Where IS the FM?

Steven White wrote:
> I do not have a lot of GNU/Linux experience, so perhaps the answer to
> this is obvious.  I would be eager to read the FM if I could FIND the
> FM.  I have found some documentation; the KDE desktop has a link for KDE

Isaac Hummel wrote:
>man <command> and info <command> are always good, at least for non-GUI
>apps. You should also check out www.tldp.org (The Linux Documentation
>Project). I completely agree that documentation should be well organized
>and easy-to-find for newbies; I'm sure that some distros do this better
>than others, but those that don't do it well really need to put some
>effort into that.

If you are using a Linux distribution that uses the RedHat Package Manager to 
sort out its applications (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake & others) then you'll find 
it worthwhile if you become familiar with the 'rpm' command.

For instance if you're feeling masochistic and want to try and use WINE, use 
the command rpm -qil wine | more   . It tells you about Wine, which version 
it is and then lists all the files known to belong to that application. That 
way you can sometimes look up the documentation files that are stored in 
non-standard / unusual places. Also try rpm -qa > packages.txt to create a 
file called packages.txt with a list of all the applications / packages / 
RPMs installed. There is a book called Maximum RPM which is a really good 
explanation of the rpm command and the book is/was on the internet - I 
printed the first half of it at work.

Off topic bit: In particular I have found that I spend considerably more on 
Linux books than on Linux software. I need the books to keep things going (I 
am a home user and have to rely on my own resources). I would buy Linux 
software but the software that I would put money in to (Wine, Star Office, 
the Kernel) are either free or don't offer the appropriate packages. The Wine 
packages aren't appealing. Take a look at the book reviews database at 
www.accu.org, that's something I rely on and occasionally contribute to.

HTH


Ian.

PS The configuration of WINE is one of my annoyances. SuSE Linux 7.1 does a 
lousy job of installing it. Maybe a later version of SuSE does a better job.