At 08:22 PM 11/12/01 -0500, you wrote: > If you work at learning Linux for 1 minute each day >for 4 years, then you'll likely forget more than you'll >retain. If you work at learning Linux in a systematic >manner for 15 minutes each day for 4 years, you should >be able to pass any Linux certification exam.
If I could find one freaking course for beginners in this stupid city I could use the system. I am not autodidactic. I cannot create my own lesson plan from man pages. I do not learn from books alone. I need a working system to start on with a carefully thought out lesson plan that takes me via example and exercise through a steadily increasing range of difficulty. I have not been able to even put together a system that is compatible and strong enough to run a GUI at a speed where I don't have to wait after moving the mouse to see where it lands. The things people have said about linux being fast on survPCs seem to apply only to the CLI version, the gui seems far harsher. The systems I've had that ran the GUIs at all were so slow I couldn't wait. I tried all the GUIs that I could at that time. I've never gotten modem to work. I got a NIC to work but couldn't access file systems between machines. I don't mind people hailing Linux as a fantastic system but would you please have a little compassion for those of us who aren't engineers? It is NOT a simple system to understand and it's tiring to be blamed for not being able to learn it on my own. 15mins a day teaches me how to scream my throat raw at a screen that just keeps blinking at me. it teaches me how to get up from the keyboard and go stomp around the yard till the urge to destroy has evaporated. I DO want to learn the system, and I WILL someday, but goddamn it, someone has to teach it to me with some kind of sense of what it means to be illiterate when you begin. My explanation of the filesystem is what would have explained it to me well enough to step forward when I had the question this person had. He asked a question I had asked. I never got an answer that I could fathom. I just got lots more paths and commands to puzzle over. I finally figured it out by doing a lot of moving around on the tree, getting the idea. It may have some errors here and there, but conceptually it makes a good deal more sense to me that way. I can always trust someone to fill in or correct things. Arrrggghhh. Linux sure makes my blood boil. I've never encountered anything in the known world that confounded me so much except for rude people. Well, and mystery novels.... Sorry if it's too strong a rant. -- For a country to be free it's citizens must have a way to defy unjust laws. The new electronic snooping devices are a step in the direction of fascism. Consequently I am appending the following Carnivore Confusion noise to all outgoing email: "Allah; America; Anthrax; arms; bomb; border; capitalist; communicate; customs; death; delivery; economic; imperialist; jihad; plane; PGP; rendevous; trucks; war; weapons; U.S.A.; end transmission
