Re: Old Computer Parts
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Mirko Scurk wrote:
> Hans du Plooy wrote:
>> On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 22:02 +0100, Joe Hart wrote:
>
>> No matter how easy or difficult the question you ask, there will always
>> be some smartass who tell to you go RTFM (which is often a longer
>> sentence to type than the answer to your question). Don't let it bother
>> you. Eric S. Raymond's advice is good advice, but I know people can be
>> intimidated and/or confused by some documentation out there. Heck,
>> after more than 10 years of using linux some projects' documentation
>> still overwhelm me. If you know absolutely nothing about a certain
>> program or the technologies involved, it can be difficult to figure out
>> where to start.
>
> One great thing about linux is huge amount of documentation and another is
> that it is developing and introducing new stuff almost every day but lot
> of that documentation is more than 2 years old and tells you little about
> current
> distro. Sometimes user of that old documentation could be even misled.
>
That is one of the major problems that I have found as well. Even
Eric's homepage at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ is dated 18 Nov. 2005,
which by Linux standards is old. The Linux Documetation Project at
http://tldp.org/ has some very good articles, but quite a bit of their
information is from 2002. Needless to say, it is sometimes difficult to
determine which information applies. Trial and error are fine on a test
machine, but not on a production machine.
I've only been running GNU/Linux for a few months, and spent quite a bit
of that time distro-hopping to find the one that fit me. I still test
other distros on a regular basis. I managed to even get Arch and Gentoo
running, although pacman and portage are great tools, I still think that
the Debian packaging is the best, perhaps because I am more familiar
with it.
I've tried to keep to recent books, but quite a few of them are so basic
that I end up skipping whole sections. I can figure out how to use most
of the GUI stuff, and it sort of upsets me when books say "to configure
your network, click on this, then click that. One of the reasons I
chose GNU/Linux was to get away from the GUI having to configure
everything. If one knows the underlying file structure, one doesn't
need a GUI.
I even sometimes use links to browse the web. grml is one of my
favorite distros because of the 'text tools' approach. If I could
somehow merge a few different distros into my own, well that would be
the ultimate, but I have a few years to go before I can take something
like that on.
Until then, I will keep plugging away reading books and searching the
web. At least I can be thankful am in the first world and can get a
fast internet connection.
Joe
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