"Man pages can be limited, and they're often not great if you're an absolute beginner, especially if the command is a complicated one. But they are often enough to get you started -- and in some cases they can quite genuinely provide an entire manual. Check out man bash for a very comprehensive example.

One point to bear in mind is that there can be multiple categories of man page. The ones you are most likely to run across are:

"1 Executable programs or shell commands
5 File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
8 System administration commands (usually only for root)"

"I've been connecting to the internet using mobile phones (via bluetooth), and 3G cards for a few years now. I've never struggled too much, but I could understand why someone completely new to Linux would have had a hard time."

"LXF: That seems to put the blame on the software vendors rather than the hackers...

"RA: In the criminal underworld, there's a set of separate economic forces that determine what the exploitation pattern will look like. What, for example, are the economics of running a botnet? Well, we know that when machines are captured, typically hackers do such high-value exploits as they can -- keyloggers for bank data, and that sort of thing -- and then they go down the food chain. Compromised machines may end up being used to send spam, and then once they're blacklisted by all the spam filters, they'll end up being used for distributed denial-of-service attacks."

"Much of the country is remote and accessible only on foot, and many of its people have never glimpsed a computer, let alone touched one. Working with other organisations, including Save the Children-Norway, HeNN is setting up the libraries with the use of what is called the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP).

"This is a free and open-source (accessible to everyone) package which connects one powerful central server in the school, using the Linux operating system, to a number of diskless low-end computers. When linked to the server, each computer receives a full Linux desktop.

"LTSP is seen as a cost-effective, power-saving and durable technology, not only in schools but also in other sectors. What's more, it is also virtually free of tampering and computer viruses