On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Gil Andre wrote: > .... But Slackware has the best man pages of any > Linux distro, bar none. Which is why I like it. For anyone who knows how distributors necessarily have to work, this appears a highly dubious claim. Most documentation, of any type, comes with the actual program packages, which are simply repackaged by a distributor, with some (usually minor) adjustments for their configuration. The rest of the man pages are likely to come from the LDP project man-pages package. For instance, the slackware web page lists their version of man-pages (called manpages by them), as "Man-pages 1.38", but my Red Hat 7.3 system has version (shows): rpm --query man-pages man-pages-1.48-2 And none of this is likely to affect a newbie anyway, in the least. > Another good reasons the BSDs are better than Linux: > updated man pages -- documentation, the UNIX way. All those who provide man pages at all use UNIX conventions (meaning the man macros and format), regardless of *ix flavor. And new users need to realize that the end user will see little difference between BSDs and Linux, and even some proprietary versions of *ix. Why? Because they all use the the same code base for the GUI and desk-tops, and even most of the utilities and many of the development tools, and they try to follow the same standards, more or less. I have found the recent advocacy of slackware for new users somewhat disturbing, and misleading, especially with regard to the idea of running linux on an old fat or vfat filesystem. Such suggestions need to be balanced with a discussion of the downside of running with such brain-damaged filesystems (probably off topic for this list), and the lack of security and stability costs. Some idea of these problems may be gotten from the URL in my sig below. In particular, read the section entitled "Chests of drawers and brainwashing". -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list