On 16-Sep-98 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have tied about 50 times to edit my lilo.conf file, and I'll be
> damned if I can figure it out. I have read man pages, how-to's and
> 5 different books! For a "NEWBIE" that is used to MS Word 97
> and its' ease of use, how in the hell do I edit this file??!! One book
> (Red Hat Linux Unleashed) says'"make sure you're logged in as
> root and load the file into your favorite editor." Not very informative
> for a beginner. Do I need to open a text editor(Joe, vi, emacs, etc)
> with lilo.conf in the command line and rewrite the whole file from a
> blank screen, or is there a way to see the file as I'm editing it? I
> hope my meaning is clear. I am a real newbie. I can't even open
> the file by logging in as root and typing the path and file name!
> Shouldn't I be able to do that? By the way, I know less about
> emacs now than when I started:)
Ha... Yet another victim of emacs ;)
Basically, what you need to do is to edit the file the same way you will edit a
file under windows or dos. If you have an X windowing system based editor, you
may prefer to use that, in which case, the procedures are usually similar to
what you would do with a windows based editor. If you're working from the
console, try running a text editor with the filename in the command line (eg.
"joe /etc/lilo.conf"). This will startup the text editor with the file loaded.
In both cases, you should be able to edit the existing file without having to
recreate the entire file.
Here's a few recommandations for text editors:
For editing in X:
- gedit (Requires GTK, simple, fast and very easy to use)
- xemacs (Powerful but difficult to learn)
- vim (X based version of vi. Powerful but difficult to learn)
- xwpe (Programming IDE which can also function as a text editor. Simple to use
and learn, but it's rather weak compare with the others.)
- You may also use any of the console editors in an X based terminal emulation
program. (eg. rxvt, xterm)
For editing in console:
- joe (Fairly simple to use and learn. Reasonably powerful.)
- pico (Fairly simple to use and learn. Reasonably powerful.)
- wpe (Console version of xwpe. Probably the easiest to learn. Features a look
and feel which is similar to the Turbo C IDE. Fairly similar to the DOS edit.)
- vi (The most common text editor in the unix environment. Powerful but
difficult to learn)
- emacs (Probably the second most common text editor in the unix environment.
Powerful but difficult to learn.)
All my comments are intended for a newbie who is familiar with windows and dos.
I'm using Joe (my personal favourite) as the base on which all the other
editors are compared.
Cort
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
