How do I use tar, ls, chmod, lilo, etc?

These commands are usually documented quite well by the man pages included in every distribution. In most cases, entering the following:

man tar

will give you all the information you need for the use of (in this example) the tar command. Of course, you can also run man man to find out more about the man command itself.

A very useful invocation is man -k . Also known as apropos (long os), this actually searches the manual pages for .

In some cases, there's even more information in the /usr/doc directory.

Read the man pages. Do your best to understand the available documentation. The channel is willing to help those who are willing to make the effort to help themselves. Asking someone how to get color to show up in the "ls" command is a waste of their time, when man ls gives you working examples.

Of course, all this assumes you've actually installed the man pages. If, for some reason, the man man command doesn't work, for example, you can execute ls /usr/man/man1 to see if the man pages are there. If they are, your configuration is munged; look at /etc/man.config and try to fix that. If they aren't there, then the man pages aren't installed; install them.