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Learn Linux without internet and stack overflow: Linux HOWTOs
- gerikson 5y agoLast updated in 2015: https://tldp.org/sorted_howtos.html https://tldp.org/sorted_howtos.html
- rascul 5y agoThere have been some updates in the Github repo since then (https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/commits/master https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/commits/master) but I don't notice any new content. It was a great resource for me decades ago, but now I understand TLDP to be mostly old and stale (and sometimes arguably bad, such as the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide) and generally better sources can be easily found.
- _ZeD_ 5y agoWhat's bad about ABS? I remember I used that guide a lot back in the days
- rascul 5y agoLooking through the examples, I see lots of pitfalls such as unquoted variables, backticks, no error checking, and parsing ls. Also bash features such as [[ are ignored, and expr is sometimes used for what bash handles natively. Also there's a lot of new stuff that this old guide doesn't cover.
- wycy 5y agoAs someone who's not particularly great at bash, I don't know enough to know if a guide I'm looking at is teaching old/bad methods. Are there any notably good references for modern bash?
- rascul 5y agoI generally stick with the bash reference manual and Wooledge's wiki. Not sure how good they are for people unfamiliar with the material already. https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/index.htm... https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
- throwaway823882 5y agoI gained the skills to become a Systems Admin when I was 17 by reading and following HOWTOs. I keep telling myself I will start writing new HOWTOs and publish them there, because the blog-spam instructions of today make it take 10x longer to get things done. Would anybody else write new HOWTOs?
- hansor 5y agoSame here. With those HOWTOs I was able to learn networking from scratch in home without actually having internet connection. Good times :) > Would anybody else write new HOWTOs? I always wanted to, but because I'm not native English speaker I was always afraid to publish anything. Still i think it could be very beneficial - especially that we all observed dozen of forums and websites just vanished over the last decade or two, but those documents are available to all as simple Linux package.
- throwaway823882 5y agoI'd volunteer as an English editor! I know I would want someone to help me translate into other languages.
- JasonFruit 5y agoIf this comment is any evidence, your English is good enough that I would be able to learn from what you write.
- Skunkleton 5y agoYour writing doesn't give you away as a non-native English speaker. Please write HOWTOs!
- megous 5y agoBarely anybody will care about your English if you'll write about something people want to know about, or if you're just sharing your passion. I publish bunch of technical writings ad hoc, just because I like to share about something I worked on with Pinephone (https://xnux.eu/ https://xnux.eu/) and other things, and nobody ever commented about the language.
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoWow, totally forgot HOWTOs existed. I'm betting a lot of us here learned Linux via HOWTOs more than any other resource.
- markwong 5y agoThe tldp was especially useful for me when i was in university.
- porbelm 5y agoSlackware, HOWTOs and Usenet was how to learn this shit back in the day. And damn if it didn't make a bunch of fine admins, 'cause you basically had to fuck up a whole lot and that's good for learnin'
- teddyh 5y agoI was going to link to the venerable collection of Usenet FAQs at rtfm.mit.edu, but the server seems down at the moment. (I seem to recall using it a few weeks ago.)
- qalmakka 5y agoI distinctly remember borrowing a copy of "Linux From Dummies" from the public library and then using it to learn how to use the Linux shell, back in the '00s. It even came with a CD of some extremely old version of Red Hat.
- orev 5y agoI think “Linux From Dummies” better describes the current trend of blogspam that are all just copy/pastes of each other. But back in the day, “Linux FOR Dummies” was quite popular.
- walton_simons 5y agoThis brings back some great memories. I learned so much from the HOWTOs, and I think they played a big part in getting me my first proper tech job. I just had to sit and figure it out, and the process of persevering through the mistakes and dead ends ultimately gave me a level of confidence around computers and technology in general which has been incredibly useful in work and in life.
- bakatubas 5y agoI second that—memories installing gentoo on iBook G4 and getting the wireless to work felt like a nice accomplishment :) Granted, the gentoo docs are really good so that’s where I went mostly.
- noufalibrahim 5y agoIf someone was running a non Ubuntu distro on a personal laptop, I used it as a proxy for some amount of technical ability and it was mostly justified.
