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For newbies Articles introducing Linux concepts.

How to read man pages

Posted 01-10-2020 at 11:50 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 05:48 AM by hazel

The Problem
Linux newbies tend to find man pages somewhat offputting. That may be because they are very concentrated, compressing a large amount of information into a small, highly-formatted package. They go back conceptually to the original UNIX Programmers' Manual, which was designed for experts who just wanted to bone up on something occasionally.

When the GNU people were creating GNU/Linux, they included man pages but also provided an alternative called info pages. This...

hazel

Senior Member

Posted in For newbies

Views 1449 Comments 2 hazel is offline

Choosing a Linux distribution

Posted 11-25-2019 at 06:52 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 05:49 AM by hazel

Tags distributions

The problem

One of the commonest newbie questions on this site is "What Linux distro would you recommend for me to use?" It's understandable that newbies ask this question. With Windows, the answer to "What Windows should I run?" is easy: the latest one that will run on your machine (and that is still supported by Microsoft and the companies that produce your antivirus software). But Linux comes in a lot more than 57 varieties, most of them equally up to date. Which then should...

hazel

Senior Member

Posted in For newbies

Views 1038 Comments 1 hazel is offline

Libraries: what they are, how they work, why you need them

Posted 05-11-2018 at 10:37 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 05:50 AM by hazel

All serious software nowadays does most of its work using libraries. The top-level program code is mainly a caller for library functions written by other people, and it is these that actually do most of the heavy lifting. Without libraries, programming would be impossible for anyone but professionally trained coders.

A library is a collection of functions that do a particular set of interrelated jobs: reading and writing a particular media format, doing quad-precision maths, parsing...

hazel

Senior Member

Posted in For newbies

Views 246 Comments 1 hazel is offline

Package managers and how to use them

Posted 01-01-2018 at 08:33 AM by hazel
Updated 01-16-2020 at 05:51 AM by hazel

A surprising number of Linux newbies do not seem to understand how to use a package manager despite the fact that they probably have smartphones and are therefore likely to be quite familiar with the concept of an app store.

Linux was using app stores long before Steve Jobs created the iPhone. However in the Linux world they are called repositories (repo for short).

Windows users tend to acquire bad habits where software installation is concerned. They browse about...

hazel

Senior Member

Posted in For newbies

Views 209 Comments 1 hazel is offline