.

Next I fell back on Thunderbird, which I don't really want, but it is anyway from a larger and hopefully more helpful house. For background, I point out that I have Firefox configured to drop downloaded files into the cutely-named folder "My Downloads". I have now downloaded Thunderbird four times (each time, the name of the d/l file becomes incremented: thunderbird-1.0.6.tar.gz, thunderbird-2.0.6.tar.gz, thunderbird-3.0.6.tart.gz...., which seems bizarre). None of these has appeared in "My Downloads", and the "locate" command doesn't find any of them (or even "thunderbird*". This is mysterious.

I have been spending a lot of time reading the literature available to me in print, that withing SUSE, and online. It doesn't seem to be helping me get my bearings in SUSE. I am unable to explain the phenomena I have described. I don't really enjoy having to come to this very helpful site with great frequency to ask how to do things that should be intuitively obvious, but which are not, apparently because the designers of Llinux don't wish them to be. I am, in fact, coming to the end of my tether.

Back to the problem(s) at hand, I would be pleased if someone can offer a clue to the absence of "xmkmf", and to the mysterious disappearance of the Thunderbird downloads.

Oh, yes: a few days ago someone suggested that a command called "slocate" might be useful for searching files, but (par for the course) neglected to give a hint about where to find it. By now, I know enough to guess that it is in a package with an entirely different and unintuitive name, that one can find only if one knows beforehand. Does anyone know?

slocate should be installed on your system by default. Try typing 'slocate' into the prompt as a normal user, and if that doesn't work, type 'whereis slocate' or 'which slocate' which will search for where the slocate executable is. If those commands show nothing, I guess you really don't have it!

If you have it, you first need to make sure its database is current (slocate is fast because it builds a database - berkeley DB if I am remembering correctly- of the files on your system and indexes them for fast access) by typing 'updatedb'. This may take a while (for the aforementioned index building) but is worth it: once update is done, typing 'slocate <SOMETHING>' returns results FAST.

That being said, that mysterious command doesn't seem right. I haven't installed Knews, but if you downloaded a tarball I would assume that it follows the normal convention of requiring the user to type :

./configure
make
make install

to install the package.

Try that in your extracted tarball directory and see if it yields results, and get back to me.

I typed slocate into the prompt as a normal user before I posted my query; I didn't think it was necessary to say that explicitly, as it seems implied by the question. The system's retort is that the command is unrecognized.

I ran updatedb last week, for the benefit of locate, which I had just installed. (Why a command like locate wasn't installed by the DVD, I have not the foggiest. Just so I could say I had updated this very day, I have just run updatedb again.

The system's response to "whereis slocate" is "slocate', the single word alone on the line. Unhelpful.

The answer to "which slocate" is a return to the prompt. I think it is clear that the system doesn't know.

If I decide to try again to install Knews, I will try the three-step process that you suggest. When I was told about this sequence here yesterday (because I couldn't find within SUSE any description of how to install from a tarball), it was emphasized to me that I must also read the README and INSTALL files within the tarball for special instructions. This implies to me that the author, knowing what he is talking about, gives instructions that supercede the standard three steps. Evidently, this is not necessarily so. There is a lot about Linux that I don't like (inadequate and even misleading documentation, utter lack of any effort to be intuitive or mnemonic, absence by default of obviously essential utilities, as in the present case, and absence of clues about where to find missing tools). I need to rethink whether I want to waste much time for no good reason, or whether I should simply stick with the lastest release of OS/2, which I have been using happily for a decade.

I feel your pain: without a doubt one of the biggest hurtles to learning linux yourself is the lack of good documentation for every flavor/distro. It is understandable, though: these people are working on it for free, and are pressured to getting the product out and running with the installation/documentation as a secondary thought. This isn't normally the case at all, but I do acknowledge that it happens, and that it is unfortunate. Trust me when I say that grievances have been filed by many a user, and that I see things improved upon every day.

