Learn Linux without internet and stack overflow: Linux HOWTOs | Hacker News Reader

Learn Linux without internet and stack overflow: Linux HOWTOs

tldp.org

300 pointshansor77 comments

Here’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

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/

DigitalOcean has the best set of how-to docs I know of for a web hosting company: 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/

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.

Ditto 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)

That idea of learning something new every day is sound. I find when I sprint and try to learn too fast there’s a law of finishing returns.

A point of diminishing returns, I meant.

One of my all time favorites was the OG Django Book

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

Arch Wiki for all distros!

You’re saying that the Arch Wiki has some good how to’s that are applicable to all distros?

I respect Arch. It’s hard core!

Thank you so much for this. Pure gold.

Pure gold. Wow. Thanks. That made my day.

This 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.

I 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.

If 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.

I 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.

This brings back memories for me, but I don't know if they are "great." I have memories of being in high school and downloading Linux binaries and HOWTOs over a dial-up modem, messing around with Debian on the family computer. So much of my youth spent (wasted?) on this. I wish I had spent more time making friends and playing sports, or learning something more fundamental like math or programming. I don't even work in the tech industry.

Not squandered at all because it's not too late to learn something like programming, for example, and knowledge of Debian will help you get started. Linux is a great platform for programming. Languages, libraries, IDEs/editors are only an `apt-get` (or what have you) away. It's so powerful, even Microsoft had to come up with WSL to try to remain relevant to developers.

So does Windows have Chocolatey and Windows package manager.

Eh. I played football as a kid for who knows how many hours, and never became a professional player. It isn't a waste if you enjoyed and learned something from it.

agree. tldp combined with the tinkering necessary to make a basic system function were a fantastic resource for learning back in the day.

For 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.

But man pages are man pages, not HOWTOs and thus don’t tell you ... how to :)

This 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.

I 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.

I've found Digital Ocean and Archwiki especially to be incredible resources

The Gentoo wiki is good too (for any distro, just adapt to your needs).

Do you know why it was abandoned?

Internet and Google. Seriously.

I haven't looked, but I imagine a lot of info is now dated. I remember reading HOWTOs about topics like how to set up dial-up and edit XF86Config.

I did some digging. There are still people working on it, but the updates aren't going to the front page. All the work seems to be buried in random e-mails on multiple mailing lists, and this GitHub repo https://github.com/tldp

I think the one or two people who are still working on it have been abandoned and need our support. I think if we can find who has access to the web servers, we could convince them to let volunteers put a fresh coat of paint on it and start publishing some new articles with a lower barrier to entry.

I was going to say... some of these are so dated. I haven’t thought about LILO for 15 years or so.

I had the same thought. The first HOWTO I looked at was encrypted root FS and contains sections for configuration of Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Just slightly old.

I was pleasantly reminded of the advances that 2.6 brought, however.

I have been configuring LILO... last week, after having installed Debian 3.3 on a Pentium 75 ISA-based laptop.

Admittedly, this does not happen every other day, but if like me you like to play with old computers these websites (and usenet archives, old FTP sites [and those are disappearing too fast], etc.) are a treasure trove.

I have recently ported Doom to a very old platform, SCO Xenix. That was only possible thanks to SCO leaving 30 years old FAQ and info on their website...

Slackware, 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'

One of my favorite resources on Linux is this: 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!

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.

The 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.

My favorite resource: 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.

I find it funny that I have no idea how to open a pdf file in a Linux terminal.

It'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.

You can use `xdg-open`.

> Last updated October 5, 2006

Last updated in 2015: https://tldp.org/sorted_howtos.html

There have been some updates in the Github repo since then (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.

What's bad about ABS? I remember I used that guide a lot back in the days

Looking 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.

As 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?

I 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.htm...

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

I 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?

Same 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.

I'd volunteer as an English editor! I know I would want someone to help me translate into other languages.

If this comment is any evidence, your English is good enough that I would be able to learn from what you write.

Your writing doesn't give you away as a non-native English speaker. Please write HOWTOs!

Barely 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/) and other things, and nobody ever commented about the language.

I’d encourage you to go ahead and not let your worries about command of Englsh hold you back. The best thing about the Internet is that it allows people to work together and improve each other’s work. E.g., I’m a better editor than I am a writer and I’ve had a few patches accepted for fixing the English in the README of useful projects.

Yeah, if you do a web search on nearly everything you find articles by people who know what they are doing and a bunch of articles that seem to be, more or less, copies of the original articles by those who really know there stuff. It doesn’t seem like search engines necessarily reward quality or up-to-date how-to’s but maybe that’s a really difficult for search engines to discern high quality content from okay content. It seems like okay content rises to the top if there’s a lot of it.

I usually look at at least two sources for cross referencing and can find how to do just about anything, though I trust some sources to get it right most of the time. Digital Ocean has done a good job of developing a strong set of how-To’s for nuts and bolts things you might want to do on a VPS (aka droplet).

Beyond that, I just do web searches and if a couple respectable looking sites agree on something, I tend to trust it. It’d be cool if there really were sort of a clearing house of curated list of the top Linux how to sites out there with sites that get abandoned sort of identified as such kind of like a repo that’s not being updated. Abadoneware is an issue but abandoned how to websites are super common. It’s hard to keep writing and keeping a site current year after year so it’s not surprising.

As someone who’s written documentation, I know how hard it is to write a good how to. To really write a good how to you have to really understand what you’re writing about and actually run through it to make sure your instructions work and are clear to the reader. Hat’s off to anyone who writes real docs not just cobbling together content for SEO and letting it stagnate.

Anyway, are there any curated clearinghouses with links to the best maintained sets of howtos on different things such as commands, scripting, sys admin, and just articles on how to be more efficient on Linux?

Wow, totally forgot HOWTOs existed. I'm betting a lot of us here learned Linux via HOWTOs more than any other resource.

I 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.

Don'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.

As 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Linux From Scratch (LFS) taught me the depths of Linux. TLDP taught me the breadth.

Another 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/

Moved to Arch Linux shortly after.

In 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.

Those 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!

I 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

Ditto. It was a procrastination project of mine to avoid my law exam preparations.

What 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

In Emacs, hit Alt-Q (fill-paragraph), which will line-wrap and preserve your current line indent.

I 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

Just feels right:

  echo cappuccino >/dev/coffee

Ref: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Coffee/#ss4.1

For beginners Linux Journey is a good resource, even if it is incomplete and slightly dated https://linuxjourney.com/ but it isn't outdated like tldp

How Linux Works book is another great Linux reference.

The latest edition has virtualization content that includes VMs and containers.

[1]https://nostarch.com/howlinuxworks3

I 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.

For me it was, without HOWTOs you couldnt get anything done.

I rather learn from Arch Linux or Gentoo wikis which are way up to date.

The tldp was especially useful for me when i was in university.

I 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.)

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