If there was one thing that I wish that I knew sooner as a newbie, it would be "Where in the heck is all the local documentation?" If you're interested in learning some basic linux commands, such as rpm and yum, etc. I recommend that you read on. Use man on the command line: man <name of command> I recommended that you do this one first: man man Man pages are generally organized in 8 sections, so sometimes articles with the same heading appear in multiple places. In that case, you can do the following: man # <name of command> The # being 1-8. To check for articles in all sections with the same name, type: man -a <name of command> Oftentimes, man will find a programming related document and not the one that you want. For example, man has three of them, one in sections 1, 5, and 7. You can use this command to see how many documents there are and in what sections: whatis <name of command> Sometimes you don't know the name of something. You can use the apropos command: apropos <name or keyword> | less If you get an error on either of the above two, run "makewhatis" to build the man page index. You can also use info to sometimes find deeper information on something. Read up: info info Man and info are both available via the GUI help, so you may find that much easier to use. Don't worry if you don't understand what you are reading, much of it is often out of scope of what you may be wanting to do at the time. For example, if I wanted to know how to update a package without installing over the previous one, I would type "man rpm" and discover that the -U and -F switches are available for use. Package documents are found here: /usr/share/doc/ And finally, here is the incredibly large and very informative "bash command shell bible": man bash Have fun and happy reading! On Thursday, February 17, 2005 2:30 PM Kumara wrote: > >Hi all, >I'm a newbie of Linux, for practicing installing rpms and >tar.gz files, I installed a lot of unnecessary programs even >asterisk. but many times, I could not launch many programs >after installing or the particular program. because I don't >know how to do it. now... my system is slow and run with lot >of stucks/non-responsive times. I want to practice some more >before making a clean installation again. could somebody tell >me to practice some good commands or run some good programs as >a newbie in Linux including uninstalling programs? Thank you >in advance Mohan > Shawn
