On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Charles O. Hartman wrote: > But I can't get (for example) the man command to get installed. When I > got back to dselect to try to get it by hand, dselect shows it marked > for installation; but no matter how many times I put in one and the > other CD, it never does get installed. There are other things not going > on (I don't have an exhaustive list) -- but for a beginner, this one's > critical! >
Ok, I'm still a newbie to Linux so hopefully I'm giving good advice and not stating crap (please correct me if I am). I had the same problem with dselect not installing programs I marked as install. I have the additional problem of possessing a 2x CDROM so installing from CD is painfully slow as dselects checks over every single file's flag (even if the prog was never installed and has never been changed). I found the dpkg program (dselect is a front-end to this program) to be much quicker and more useful. Dpkg -i package-name.deb is the correct syntax. You should be able to copy the man packages from the CD or from the net and install from a local directory. > =============== REALLY newbie problems ======================== > > In case somebody's got a moment's patience for simplicities, I have > three really basic questions about using Linux (which man might be able > to answer if I could get at it!): > > 1) How do I access other devices (for example the CD), such as to use ls > to find out what's on them? You can mount the devices using mount /dev/devicename /mount_point. On my box I use mount /dev/sbpcd /cdrom (SoundBlaster Pro CD interface) to access my CDROM. Umount is the command to unmount. > 2) If I add another piece of equipment (such as an extra hard drive), > how do I go about acquainting the system with that fact? Do I re-run > install? But that's a DOS command and DOS has gone away now . . . I've been wondering the same thing. > 3) What's the proper way to shut down the system? I can reboot (which > does an orderly shutdown) and kill the power during the reboot, but that > seems crude. If you type shutdown alone, it'll give you a list of options. "Shutdown -h now" (without the quotes) will halt the system.
