Brian Masinick
There are loads of resources that cover this sort of thing.
That is absolutely true. Number one, do START with the man page, but suppose, as many people are, that you are a newbie, or as @stevesr0 openly says, “I am a permanent newbie”, that means even though Steve is quite intelligent, he doesn’t come from a long career of software engineering; though he uses a computer, it is a tool, not his key tool of trade, more of an information tool.
A great number of people here are like that. Given this truth, a person can START with a manual page, BUT an equally intelligent thing to do when you do not understand something within a manual page would be to search the Internet for various phrases that contain the words not understood, and a GOOD search will include additional words including Linux in those searches.
Learning how to search properly is NOT an ideal or exact science either, but as I’ve said countless times, every one of us did not start out as experts; we studied, read, but then we TRIED stuff out; when it didn’t work, we tried something else. For me, I doubt that even “six times was a charm” (like the “My Cousin Vinnie” movie quote that I’ve cited multiple times too). It takes research, trial and error, genuine hard work.
Do you think that the telephone, the automobile, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor – you name the technology – came about immediately or automatically? I think it was either Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, or some other long deceased inventor, that said the same thing. They FAILED thousands of times, but that one time, they created a phenomenal invention, based on errors and corrections.
Do you think that even antiX is any different? We’ve already had an Alpha 1 and a Beta 1 test release and we have a lot left to fix. Does that make our workers and our leadership ineffective or any other word? No, it means that we learn from our experiences and make things better based on what we learn.
The only people around here who will be successful are those who will be willing to do the work, dig deeply, uncover problems and correct them, one by one, until a specific goal or group of goals are achieved. I doubt that even then it’ll be perfect, but it will serve a useful purpose.
I can spoon feed commands and tell people to repeat this or that endlessly; until they eventually do their own learning it won’t mean a thing; BUT if they at least try, get a starting point, then work hard to improve their starting point they will get a LOT better.
We have an excellent example of that here, our Brazilian friend @MarceloCripe. I’m sure that Marcelo would tell you there is plenty that he does not know, and will never know, but he will also tell you that he’s learned a lot. He did so because some people gave him some tips, and then he used those to improve his knowledge, and he continues to add to his knowledge, and due to EFFORT on his part, he’s definitely a functional antiX user.
I’m another user at a different place. I had a more significant amount of information at my disposal, so there is a lot that I’ve learned over the past forty or more years. Is there stuff I know? Definitely. Is there stuff I don’t know? Also definitely. I just have a different point where “I’m am permanent newbie”!
What each person can do, however, is take as much initiative as possible to advance that point of “newbie”-ness – to the point that we become veterans in an incrementally greater number of areas (recognizing that there will always be other areas where we are always newbies!)
--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page