- rckoepke 5y agoI had a similar feeling installing Gentoo on my graphite iMac in 2004. Except in my case I received so, so much help from the IRC channel, particularly Joseph Jezak (JoseJX) who helped me with some very deep problems I had involving patching X to start on the iMac because it hadn't been used on my model before. I saw just now that JoseJX went on to do Google Summer of Code with Gentoo in 2006 to work on the X.org Configuration Tool. I believe it took me most of the high school summer to get X working. In the meantime I got to use links CLI web browser, IRC, and instant messenger clients (AIM etc) for 2-3 months until GUI was functional. I became completely comfortable in command line as a result. It's sad to me that I can't help students replicate a simklar experience today because the internet seems largely unusable in a text-only browser now. Those communities are incredibly for new users. For me it's been critical to have others around who can get me past roadblocks while I work hard to genuinely learn on my own. And yes, the Gentoo docs were superb. The forum and IRC had incredibly patient people who genuinely loved helping people of all skill levels.
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- andi999 5y agoFor me it was, without HOWTOs you couldnt get anything done.
- grafelic 5y agohttps://github.com/lahwaacz/arch-wiki-docs https://github.com/lahwaacz/arch-wiki-docs as an alternative to tldp for offline viewing. IMO the Arch wiki is the best Linux configuration resource available.
- iib 5y agoThe arch wiki is also available offline as ZIM files, a type of compressed file suited for text and indexing, used by Wikimedia for its projects, and viewable through software like kiwix. It also works as a general way of encoding html documents in a single, compressed file, which I really like, but I could not get their tools to work properly to convert some unconventionally structured websites.
- desktopninja 5y agoJust feels right: echo cappuccino >/dev/coffee Ref: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Coffee/#ss4.1 https://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Coffee/#ss4.1
- _benj 5y agoThose HOWTOs where what started me on Linux back in Slackware time when I’d order CDs of it because downloading those ISO with dialup was almost impossible. Good times!
- alexpetralia 5y agoOne of my favorite resources on Linux is this: http://www.linfo.org/newbies.html http://www.linfo.org/newbies.html I have learned so much about low-level systems from these encyclopedic (yet extremely simply written) articles. Make sure to click into the links on things you don't know - it is a very fun rabbit hole!
- durnygbur 5y agoI have a dedicated private git repository for classic, awesome, and useful programming material serving as local offline knowledge base, and it awaits for content like this.
- hliyan 5y agoWhat tool can I use to simply create and manage text files like these? Something that can indent and wrap using spaces rather than rich formatting. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/text/DHCP https://tldp.org/HOWTO/text/DHCP
- EnigmaCurry 5y agoIn Emacs, hit Alt-Q (fill-paragraph), which will line-wrap and preserve your current line indent.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoAs a new Linux user, those HOWTOs where essential to get stuff done back in the 90s. I remember having read many of those HOWTOs as a kid when I got started with Red Hat Linux 5.2.
- runjake 5y agoFor those not paying close attention, TLDP hasn't been updated in about 6 years, but much of it hasn't been updated in 15-20 years. Just keep using the Internet (ServerFault/Digital Ocean/ArchWiki/Ubuntu Wiki/etc) and man pages.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoBut man pages are man pages, not HOWTOs and thus don’t tell you ... how to :)
- Skunkleton 5y agoThis is often true, but many man pages have a pretty good examples section. Sometimes these are good enough, and are at least worth checking for.
- marmot777 5y agoI have to confess, I use man pages for a quick thing I want to know such as options. For how to, man pages aren’t structured to teach step by step like a how to. A how to is like a tutorial or instruction manual and I think man pages are like reference books.
- jedimastert 5y agoI've found Digital Ocean and Archwiki especially to be incredible resources
- herewulf 5y agoThe Gentoo wiki is good too (for any distro, just adapt to your needs).
- InfiniteRand 5y agoDo you know why it was abandoned?
- hansor 5y ago
- phren0logy 5y agoMy favorite resource: https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php "The Linux Command Line", also available in dead-tree version from No Starch Press. The PDF of the Fifth Edition is available for free from the link above.
