Arch Linux

Sole

Member

Registered: 2007-04-09

Posts: 42

Missing info on arch's wiki?

Today I just had to do a simple fsck because of a few disk errors and noticed there aren't very much info on the matter on arch's wiki, for example I hooked up an empty external usb drive yesterday and figure I have no idea how to even partitioning it with linux tools, so I searched on arch's wiki and I found pages on ntfs, vfat, and how to partition a usb drive in vfat, etc, but not much about ext and other linux native file systems, fdisk is self explanatory but I had to google on "formatting" but to find out write permissions were set to root and I can't write to it, so I had to do more googling, to find a thread on ubuntu and it was filled with people suggesting using scripts, when the topic poster just needed a simple chmod for the solution, I used sudo thunar to set the permissions from there since chmod didn't do it for me and I just didn't have time to read through pages on chmod.

Those are examples of some really simple procedure but somehow I just couldn't find a lot info about them on arch's wiki and ending up spending hours looking at the wrong place, but somehow I did found a lot info on things like writing to ntfs, and other non native linux stuff, it didn't feel like I'm actually learning linux at all... but to learn windows all over again with a set of different tools.

Anyway a lot of the things could really be solved maybe through "man" on the command and reading through it, but a lot of times I don't really know if that is what I'm looking for, so my question is, is there a newbie guide on just simply maintaining linux, and not just "how-to" on installing programs and drivers? 

kakTuZ

Member

From: Hannover, Germany

Registered: 2007-10-20

Posts: 86

Re: Missing info on arch's wiki?

Some of the stuff you are looking for is not arch specific, so it would just blow the wiki up.
Have a look at the The Linux Documentation Project. The "Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide" gives a good overview, but it is very very long to read especially when you usually avoid reading manuals

fwojciec

Member

Registered: 2007-05-20

Posts: 1,411

Re: Missing info on arch's wiki?

Today I just had to do a simple fsck because of a few disk errors and noticed there aren't very much info on the matter on arch's wiki, for example I hooked up an empty external usb drive yesterday and figure I have no idea how to even partitioning it with linux tools, so I searched on arch's wiki and I found pages on ntfs, vfat, and how to partition a usb drive in vfat, etc, but not much about ext and other linux native file systems, fdisk is self explanatory but I had to google on "formatting" but to find out write permissions were set to root and I can't write to it, so I had to do more googling, to find a thread on ubuntu and it was filled with people suggesting using scripts, when the topic poster just needed a simple chmod for the solution, I used sudo thunar to set the permissions from there since chmod didn't do it for me and I just didn't have time to read through pages on chmod.

Those are examples of some really simple procedure but somehow I just couldn't find a lot info about them on arch's wiki and ending up spending hours looking at the wrong place, but somehow I did found a lot info on things like writing to ntfs, and other non native linux stuff, it didn't feel like I'm actually learning linux at all... but to learn windows all over again with a set of different tools.

Anyway a lot of the things could really be solved maybe through "man" on the command and reading through it, but a lot of times I don't really know if that is what I'm looking for, so my question is, is there a newbie guide on just simply maintaining linux, and not just "how-to" on installing programs and drivers? 

If you take the time to read the man pages and learning how to do things properly whenever a problem comes up you'll learn how to maintain your system rather quickly.  The problem is that linux systems can be so vastly different that it is difficult to come up with a single centralized source of information about everything.  Also, the wiki is maintained by the users of Arch so if you find it lacking in any sense you can always set up an account and start improving it yourself