Mark Trickett <marktrickett@bigpond.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2012-09-10 at 12:29 +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
As the more general heuristic, what I would be doing in such a scenario is looking at aptitude search ?source-package(foo) when foo isn't working, and looking at unmet Recommends dependencies of installed packages.
That's excellent advice.
That too is interesting, while I was scratching around, some of the documentation files were mentioned, but not present. One trouble is that unless I use the commands and options reasonably regularly, I will forget them. I know quite a lot of looking things up, but sometimes I still need prompting, including the appropriate technical terms.
Aliases and shell scripts can help you to automate and simplify complex commands, or complex sequences of commands. Also remember man -k, and maybe it would be a good idea to install the debian-handbook package (a very recent addition to the distribution) and then refer your Web browser to file://localhost/usr/share/doc/debian-handbook/html/index.html Often, reading a coherent discussion in a book makes it easier to remember commands and technical terms, while providing a better technical foundation of knowledge in the subject.