"Day Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> How could they be? for one, you say there are thousands
> of pages, and for two, I show how the drdos manual is 1/2
> again larger.
No Day, there are thousdands of printed pages worth of documentation on the
RedHat CDs. For one thing, they included full electronic versions of at
least three commercial texts, at least back in the version I used last (I'm
assuming you purchased an "official" RedHat set.) And the HOWTOs and various
guides are easily that thick.
If you want to go for documentation by the pound, try SuSE!
> What came with Redhat 5.2 is an 'Installation
> guide', which does what it says, but is not a 'user guide'.
In paper format, perhaps. I did mention "online" though.
> Mandrake does better, both an installation and user guide,
> but when you go to the index, there isnt any, just a 'list
> of figures' and a glossary. Corel has an index, but no
> glossary. DRDOS has all three.
Yes, but DRDOS didn't come with online help, only a crude paper manual.
Stuff for Linux is usually broken out into discrete documents. Again, you
don't have to read every page sequentially. And even the RedHat manual that
DID come on paper points you directly to the documentation file on CD for
making recovery disks. AND the entry is indexed.
> Maybe I was not clear, but with the above Linux manuals,
> it is impossible for a newbie.
There you go with IMPOSSIBLE again, Day. "Impressions as fact." YOU'VE had a
tough time, so it's IMPOSSIBLE. Admittedly, it can take a bit of time to
pick up, but give us a break on IMPOSSIBLE.
> Redhat, in delicious irony
> with 5.2 sent me floppies that would not boot, and a CD
> that had 'corrupted RPMs' that took days for me to figure
> out which would work and which not, and if I had chosen
> one which would not, the whole install crashed sending me
> back to square one.
Presumably, having purchased the official version, you'd have been entitled
to return it for full exchange.
> [...]
> That's my whole point Bob. I keep saying but dont see
> where you cite me, that Dos had much the same problem in
> the days when it was trying to break out of the guru
> niche market and provide what ordinary users would need
> to know to get something done.
You cited it yourself ! ("And back then, there were the very same criticisms
by the dos gurus as we have seen here.") Or you just keep conveniently
forgetting about the "bad old days". Hell, I trained and ran training for
DOS, Windows and Macs. The only one that came close to "easy" was Mac. C'mon
Day, how is "chkdsk" so much more intuitive than "fsck". How does "dir" mean
anything more to a newbie than "ls". Editing "AUTOEXEC.BAT" and "CONFIG.SYS"
to get stuff to work intuitive? Memory managment simple?
To say "DOS CLI is easy, Linux CLI is hard" is silly. NEITHER is trivial.
NEITHER is IMPOSSIBLE. A willingness to learn is required in either case.
That's why they called us Power Users, remember? We bothered. (But here's an
unbiased 3rd party opinion on the matter:
http://www.cinnamon.com/~bandy/sucks.html :)
> but the only way Linux is
> going perfect the documentation is by Newbies complaining
> of what they dont find that intuitively should be there. [...]
Yes, but you just start to make up stuff and cite it as fact. Sort of like
your diatribe on Wake-on-LAN, lots of noise but nothing helpful, nor
meaningful. Anyone actually WANTING to improve Linux will see your rants,
then quickly decide you're just grinding some axe against the "academic
elite" rather than actually seeking help. Hell, even here we tend to spend
as much time correcting your misinformation as answering any genuine
questions you have.
As to what "intuitively should be there", information on rescue disks is in
the RedHat printed documentation. Had you created a set, your problem might
have taken a fraction as long to deal with.
> And back then, there were the very same criticisms by the
> dos gurus as we have seen here. IT is a difficult balance,
> and it will take a while to sort out what Newbies struggle
> with most and what to do about that.
Newbie struggles are one thing. Rants and blathering are another.
- Bob
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