----- Original Message ----- From: "Carroll Grigsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I apologize for the curt response. No problem. > Fortunately a number of others gave you > more informative answers, and now you're tweaking away to your heart's > content. Haven't actually booted the linux box today - it's also a Windows box and I've been setting up a pcmcia modem. I dare say I'll be having a play this evening, and I'll try out their suggestions then. > My main problem with man is that I have to know the name of the command in > order to access the man file. Well, there's a bunch of commands with > not-always-intuitive names and I don't have the sharpest memory. What I'd like to see is a browsable front end. Not a GUI deal, just some text-mode screen that uses handy things like the arrow/esc/enter keys to let one move around dirs and files, letting one do useful stuff like 'read docs', 'get quick help', 'install', 'run', etc. Plenty of such stuff like that for DOS, but I don't think I've seen similar mentioned amongst linux people. Another problem is that it can be bewildering when there are so many choices for a given app (like text editors). On the MD8.1 download, they're just dumped into a single RPMs directory - how on earth is a newbie supposed to manage when the app he might or might not want is buried somewhere in a list of 2000 files? With an all-too-often obscure "xmc3-2.11-mightworkifyou'relucky.rpm" file name. > One solution > that I've found useful is the Linux Cookbook -- available on paper and also > online at www.nostarch.com. It's task oriented, so that if I want to search > for a specific bit of text, and I can't remember whether I should use grep > (or is it "gerp"? "grope"?) or some other tool, a few minutes scanning the > chapter on searching text gets me pointed in the right direction. I'll have a look. Was at the local computer mega-store today (getting the modem) and had a look at their linux books. I didn't really feel that any of them fitted the bill - quite a few based around RedHat 7.x, but I'm not sure how relevant that would be to Mandrake 8.1.
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