- ByThyGrace 5y agoI find it funny that I have no idea how to open a pdf file in a Linux terminal.
- phren0logy 5y agoIt's also 100% accessible via HTML, but in the spirit of the "without internet" above I figured the PDF was easier for beginner than a curl command.
- abnry 5y agoYou can use `xdg-open`.
- justaj 5y ago> Last updated October 5, 2006
- znpy 5y agoI remember back in 2005-2005 when LinuxPro magazine gave a full dvd containing ALL of the tldp howtos and stuff, and that was kind of a sweet deal. I never bought a magazine so fast in my life.
- quink 5y agoDon't know about the "stuff", but Linux distros frequently shipped with packages for the TLDP. Or rather whatever it was know as at the time, some derivative of Linux HOWTOs or linuxdoc.org.
- cheschire 5y agoLinux From Scratch (LFS) taught me the depths of Linux. TLDP taught me the breadth.
- megous 5y agoAnother one here. My first real IT job was building a LFS based distro in 2005. :) It was fun. Though I was coming in with a year of Slackware experience already, so following some commands and dealing with build issues was not a new thing to me. So I at least based it on m4 generated shell based build system scripts and my slackware package manager I wrote at that time. https://spkg.megous.com/ https://spkg.megous.com/ Moved to Arch Linux shortly after.
- kristianpaul 5y agoI rather learn from Arch Linux or Gentoo wikis which are way up to date.
- cbpowell 5y agoIn 1994/5-ish I had a compendium of HOWTOs published in book form called "DRx. Linux", put out by Linux System Labs. It was awesome, and THE way to get Linux configured. Good memories.
- savant_penguin 5y agoI really hope they add a bunch of examples. The thing I miss the most about man pages is the total lack of runnable examples I get what I have to do 10 times faster from an example (preferably one in which I can just substitute the target files) than if I have to actually understand the manual lingo
- bowlingx 5y agoI remember printing out the gentoo documentation back in the days to do a stage-1 install with the only computer I had :D. This was so much fun
- yls 5y agoDitto. It was a procrastination project of mine to avoid my law exam preparations.
- marmot777 5y agoHere’s a few how to style sites that I’ve found useful for everything from small things to big projects: These are general things that might seem too basic but there are some gems in there. Everyone, even really experienced users, can have gaps in their knowledge of basics: https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-GUI https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-GUI Julie Evans doesn’t right just about Linux but when she writes a how-to she really puts the time in to do it well: https://jvns.ca/ https://jvns.ca/ DigitalOcean has the best set of how-to docs I know of for a web hosting company: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials I have less experience with them but Linode seems to do a good job on how to docs too: https://www.linode.com/resources/ https://www.linode.com/resources/ And there’s man pages and the like, too, but man pages can be a bit cumbersome for learning more than some options and basic use of a command. Any other sites that people think are best for Linux in general, specialized areas like shells and scripting, distro specific sites, etc.? I’d save those sites and return to them first then do a web search if not enough there.
- greenie_beans 5y agoDitto on Julia Evans and Digital Ocean. Also, do the reddit.com/r/linuxupskillchallenge. You'll learn a new piece each day. (Rest in peace snori74)
- airstrike 5y agoOne of my all time favorites was the OG Django Book http://web.archive.org/web/20080304015113/http://www.djangobook.com/en/1.0/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080304015113/http://www.djangob... I believe the idea to let readers annotate any paragraph with questions / additional comments has not been replicated to date, but it was immensely helpful. Sadly the Wayback version doesn't let you load those comments, but you get the idea
- kulix425 5y agoWho's gonna tell em?
- type0 5y agoFor beginners Linux Journey is a good resource, even if it is incomplete and slightly dated https://linuxjourney.com/ https://linuxjourney.com/ but it isn't outdated like tldp
- teleforce 5y agoHow Linux Works book is another great Linux reference. The latest edition has virtualization content that includes VMs and containers. [1]https://nostarch.com/howlinuxworks3 https://nostarch.com/howlinuxworks3