[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting of Monday, 15 August 2016

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

>     I neglected to mention that Aaron and Erik discussed
> CLI tools for disk formatting and the use of man to discover
> operation of those tools.   Myself when I look at man pages
> I get confused and that is one of the reasons I prefer to
> use GUI tools.

Ah, I can help, here.

Sadly, man pages are generically a poor vehicle for learning about
software -- because that's just not the _type_ of documentation they
are.

Computer documentation gets broadly divided into two categories:

1.  Tutorial: something you read to learn about a topic
2.  Reference: something you consult to find details about 
    something you're already familiar with.

man pages are _not_ tutorial material.  They're reference material.
Moreover, they're deliberately the most terse subcategory of reference
material:  They're 'quick reference'.

That means they're an ultra-compressed, minimalistic list of what each
command switch and parameter does, a syntax spec, some very brief
examples, a list of known bugs, and a 'See also' bit at the end.  No
context for anything, no attempt to teach you what's going on or _why_
you would use any part of the discussed software.

I'm not saying 'Avoid trying to learn software from man pages.'
Sometimes you can, in which case 'Yay, you.'  But you should not be even
the slightest bit surprised when you cannot, because they're written
with no aim to teach anything to people, _whatsoever_.


Where are the tutorials?  Books, to be sure, but also, gosh, pretty much
all over the goshdarned Internet.  And Web-searching is still _the_ key 
life-coping skill of the 21st Century so far.  Trying:

  parted tutorial

I find as the first hit:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNU_Parted

Hey, pretty good, and Arch Linux's wiki is renowned for the high quality
and usefulness of its technical content, generally.  A few hits down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7j5H6AxO9w  PartEd Basic Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcB6IGqG34Y  Creating Partitions with GNU PartEd

Will you look at that!  Two video walkthroughs.

http://www.tecmint.com/parted-command-to-create-resize-rescue-linux-disk-partitions/

   8 'PartEd' Commands to Manage Linux Disks

   [...]
   In this tutorial you will learn the basics of parted and we will show
   you some practical examples. If you don’t have any previous experience
   with parted, please be aware that parted writes the changes immediately
   to your disk, so be careful if you try to modify your disk partitions.

Anyway, tutorials, not quick references.

Attempting to learn a totally unknown piece of software from its man
page is rather like driving nails with a screwdriver.


Note:  Even the above tutorials assume that you merely want to learn
about the particular _tool_ discussed, but assume you already have a
basic fluency with partitioning in general.  Be careful what you ask
for:  As Prof. Tolkien might have written if he'd lived in the current age,
'Ask not the Internet for advice, for it will give you verbatim what you
asked for, good and hard.'  Point is, if you _first_ need basic
background on disk partitioning, you should read up on that first.

   partitioning tutorial

First hit looks OK:
http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/40-partitions/111-tutorial-understanding-partitioning-and-formatting.html

-- 
Cheers,             Grossman's Law:  "In time of crisis, people do not rise to
Rick Moen           the occasion.  They fall to the level of their training."
rick at linuxmafia.com          http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#grossman
McQ! (4x80)