What is a ‘Hands-on How-to’?
Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized
Any current Linux distribution includes a “doc” directory and under that, a directory full of files whose names all end with “HOWTO”. Each of those files is an exhaustive (and exhausting!) treatment of one subject area — “how to install an IDE disk drive;” “how to install a SCSI CD-ROM;” “how to install… every known form of networking?!”
You might begin to see a problem with this approach; some topics are bigger than others. Adequately covering the entire topic of networking in a single document is just not possible.
Of course, that won’t keep me from trying….
Long before I got any sort of permanent Internet presence, I had been using a batch-mode process to read my email and news offline. (In some parts of the world, per-minute charges for access are still quite common, and such an offline reader still makes a lot of sense.) My documentation of that process became the first “Hands-On How-ToSM.”
Years later, I finally put my home LAN onto the Net using a Linux box as a gateway. It took less time to do it than to collect and read weeks of articles from the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.networking, where many other people were encountering the same issues that had me stumped. (This was before Google, by the way!) It was nice at first, because I didn’t have to ask any questions — everyone else, it seemed, was asking them for me. It didn’t take long before those questions became repetitive, though, and tempers began to fray.
To repay the people who helped me, and to spare the group from answering those same questions over and over again, I collected the answers that had helped me, added a bit of my own spin, and put them into my second “Hands-On How-To.”
Metaphors Are Your Friends
Imagine a car stuck on a little patch of ice. A tiny little spot — if you could get past it, you’d be fine. But you’re stuck spinning your wheels… I’m here to throw a little sand on that patch of ice. Maybe the author of Whatever for Dummies assumes you know something you don’t. I’m going to try really hard to avoid that, by explaining things over and over using different examples and metaphors (like “a car spinning its wheels”).
The challenge for me is to choose metaphors that are helpful but also correct, so they don’t leave you with a wrong idea that you will have to “unlearn” later.
Us vs. Them — NOT!
The big difference between a Hands-On How-To and a Linux HOWTO is one of focus. The official HOWTOs feel an obligation to cover all possible situations. We have the luxury of picking out the most common, practical cases and mostly ignoring the complications.
We’ll be starting at some well-defined point (whether it’s a working Linux installation, or a bare desktop) and continuing until the problem at hand has been solved. Even if that problem isn’t the one you’re trying to solve, at least you’ll have a point of reference to try to figure out what your other resources are trying to tell you.
For example, the HOHT on IP Masquerade will not tell you everything you need to run your own Internet Service Provider… but it will help a small business user who wants to dial into an ISP with a Linux box, and share that connection with the rest of the office; say, two to six PCs.
You should be thinking “Hmm, I’ve got a similar problem. I can use that example and tweak it just a bit.” That’s the idea.
Remember it’s “Hands-On.” Light up your machine and follow along!
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