On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 02:51:46PM +0200, Ian Balchin wrote: > Brenda, I did install the newbie help files, now it would be nice > to be able to turn some of them into hard copy. I note that the > files in /usr/doc are the same as in /usr/share/doc (writing this > from memory, hey) except that the former seems to catch the > documentation packages when you install something new (like I did > Joe last night). So can I dump the latter?
No, as explained by the other poster. I think /usr/doc is there for historical reasons, and /usr/share/doc is the new "right location". You can put a link from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc (as is done for the other packages): $ cp hello.file /usr/share/doc $ ln -s /usr/share/doc/hello.file /usr/doc/hello.file and your other software will find it. It seems the packages you installed (like joe) are installing their docs in the wrong place. Don't worry about that for now. You have many more relevant, interesting things to learn about first! Maybe by the time you get to fixing that on your own system, someone would have done it in the latest distro, anyway. The next time you upgrade, it might be automatically fixed. > What do I use to do some word processing, like a la WordPerfect > 5.1 ? Tex? Emacs? Short of Star Office, are we restricted to > 'editors' which in my terminology mean text-only, no bold, no > underlining, no nothing? I'm not sure what wysiwyg word processors are out there. I know that WordPerfect exists for linux (it was distributed by Corel for a while). And StarOffice, as you have found. emacs is a text editor (or "editor" as you call it). It has syntax highlighting (as does vim) but you can only see the highlighting in X windows. Highlighting applies to the file as you see it in the emacs display, not as it is printed. (Is there syntax highlighting for text mode emacs, using console text attributes like bold, highlight, reversevideo, underline? --Dunno) It is meant to help you edit the file - eg, you can see right away if you forgot to close a quote, because all the text after the open-quote is coloured like a string (as opposed to code). I too use LaTeX. Yes it can be used on a text console (as can emacs and vi). LaTeX is a markup language (as HTML is a markup language). It is based on a more primitive (in the sense of "closer to the hardware", not in the sense of "less powerful") markup language called TeX, which is fabulous for professional typesetting. LaTeX basically predefines a bunch of commands for documents, making it easy to indicate chapter headings, section headings, headers, footers, abstracts, author, etc. It requires one to be more disciplined in choosing a style than something like Microsoft Word. I find if you're not too fussy about the exact layout of the final document (ie, if you can live with the existing report, book, etc, layouts) then you can get stuff done reasonably quickly. On the other hand if you just have to have extra spaces in random places or other quirks in your document, or even different headers and footers, or you want a different font from the default, then you should be prepared to spend some time on learning LaTeX and TeX. By the way, if you can find a copy of the book: The TeX Book, (by Knuth) grab it. It's out of print (fits your criteria :-) and is an excellent book for TeX. I wish I could lay my hands on one. However most of your work should be done at the LaTeX level. What does one do with a LaTeX source file? One runs it through LaTeX to produce a device independent file (.dvi) ($ latex file.tex), then through a filter to make a postscript file ($ dvips file.dvi -o file.ps) - all this of course only if you have the tetex package (and the stuff it depends on) installed (tetex is the linux version of LaTeX). You can preview the ps file in a ps viewer such as ghostview ($ gv file.ps), if you have X windows running. > I seem to have stacks of stuff loaded according to the screens > that wizz past on bootup. What is the linux equivalent of the > autoexec.bat file, can I rem some of this stuff out for a while? Ah the system init files. Well... Linux systems have a lot of initialisation to do. So there are a few files. I think the main one is /etc/inittab. Then after that there are the init scripts in /etc/init.d, and linked to from /etc/rc[0123456S].d. This last file spec really means 8 different directories, named: /etc/rc0.d /etc/rc1.d /etc/rc2.d ... /etc/rcS.d I wouldn't mess about in there until I read up on them: init(8), inittab(5), update-rc.d(8), and look at /etc/init.d/skeleton, $ man init $ man inittab $ man update-rc.d The files in /etc/init.d are shell scripts (like .bat files). They would contain half of the autoexec.bat contents: the half that is for every user. Well that's ok for bringing up the system, now for the user init files. Depending on what shell you are using (likely bash for a Debian system), you have different init files. (the following assumes bash on Debian). When you first log in, a file called /etc/profile is run. It is a shell script (a la autoexec.bat). It should do stuff that only needs to be done once per login, like set environment variables. This file is for every user on your system. In addition to this file, each user can have a $HOME/.profile in their home directory, and it will also be run when they log in. Then for every shell that is launched on your system, a file called bash.bashrc is run. It should run per-shell commands, such as setting aliases. Again, each user can customise their own environment by having a $HOME/.bashrc file in their home directory, which will be run. Finally, you can do some cleanup upon logout with the .bash_logout file. Hint: When you change any user init file (global or per-user bashrc or profile), try to run it before you log out. If there is something wrong with it, you will still be logged in, and you can change the file. Otherwise, you may be in the position of being unable to log in, if (as a silly example) one command in the .bashrc or .profile command is to log out. To run a script called .profile: $ ./.profile It has to be executable: $ chmod u+x .profile Read the bash(1) man page for more info on the profile and bashrc files. Read the chmod(1) man page for info on file permissions Also, read the man(1) man page for info on the manual pages. To comment out a line in a script, put a # at the beginning. Actaully, everything between a # and the end of the line is a comment, in a script, unless the # is escaped with a backslash: \#, or unless the # is in quotes (I think). To comment out a script in an rc?.d directory, rename it to a name that doesn't start with S or K. (Lower-case s and k is reputedly sufficient. Personally I haven't tried that, I created some extra directories called rc[0123456S].comment and I move the scripts there when I want to comment them out. But that's overkill, caused by my not understanding the system when I did it.) To move (and/or rename) a file: $ mv S20hello.file s20hello.file $ mv rc2.d/S01hello.file rc2.comment/S01hello.file > Is there a command like the dos "mem /c /p" or something that will > indicate resource useage? Another poster said "top". You can also look at the contents of /proc/meminfo like this: $ cat /proc/meminfo and pstree gives a list of running processes, ordered by which process is the parent of which other processes. $ pstree Note that the files in /proc are special files, they are a view into the kernel memory and data structures, so don't write to them. That is, DON'T WRITE TO THEM, unless you know what you're doing. > Lastly, linux has been up and running continuously (but not doing > anything much) for some days now. Considering that my W95/8 > machine has probably never run for 24 hours without a reboot over > the past 5 years (it locks up when it wakes up even) this is > nothing short of amazing to me. Still, I suppose we should not > compare a linux console to a windowing environment, I see plenty > of hassle-posts starting with X. Well, as the other poster said, once you figure out how to get X going, then you're ok. It's getting to that stage that can be iffy. By the way, X windows and each associated window manager has its own (constantly evolving, grrr) startup file maze that you can look forward to :-). > I have asked my colleagues in the out of print book trade if they > have any linux books. Let me wait and see. it goes against the > grain to buy a new book in my position! It may even be possible to find out-of-print LaTeX books as LaTeX is also pretty old, but I'd recommend a more recent one as LaTeX is often updated, and you'd be missing some useful info if you stuck to the old books. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Consider registering as a bone marrow donor http://www.bloodservices.ca/english/ubmdr
