💾 Archived View for wireheadmechanist.com › blog › 23week11.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:33:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
# DEV BLOG - Week 11 of 2023
The first book that I ever published about twenty years ago was formatted in TeX. If you're a person that has been in the Linux world for at least that long, you know of it. I know that I could write in Markdown like I'm doing here, but there is one little thing. While I intend to publish the subject matter books that I am working on, I also realize the commitment to the opensource world, so they will also be freely available electronically.
We are back to TeX, in that case.
It doesn't appear to be as easy to install as it used to be. I'm on Arch now, which at one time I know I said I'd never do. I am installing it with pacman as I write this, so we'll see. Back on yet another learning curve that will be at least a little worthwhile, I hope. The good news is that they did install rather fast, and I found a template for another publisher that I can modify and use for my own. Pillaging is yet another lost art.
Seems like it's just time to throw a bunch of documentation out into the wild. I'm at the age where I don't remember things as quickly as I used to, and RTFM is now a lifestyle rather than a punchline. They don't write docs quite like they did in the good old days. My friend that got me into Linux had a copy of Yggdrasil, and he would fight you in a bloodsport for it. It was a neat book, about 1200 pages if I recall correctly, and it contained every man page, and most of the available HOWTOs that were available at the time.
Now we're so scatterbrained that tldr is my best friend.
I started this idea out as a revamp of HOWTOs, bringing them into the current day, and somehow that because something more on the order of the old O'Reilly books. They've become rather useless to me these days. The trend to under-document disturbs me to no end. This also happens in the automotive world.
When I was a kid, one could take a Haynes manual and literally dissect a vehicle down to the individual nuts and bolts and put it back together again. I know. My father and I did it twice to two Morris Minors and a Ford F-150. When my Ford LTD lost its transmission in high school, Dad handed me the Haynes manual, pointed at the transmission he'd picked up at a pull-it parts place and said, "There you go. All yours now."
There were a few moments of stupidity, but for the most part it was smooth sailing.
Now they barely show you how to change the oil.
Same with chasing Linux documentation these days.
I'm so angry I could cry right now.
It's mostly frustration and disgust with where everything has gone.
I have a little toy machine I got on Amazon. I wanted to mention that it's not an affiliate link, but like everything else today, nothing intends to work as designed. By that, I mean that footnotes are not working here. Probably have to add a feature somewhere. Anyway, I initially installed EndeavorOS on the machine, but with the onboard Intel AX-601 wifi chip, I learned that Linux has not actually supported it in about six years. So I replaced EndeavorOS with Slackware, my first Linux love.
It fixed my wifi problem after I bought a USB wifi NIC, but after the install, I found out that it was a pain to connect USB drives, but more importantly the pain of getting new packages installed.
So I went to Debian. Now the NIC is a pain again, and there is more I have to dig into.