Solution

There’s another difficulty, too: Linux follows the grand Unix tradition
of small, specialized programs working cooperatively, so any Linux
distribution contains a large number of individual programs. For
example, Tom’s Root Boot, “The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk,”
contains over 230 separate, individual programs on a single 3.5”
diskette. A general-purpose distribution such as Mandrake or SuSE
contains several thousand programs and there are over 12,000
packages in the Debian repositories. While organizing and
maintaining a printed library presents some difficulties, the good
news is that all of these things are documented. Whatever you want
to know, there is a way to find it.
1.1.1 man and info: The Universal Linux Manuals
Almost every program written for Linux has a man page. They’re
usually not the best teaching tool for newbies. Their purpose is to
document the command syntax and every command option, and to
be universally available. No matter what kind of strange desert-island
scenario you may find yourself in, there will always be man pages.
And because man pages are incorporated into the programs to which
they belong, you’ll find that only installed programs have man pages
and that the versions of those pages are pertinent to your system.
info pages tend to be more verbose than man pages and are
hyperlinked. The hyperlinks navigate to the various nodes, or
chapters, inside the document and to cross-references in other info
pages. Many info pages are simply reformatted man pages. But in
some instancesprimarily the GNU project programsthe info pages are
more detailed, containing tutorials and extensive examples.
1.1.2 Other Documentation
A large number of README, CHANGELOGS, RELEASE NOTES,
COPYRIGHT, INSTALL, integrated Help systems, and HTML docs are
going to be squirreled away in various locations on your system. Yes,
it’s a jumble. Don’t worry, you’ll learn easy ways to find all these
things in this chapter, including a nice Python script to do the finding
for you.
There are many web sites that host complete archives of man and
info pages, which comes in handy if your system is missing the ones
you want, or you want to read them without having to download and
install new programs. A Google search will find them quickly.
The commercial Linux distributionsfor example, Red Hat, SuSE,
Mandrake, Xandros, and Linspiresupply excellent user manuals. Every
major Linux distribution provides a feast of online resources. Search
engines, user mailing lists, Usenet, and all sorts of Linux web sites
also supply a wealth of help and information.
1.1.3 Graphical Viewers
There are several good graphical man and info page viewers:
Konqueror
The web and file browser in KDE also contains an excellent man
and info page viewer. Simply type man:foo or info:/foo in the
address bar. It is easy to print from Konqueror, and easy to
select individual man or info pages for printing.
Yelp
The Gnome viewer. Displays man and info pages, and Gnome’s
help documents. It is indexed and searchable.
Pinfo
A nice ncurses-based info and man viewer for the console.
Users can add new documents to it, and it supports regexp
searches.