[PLUG] How to research (<>"ask") Linux questions?

Richard Owlett rowlett at cloud85.net
Thu Aug 6 14:36:12 UTC 2015


Louis Kowolowski wrote:
>
>> On Aug 4, 2015, at 7:22 AM, Richard Owlett <rowlett at cloud85.net> wrote:
>>
>> Google searches can have a lot in common with turning 1000
>> monkeys loose on 2000 typewriters expecting _The Decline and Fall
>> of the Roman Empire_.
>>
>> Asking questions on fora can get bogged down in minutia (e.g.
>> "when up to #### in alligators it's difficult to remember swamp
>> draining is goal").
>>
>> Case in point:
>> My starting point is complete DVD sets of Debian 6, 7, and 8.
>> Optimizing for clock time:
>>    A. copy each version to individual directory on "flash drive"
>>       and/or "hard drive" such that resulting structure will be
>>       /debianN/dvd1.iso ... /debianN/dvdM.iso
>>    B. create a local repository of each version in its own partition
>>
>> For my unique case, I have adequate if imperfect solution(s).
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  ;/
>>
>> I suspect that "How to research Linux questions" will have much
                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   ;/
                           ^^^^^^^^                   ;0}
>> in common with various articles on "asking good questions on
>> Usenet". If fact this might be an expansion the most common #1
>> point under "how to ask ..." --> "Do your homework."
>>
>
> The problem with search engines is that if you aren’t knowledgable on the
>  subject, you don’t know which questions to ask, or how to 
phrase them.
>  Chicken and Egg.
>
> Case in point, one possibility to accomplish what you want:
>
> dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/dvdN.iso
>
> dd will read bits off the cdrom (dvd) and write them to the file you specify.
>
> I used duckduckgo, but my search query was:
> how to create iso from dvd linux

<chuckle> So much for attempting to phrase post to exclude 
certain responses ;/
E.G. using dd was already among my "adequate if imperfect 
solution(s)".
I was also attempting to exclude the popular search engines. 
Their weak point being that they inherently do "key word" searches.
E.G. FORTH is a programming language of interest. Try entering 
that in
      Google, duckduckgo, etc.

What I was expecting responses which would lead to sites such as
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
 
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/index.html
    http://manpages.debian.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi

Your post did lead in two valuable directions (Thank You):
   1. I hadn't considered natural language questions as search 
strings.
   2. 
http://linux.india365.org/2011/07/how-to-edit-linux-iso-dvd-cd-image/ 
was one
      hit for your ducduckgo search. Although I've the topic 
before, the phraseology
      of that page triggered a solution to a slightly different 
problem.






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