[lug] Advice Wanted: How to Locate OS projects in need ofdocumentation help

[David L. Anselmi]

siegfried wrote:
> If you are interested: I've been looking for a good tutorial on Linux for
> over ten years!

Did you look at RUTE?  I've never had a serious beginner and I'm a poor 
judge of what beginners need but it seems comprehensive.

> Every single one I have ever seen assumes you know the command you
> are looking for so you can look it up in the index and that > is useless to a beginner.

Really?  That sounds more like a reference than a tutorial (it describes 
the Unix nutshell book exactly).

A friend recently said similar, that it was hard to know all those 
invisible commands (commands you never used and never heard of so you 
never knew to look for them).  I think seq would qualify for him--he's a 
Solaris guy.

So I found seq on Google because when I was scripting for i in 1 2 3... 
I thought, "this doesn't scale, hasn't someone fixed it?"  Google is 
good for Linux where you might not have all the available commands 
installed.  But I've found commands that I never heard of using man -k too.

So to qualify as a tutorial, doesn't it have to say "here are some 
things that you might want to do, and how to do them."  A good one would 
cover a lot of things and explain the pieces well, and perhaps even 
build in some logical way.  But in the end you actually have to read the 
whole thing to understand a broad set of commands and how they can be 
put together.  And then remember some of what you read.

BTW, what do you mean by a Linux tutorial anyway?  I've seen good 
tutorials on vi.  The bash man page is pretty thorough, especially if 
you google for the parts that you think, "why would I ever want to do 
that?" (e.g. process substitution).  And there are very good books on 
scripting.  All of which have made Linux easier for me.  But none of 
those sold themselves as Linux.

Dave