On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, anarkissed wrote: > 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.
My wife is like that. She had a loom in front of her and two or three weaving books, yet couldn't figure out where to begin. I come along, read the books, show her what to do, and voila, she "gets it." I'm the opposite. Show me what to do, and you'll have to show me again. I "get it" a lot faster by reading and understanding all the underlying whys and wherefores. People learn differently. I probably should have added "optimized to their learning style" to "systematic manner." > 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. The SAMS book can't help you with the working system, but one of the reasons I find it so useful is that it trims out all "noise;" the stuff that seems to make a command confusing. Unlike a man page which gives you all the command line options, but no examples, this book skips the section with all the options, and just gives examples using the most common ones. > 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. I wouldn't install X-Windows on anything less than a 486DX-66 with 16MB RAM, and then I'd either use no window manager, or something like twm. Certainly nothing heavier than fvwm2. (Whatever your minimum system would be for Win'95 would also likely be your minimum system for Linux running X.) Linux is written in C, so is probably marginally slower than DOS (written in assembly). However, Linux is much more powerful and portable, which more than makes up any minor speed losses. > I've never gotten modem to work. Sometimes tricky. Sometimes very frustrating. Sometimes because the ISP is running Windows and makes the assumption that everyone else is too. I found that wvdial seems to be the most compatible with intolerant ISPs... and wvdial's man page even has an example. ;-) > 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? I roast coffee... so being an engineer is certainly not a requirement. > 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. Is there a LUG (Linux User's Group) in your city? There are always knowledgeable and helpful people there, and in person they can *show* you things in a way not possible over e-mail. > I've never encountered > anything in the known world that confounded me so much except for rude > people. Concision is sometimes confused for rudeness. > Sorry if it's too strong a rant. Then again, sometimes ranting is seen as rudeness too. ;-) - Steve
