On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 11:12:56 +1200 Roger Searle wrote: > in my original email i attempted to do this and posted the output of > dmesg | grep media, and grep hdd, though wasn't clear enough myself > about what it was telling me. i was close.
I didn't quite understand what the output was telling us in your original post, so probably glossed over it. Looking back though it does seem to indicate that a hdd and hdc were detected. Another thing to do might have been to dmesg|grep -i cd would find (case insensitive) references to CD-ROM's and the like. see volker's post that just arrived too, about other places to look (/proc/ide) (thats another hindsight thing of course, but we improve by remembering these things for next time. I might sound like a real command line advocate but it did take me ages and ages to learn what skills I do have. It took me ages to even grok grep, so i would redirect the output have. It took me ages to even grok grep, so i would redirect a long output to a file, then open the file in an editor and search through the file - very tedious!) > > i'm just glad that it is finally working, and that i predominantly used > a command line approach, which tells me i am making slow but steady > progress up the (still steep but flattening) learning curve. > > Nothing beats sitting down and diagnosing a few problems to build that familiarity. The good thing with unix is that you can hide all that stuff from the average user by throwing them a nice gui, but the command line is there if you need to debug something. I find that because of my computer knowledge a lot of people ask me to fix something on their windows computers, and its often hard to know where to begin. No text config files. No ability to see what files were installed by package X. No clear place to find log info. Do we need a session on diagnosing problems? Pretty tedious watching someone else play on the command line on a projector, and hard to read too. I wonder how it could be made more interesting? Perhaps a suite of computers with a set of problems, get several people to solve the problems and explain how they did it? But where do we get a suite of computers? -- Nick Rout
