Day Brown wrote:
> > >
> > > Part of the problem is the sys ad mentality of nix,
> > > designed for a multiuser enviornment which is all
> > > extra junk in the way for the standalone home user
> >
> > Actually a lot of that "junk" will be quite useful
> > when you connect that computer to the internet and/or
> > give family members access to the computer.
I have been online for years Steve, first with BBSes and
later with PPP. it aint rocket science. it's just taking
a data feed and parking it on this screen. Arachne loads
the PPPD driver as a TSR, dunno why nix couldnt. Nor, does it
seemta be a big deal to reconfigure, or reinstall a new
kernel if you put in a home network.
>
> > > The DR-DOS manual expects to be instructing computer
> > > newbies, whereas the nix books have copied the text
> > > books on Unix, which were designed for college students
> >
> > Surely not *all* the nix books.
All the nix books I have seen, from Mandrake, Corel, and
Redhat, and the idiot's Guide to Linux, and Linux for
Dummies, frequently use the phrase, 'see your system
administrator', which is straight out out of the collegiate
millieu, where they _have_ sys ads. I aint the only newbie
to notice that the only sys ad I got is me... and you all.
My complaint aint with you and the other nix people, it is
with the book publishers. I cant affort all nix books. I'd
kinda expected to get good manuals with the distro.
> > > A shell could be made to copy letter for letter
> > > all the old dos commands and have those functions
> > > performed on a nix system.
> >
> > And a shell could be made to copy letter for letter all
> > the old Commodore 64 commands and have those functions
> > performed on a nix system.
> >
> > When I upgraded from the Commodore 64 to DOS, the learning
> > curve was steep because DOS made me use stupid new commands
> > instead of the tried-and-true Commodore commands. Why oh
> > why wasn't DOS more user-friendly?
Right, and it took me years to get to know it, and now
the nix guys are all saying to throw that away cause it's
in french and they want me to speak German, even though the
computers themselves are perfectly capable of translation.
> > > why look if it aint gonna mount the drive?
> >
> > If you want the drive automatically mounted, list it in
> > /etc/fstab. If not, you can mount it at the CLI whenever
> > you want. It's not rocket science.
No, but it's diddly compared to all the other automated
processes which the kernel already knows. I've seen others
complain about this. Some of us are hotsolder hackers; I
have always swapped drives around freely in dos. it was a good
way to transfer data, a lot more reliably that floppies, and
not that big a deal for those of us who run with the hood off.
(I dont even have a hood, my mthbd is in a milk crate. vents nice,
and I dont havta listen to a fan.
> > > then it has a track 0 error, it crashes and wipes out two
> > > hours worth of install.
> >
> Sounds like a faulty floppy. Can't blame Linux for that one.
I aint complaining about that, I'm complaining about the fact
that it never occurred to the installation script writer that
I might have a bad floppy (DOH), and let me abort without just
trashing the whole install up to that point.
> > > when I re-install off the CD, it does not ask if I want to
> > > save my personal data, and wipes the whole damn drive clean
> > > even though all I wanna do is repair the boot section.
> >
> > Corel was designed for brain-dead users, so it makes assumptions.
> > MSwindows does the same. I prefer to avoid both of them.
> Dont blame you; but I felt I should have a look at their
> Wordperfect and Photoshop, two packages win users are familiar
> with to see if I could make a nix machine that they could use.
>
> > > Dos dont do that to you. It is duck soup to modify or
> > > replace the boot files without affecting anything else.
> >
> > It may be duck soup for you, but it certainly wasn't
> > for this C-64 boy during his first few months with DOS.
> > Thank god for F8.
Well, I never fooled with the c-64; IIRC at the time, if
I wanted a floppy drive, I hadda go with Apple, Franklin,
or IBM. I went with the Franklin for year or so until the
prices for clone boards came out. I was able to use the
Tandon floppy that had been in the Franklin on a PC, which
made the upgrade affordable.
> > Perhaps you might consider booting Linux from a DOS
> > partition using LOADLIN.EXE. This allows you to
> > change kernels and/or root partitions easily. As a
> > faithful DOS user, you will probably find it comforting
> > to see your computer booting DOS before going to Linux.
Well, as it is, I have the dos hd as slave, and the cmos
set to boot off A:, with a floppy with dos 'boothru' in
it. with the floppy out, it boots on the drake master.
with the floppy in, it boots to the dos drive it can see.
It dont waste time loading os stuff it aint gonna use.
A little inconvenient when I wanna transfer a file from
one drive to the other, putting it on the floppy, but then
no matter how bad a crash might happen with either os, it
dont even know about the other drive and cant mess it up.
> > > I have installed REDHAT, COREL/DEBIAN, and MANDRAKE.
> > All three designed for brain-dead, point-and-clickers.
> Well actually, drake seemed to offer flexibility, but trying
> to figure out the meaning of all the options is intimidating.
...
> > Un-true. There are many different Linux options.
> > Forget about the point-and-click distributions
> > with brain-dead installation wizards, have a look
> > at Slackware. Now that's a real hairy-chested
> > distribution.
I wasnt clear; it's either one flavor of windoz, or
one flavor of nix. I've heard of slackware, but I already
got a software project at the moment, which will lead me
into the vortex of scripting, and I may never come up again.
> > I hate to admit it, but I put DOS aliases in
> > BasicLinux for people just like you. Enjoy.
I havnt used basic since the 8088; I found Ralf Brown
for that damn little that wasnt already written and
available on the BBSes to do anything I wanted.
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