Linux "howto’s", brief articles that tell you how to do some particular thing, have been around for almost as long as Linux. Now that Linux is mainstream, bloggers around the world are sharing their knowledge about how to do thing with Linux, and it’s good times for the howto universe.
Especially over at HowtoForge, a good site for Linux instructions. Good, but it could be better. First, I assumed that there’d be links to the old-school howto’s that have been accreting around Linux for the past decade or so. There isn’t. I’d have also liked an easier way to browse the howto’s on tap here.
That’s not to say anything against HowtoForge: It’s organized more like a blog than a traditional howto-repository, and HowtoForge does have the advantage of being more current and topical. It also has a HowtoForge forums section, where you can ask–and answer–questions about how to do things.
How useful are these articles? Well, here’s one on Installing LAMP On Ubuntu For Newbies, which might seem an oxymoron: a simple step-by-step "how to" setup a computer to run the powerful Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) server stack. It actually delivers, too, but once you’ve got everything installed (the easy part, IMHO), you may need some more guidance.
On the other hand, there are articles like Removing A User, that give you the basic steps to doing basic Linux tasks, in this case, step-by-step instructions for removing a user from a Linux box, aimed at the novice Linux system administrator.