-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mirko Scurk wrote: > Hans du Plooy wrote: >> On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 22:02 +0100, Joe Hart wrote: > >> No matter how easy or difficult the question you ask, there will always >> be some smartass who tell to you go RTFM (which is often a longer >> sentence to type than the answer to your question). Don't let it bother >> you. Eric S. Raymond's advice is good advice, but I know people can be >> intimidated and/or confused by some documentation out there. Heck, >> after more than 10 years of using linux some projects' documentation >> still overwhelm me. If you know absolutely nothing about a certain >> program or the technologies involved, it can be difficult to figure out >> where to start. > > One great thing about linux is huge amount of documentation and another is > that it is developing and introducing new stuff almost every day but lot > of that documentation is more than 2 years old and tells you little about > current > distro. Sometimes user of that old documentation could be even misled. >
That is one of the major problems that I have found as well. Even Eric's homepage at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ is dated 18 Nov. 2005, which by Linux standards is old. The Linux Documetation Project at http://tldp.org/ has some very good articles, but quite a bit of their information is from 2002. Needless to say, it is sometimes difficult to determine which information applies. Trial and error are fine on a test machine, but not on a production machine. I've only been running GNU/Linux for a few months, and spent quite a bit of that time distro-hopping to find the one that fit me. I still test other distros on a regular basis. I managed to even get Arch and Gentoo running, although pacman and portage are great tools, I still think that the Debian packaging is the best, perhaps because I am more familiar with it. I've tried to keep to recent books, but quite a few of them are so basic that I end up skipping whole sections. I can figure out how to use most of the GUI stuff, and it sort of upsets me when books say "to configure your network, click on this, then click that. One of the reasons I chose GNU/Linux was to get away from the GUI having to configure everything. If one knows the underlying file structure, one doesn't need a GUI. I even sometimes use links to browse the web. grml is one of my favorite distros because of the 'text tools' approach. If I could somehow merge a few different distros into my own, well that would be the ultimate, but I have a few years to go before I can take something like that on. Until then, I will keep plugging away reading books and searching the web. At least I can be thankful am in the first world and can get a fast internet connection. Joe -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFF2XqUiXBCVWpc5J4RArHYAJwKo5vn2hKGQdIOS8H6cWr/pOBqVgCeJnL6 je6PXjy5liPwZEHFCxDzIMw= =s+a3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
