RE: Thoughts on RTFM

[Jeff.Chimene@etest.com]

Some of you obviously "get it." My hats off to you!

Others, sadly, do not:

-----Original Message-----
From: Dimitri Maziuk [mailto:dmaziuk@yola.bmrb.wisc.edu]
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 17:53
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Thoughts on RTFM

Good. I sincerely hope it'll stay there -- the last thing I want in my mailbox is mail from lusers who need a dancing paper clip to tell them how to insert a CD in the drive.

The last thing I do is let people like you define people like me.

Definitely. If you found DeadRat too hard, Debian is not for you. Maybe Linux is not for you. You know, there's Mac Oh-SeX, several *BSDs, a bunch of similar-but-not-entirely-unlike flavours of Winders out there, and more. Why did you want to run Linux anyway? To be a k3w1 1337 h4X0r d00d?

My reasons for installing this distro are none of your business. If you can't help, stay out of the street.

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Johnny Ernst Nielsen [j.e.nielsen@iname.com] wrote:

Um, I see that particular question on and off on different lists. So you better think again sir.

I stated that type of question rarely ever gets a polite reply. Thank-you for making my point.

So, sir, you are simply not right.

Think so? The following was posted on debian-alpha. So far, no answers. I don't think it has anything to do with the question specifics. It seems to have everything to do with whether or not the question is sufficiently "interesting."

Hi:

 

On an AS/200, at the MILO prompt, I should be following these instructions, from the "Installing Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 for Alpha":

To bootstrap the installation system, enter the following command at the MILO prompt:

     MILO> boot fd0:linux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1

If you are booting from something other than a floppy, substitute fd0 in the above example with the appropriate device name in Linux notation. The help command would give you a brief MILO command reference.

Where is "linux.gz?" when I use the path "sr0:boot/linux.", MILO complains that this is not a gzipped file.

I would prefer not to install from floppies. Presumably I have a "bootable" CD-ROM image, although LSL disclaims any responsibility for the contents of the CD-ROM.

 

It looks like even though I boot MILO, and can access a CD-ROM drive, I still have to rawrite & then boot from floppies to continue the installation? Perhaps linux.gz is the machine-specific image created by the install process?

 

I note that the section "Obtaining and Installing Linux" at www.linuxdoc.org doesn't actually mention this file.

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Viktor Rosenfeld [rosenfel@informatik.hu-berlin.de] (who does get it) wrote: 

In fact, I think it's a very poorly worded question, because it simply does not narrow down the problem space enough.

Of course it's a poorly worded question: that's my point. There are so many failure modes that it's not possible to elucidate them all. Boasting about the quality of the documentation proves nothing to the rank beginner.

Eg, one could include an error message that mount gives, debugging information from the kernel, or if your newbie enough, not to know that such information exists, you could describe that eg, the busy light of the CD-ROM keeps flashing eratically, or that the drive makes funny noises, and the like. If there's no such behavior, you should write that too, so some options can be dismissed as possible sources for problems.

I added another CD-ROM at SCSI ID #4, leaving the failing drive at ID #5. From MILO, the command "ls -t iso9660 sr0:boot" succeeded, and the command "ls -t iso9660 sr1:boot" failed; error messages indicate that sr1: is unable to sense the presence of the disk.