water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

["Kevin Stokes" <linux@pieskysoft.com>]

   Once again I find myself helpless.   As unreliable and as frustrating as
Windows is, in Linux it seems like you can't do anything without asking for
help.

  I wanted to remotely login from a Windows machine to my linux machine.  So
I wanted to install telnetd.   Everyone said, 'shame on you, telnet is
simply awful.  You should be chained to the wall and whipped for wanting to
use telnet!   Use 'ssh' instead.'

  Well, ssh got installed along with everything when I installed linux.   So
I read the man pages for ssh.   As is typical of the linux world, it is
about 15 pages of utter gobbedly-gook.  To be fair, man pages are not meant
for newbies to learn linux from scratch.

 So I search until I find a HOWTO on ssh.   This would be nice if it worked,
but of course it doesn't.   Everything seems to be different.  Their
suggestions fail.  The paths are different.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/LG/issue61/dellomodarme.html

  Now I can explain the title of my post.  Linux is amazing.  There is
source code, and binaries and gigabytes of documentation about everything
under the sun.   All free!   But it all seems nearly useless.   Take a
newbie, and drop him into the sea of freebies.

 And he drowns.  You start searching archives and HOWTO's.  Each thing you
find leads you in 10 different directions;  10 more places to look for
answers.  Only each of those ten leads simply bring up 10 more questions and
strange things you never heard of.    It seems like there is a infinite sea
of little config files, and nested /etc directories, and devices and weird
little two-letter commands.    And for each of these, there are man pages
with 20 options, and completely obscure text which makes no sense unless you
already know everything.

  Take the last time I needed help.  A generous and helpful person told me
to do the following:

update-rc.d -n -f xdm remove

  Why the hell didn't I think of doing that?   What does that command do?  I
don't know.  It worked just like the helpful guy said it would.   But I have
no clue what it did, and what those 8 files that it deleted or modified
were.

  In my opinion, Linux is a truly great and remarkable thing.  And I get the
impression than many Linux enthusiasts want Linux to become the dominant OS.
However, I think that no matter how great the software is, the #1 problem is
that Linux is a nightmare for anybody who doesn't know it already.  This is
not true of Windows, or even DOS.  Linux is chasing away the very people it
needs.

  You can tell this from the tone of most newbie posts.   They are
embarrassed to have to ask these questions.   They (read me) have a tough
time asking a question which uses terminology correctly, or even coming up a
question that makes sense.

  There is something that Linux needs much more than anything else, and that
is a decent help system.   We need something about 50 times larger than the
man pages.   Something which always has an extensive chapter in simple
layman language, and lots of examples with clear steps with *explanations*.
And also a way to get to the more typically man page type stuff for the
people who need that.

  Who is willing to create such a thing?  Not me, I'm not a Linux devotee.
But people have put so much effort into building the OS itself, and writing
doc.   But the bottom line is that the Windows Help system totally blows
away all the confusing HOWTO's, man pages, or archived email searches.
I'm sure the Linux community could come up with something which beats the
Windows Help by a long shot, if they ever decide to get serious about making
progress.

  For those who read this list and have put in 100's of hours working on
Linux for free for whatever reason:  How many people do you suppose have
installed Redhat, Debian or Suse, and tried for a week or so, and then
deleted it in frustration?   Did they remove it because they are
weak-minded, or were they programmed by Bill Gates to hate the penguin?
No, it was because they couldn't figure out anything without being bombarded
with 100 other things they didn't know

   Anyway, I detest Windows because it crashes every day.   I detest Windows
because there is no useful support.  (If you call them they charge $40 and
their solution is to reinstall Windows)   I detest Windows because they have
such a freaking attitude that when their OS crashes, they give you message
that you need to contect 'The Vendor', as if a crash could never be their
fault.   I detest Windows because to install anything you have to reboot 100
times, and sometimes it becames so messed up you have reinstall the whole
OS.    I detest Windows because they make you buy a new version every two
years and it is never any better.   In summation, I detest Windows because I
have to use it, and it is low quality software.

   So I have all these reasons to detest Windows.  What keeps me and
zillions of others like me from jumping into Linux?     Because we quickly
drown.

  Anyway...   Does anybody know what steps I need to do in order make ssh
work so I can log in remotely?   I wanted to try to use Tera Term Pro with
the SSH extenstion to log onto my Linux machine from a Windows machine on
the local network.

Right now if I type:

ssh -v -l root rocky

  I get this error message about authenticity not being established.   I
made a 'indentification' and an authorization file in the  ~/.ssh directory
along with the keys created by ssh-keygen, but I really don't know what I'm
doing.  I just tried to do what it said in the HOWTO link above, and nothing
seems to work.

-Kevin Stokes
frustrated Linux Newbie.