> problem is knowing the names of the man pages
This is an understated and underestimated problem with computers and
software in general. We're provided with lots of syntactic reference
support (here's all the options you can use with this command) but
very little guidance when it comes to what exists, why you'd want to
use what exists and how the heck what exists works.
The vast majority of questions asked here involve just those
questions. Truthfully, in my limited experience, the Linux world
provides answers to those kinds of questions better than most I've
been part of, at least in part because it's such an Internet saavy
community. But a couple basic books, like "Running Linux" from
O'Reilly Press sure help fill in the details. One thing that's
overlooked (mostly cuz you gotta know it's there) is the large library
of "how to" articles that come with Mandrake (in the Documentation
section). These explain many aspects of how computers work, how to
install stuff, how to do stuff with apps that are included and such.
We get so caught up in making particular things work that we often
lose sight of the fact that we need to read about systems in
general...at least I do.
But one solution to the problem you've stated is to sit down some
night with a good brew, go "cd /usr/bin" (and later other
directories), do "ls -al" and then just start typing "man filename"
for each of the files contained in that directory. You'll be amazed
at how much you learn in a short period of time.
Cheers --- Larry