If you are truly interested in learning about how everything works, nothing is better than the Linux documentation project http://www.tldp.org. That site has helped me many times and (aside from LQ.org) continues to be a great source of free information on running linux.

So...Knews. It looks like it is pretty new (1.0 beta), and so that will explain a lot about its awkwardness. Let us know about how your ./configure, make, make install goes.

I think it is not entirely accurate to say that they work on it for free. SUSE has paying customers that presumably cover their salaries, and we freeloaders are just that. In any case, all that is extraneous. If I use SUSE, it is because SUSE is usable (which at the moment is questionable). If they were working for nothing, there wouldn't be any pressure to get something out; I doubt that this would make for better documentation -- I think the state of the docs is the result of a mindset that doesn't attach much importance to documentation.

I am not coming from Windows. I am accustomed to informative documentation, which I do not see here. The man and info pages are presumably uniform across distributions, or nearly so; they are deplorable. I am aware that bugless software has not been written, but the apparently successful completion of a RPM installation, followed by the unexplained absence of the "installed" software is simply too fundamental. It needs an explanation, and I have not found one, nor has one been suggested seriously.

I am not sure why you write "If you are truly interested in learning how everything works....". No possible documentation will explain why the step-by-step installation of the Thunderbird RPM claimed to be successful, yet failed to produce a running, or even visible, Thundeerbird. There is no question that I want to understand how things work. Even more than that, however, I want things to work as advertised. In fact, it is erratic. It is not an improvement on what I have been using, but the opposite.

You are correct in your implication that the enormous multiplicity of distributions is a drag on the ability to document properly. It is also the reason why installation of applications can't be simpler. I doubt that the number of distributions can be jjustified in any way. It is possible that an argument can be made for ten or so, certainly not for hundreds -- and I would not be surprised if their are thousands. But SUSE is one of the leaders, is it not? It isn't one of the hangers-on in an excessively fragmented market. So far, Linux is a great disappointment. It is good to know that things are getting better all the time, but I am a mortal, and am interested in actually using it today (more or less). But enough of that.

I don't really want Thunderbird; I tried to install it only because I couldn't find a better news client. I am a heavy user of Usenet. Apparently, there isn't one. Accordingly, the rational thing to do is to continue using the one I have been using, which means that it isn't likely that Linux can be my primary OS.

What I meant here is the developers of the software (Thunderbird, Knews, etc.) and not the distribution makers. Even the vast, vast majority of distribution makers still do it for free (Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, etc).

Pressure to get something out doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they are working on it for free. What I mean is that they want a working program NOW and the documentation comes secondary. I'm the same way: if I write a script to do a batch job that is helpful, I'm surely going to get it working before I write the documentation. What good is a manual without a working product?

I never said you were coming from Windows. As for the man pages, they are far from deplorable-they do exactly what they were intended to do. They present the information in a thorough and accurate manner, and are technical by nature. Furthermore, they are in a format that is available to larger systems with a GUI like KDE, or smaller systems having only a terminal.

Of course you will not find documentation specific to installing Thunderbird on that website (tldp). You will, however, find several instructions on the different ways to install software correctly (e.g. RPM, tarball, DEB, auto-installer). As I recall, Thunderbird required no compiling. This is confirmed by a link right off of their website: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thun...oadandinstall.

Justified? How about one of Linux's (and OSS) primary philosophies - to be able to modify software freely to get it just the way you want it. That extends to distributions, too. Sure, most of them abide by standards (http://www.linuxbase.org), but they really don't have to, and shouldn't have to. If someone wasn't happy with their choices in the distributions, then I think it is great that they could/did create a new one to make them happy! After all, my distribution suits me perfectly, and came about because the creator (Judd Vinet) wasn't happy with Slackware or Crux.

I'm sorry that Linux isn't likely to be your primary OS. You do what suits you best, and we'll do what suits us best. That's what we're all after anyway!