"Day Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Bob George wrote: > > You need to consider the several THOUSAND pages of documentation [...] > That sums it up really well Bob. 'several THOUSAND' > pages. Which given the greater power of Linux is to > be expected. And likewise, since there aint no free > lunch, all that much more for Newbies to look thru.
But in your previous message, you also wrote: > My dogeared copy of DRDOS 6 User Guide is only 666 pages > for an operating system that everyone will agree is not > nearly as powerful and complex as any distro. Yet none > of the three distro user guides I have is 400 pages, and > the other books run 250 and 350. So how complete could any > of them possibly be? So perhaps they ARE complete but you can't/won't spend the time with them? It's not like you have to read every page sequentially from start to finish! I know from my own RedHat experience that they include a very nice set of HTML-based docs, as well as HOWTOs in txt, pdf and postscript formats. > I find it ironic that I learn more useful stuff here > from you and the others on Linux than I do anywhere > else. But you either miss, or misunderstand my position. Well, when you state that something is "impossible" with Linux, I see little to misunderstand. Perhaps there's something I've missed. > I do indeed hope for the success of Linux. It will be > a vast improvement over windoz for the vast majority of > users who only know the GUI interface. My suggestion is > for the distro people to get a handle on what these folks > will actually need to know without bogging them down in > reams of trivia clipped and pasted out of geek docs. As > you recall, it took quite a while for dos docs to figure > this out, and it will take even longer for Linux, cause > the os is so much more powerful and thus, complex. Day, the documentation is far from perfect, but your assertion that disk recovery info is some hallowed magick held by the high priests is way off. That info's pretty readily available, online and on CD with most distributions. And this isn't the first example where your installation seems to be "missing" documentation that everyone else with the same distribution seems to have. Are you installing the documentation? > I've made, and used Rescue disks. They are great, as far > as they go, but they didnt give me a clue as to how to > use one to repair the damage so as to get back to the > original boot. That would seem to be an intuitive option, > and placed where I would run into it, but I didnt. Web. Search. Manual. *sob* Day, forget searching or reading anything else. There's a tool called LNX-BBC that you can dowload from http://www.lnx-bbc.org/ and burn from ISO yourself. It's 47MB in size, and will fit on those little biz-card sized CD blanks. If that's too much of a hassle, by asking nicely someone may mail a copy to you. You boot this CD and it fires up a nice, compact Linux configuration that will generally run in your beloved hi-rez text modes on most video hardware. It will ALSO automatically mount any Linux filesystem it finds in read-only mode, perfect for system recovery. It can also mount DOS partitions, though you'll have to do that yourself. You should be able to figure out where partitions are living on hard disk by doing "dmesg | grep hd" once it has booted up. Of course, you can also mount Linux systems in RW mode. It also has the Joe editor, which has a WordStar-like syntax. You can reboot it or simply power it off if you like, as it runs from RAM (being careful if you HAVE mounted anything RW). They've also created one big ASCII help file that gives a pretty good system overview. No nasty man pages, HTML or other wasteful fluff. This text file has instructions on EXACTLY how to mount various filesystems. The ONLY thing I can imagine that you'll still gripe about is that it hits you up for a login prompt on startup, although it does helpfully display the root account name and password in colorful text. > Then too, there is the variety of the distros. Some love > one and trash another. Er, what exactly do you mean here? What trashed what? One distribution trashed another? How did you do that? > After looking at lotsa posts on > this commonly contentious issue, I decided to simply try > them for myself. If you mean distribution preferences, yes that is a contentious issue, just like any OS discussion. :) > So far, I can see where hardware plays > a large part, some distros dont do well with some sets. > This means that trying to compare Linux with dos should > be first clarified as to which distro on which hardware. Er, what? OK, the hardware compatability part I get, but what do you mean about comparison to DOS? If you're saying selecting a subset of hardware that one runs on, and the other doesn't is somehow the basis for any sort of comparison, I'd have to disagree! (Though I suppose a long debate over which does better on Sun Sparc hardware might be interesting.) > And- this adds considerably to the complexity of the > issue, and to the confusion for Newbies. I'm all for helping with newbies with their confusion, but the "belief as fact" statements are also going to get some responses. - Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
