Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* Paul Cartwright
[08-14-05 18:57]: I've read man pages for 20 years. You still have to know what you are looking for, and man apt.conf is not something I would have looked for.
I also find man pages sometimes of dubious help. Written by programers for people with programmer knowledge. After all, they are addressing their peers.
And you already know what you're looking for!
I only wish.... But I do learn more by trying to solve my problems myself before asking for help.
But you have something to start from. I as a part-time unix/linux _user_ for 15 years, am now faced with trying to do system administration on my home system. Suse's defaults do pretty well, but when they don't, the man pages are useless to me -- I look for HOWTO's first, then Google, then the list. For instance, I still have never had an answer to why my usb flash drive (asked about on this list a couple of weeks ago) "refuses to accept address x" when I plug it in, even though the system recognizes it and reads its name and characteristics. None of the above has even mentioned this error message, and it appears to be the only thing between me and my Cruzer (which I finally solved by sharing it from my wife's XP Pro machine). I have no clue where to go from here. No, apropos didn't help. John Perry