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Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

> One of the more useless pieces of advice Linux beginners are given is to `man [tool]`.

On the other hand, when I was first introduced to Linux ~20 years ago, I didn't have an "always-on" Internet connection and web sites weren't that popular.

Probably 90% of what I learned in the first few years or so came from the man pages and a locally downloaded copy of the guides and howto's from TLDP [0].

I might also mention that not all man pages are created equal. I've seen some in Ubuntu that serve no purpose other than wasting bytes on the disk while some of those in OpenBSD act as a single source for everything one needs to know about <tool>.

[0]: http://www.tldp.org/

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Similar situation for me. My first Linux distribution was Red Hat 5.2 which included an off-line copy of the Linux Documentation Project on the CD (as did other contemporary distros such as Mandrake). Since I only had a slow dial-up connection, I found these off-line copies to be an invaluable resource. I remember using Lynx to read Guides and Howtos during the two weeks it took me to get X working on my old laptop.

After those early days, I hadn’t looked at the LDP site in ages but about 4/5 years ago I looked at the project again with a view towards contributing (now that I know more about GNU/Linux and Unix in general). However, it looks like the project was (is) largely moribund and I got the impression that the active community had dwindled significantly over the past 15 years or so – which is a pity.

Same here; I was constrained to what was on my stack of floppies comprising my Slackware dist

Slackware was the first Linux distro I ever installed on my own machine (I think that was the case for most of us at that time).

I can remember very well trying to scrounge up enough floppies to write out the "A" and "N" sets -- the minimum needed to have a functional system with working "networking" (in my case, dial-up).

After struggling for days to get a working "chat script", I finally managed to get online.

I don't miss it but, in a way, it was sort of a "rite of passage" and you were forced to learn how your system really worked.

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