Re: debiantutorials.org seeks input and new blood
On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 01:12:03AM EDT, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Chris Jones wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 06:12:35AM EDT, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> >>> Check out the FreeBSD handbook at:
> >>> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/
> >>> It is also available as a pdf which is >1000 pages! It doesn't cover
> >>> everything, but it does cover a lot. They also have other books and
> >>> articles at http://www.freebsd.org/docs/books.html.
> >>>
> >> That sounds more like a problem than a solution. I would not try an OS
> >> that had a 1000 page manual. I want simple, not comprehensive.
> >
> > I don't know about their more recent consumer-grade offering but you may
> > want to take a look at Windows '98. When I got the laptop, it came with
> > a 20-page or so manual. But then considering the "capabilities" of the
> > OS that was probably overkill anyway.
>
> That wrongly assumes anything Windows is a modern OS, when in reality
> it's just a rehash of the worst ideas CP/M and VMS had to offer.
Honestly, I thought Dotan wrote the above in jest and forget the ":-)".
I certainly did not post in earnest.
On the other hand, what I wrote was bare-bone facts .. They did give me
a 20-page manual, _and_ notepad, a web browser, a calculator and a few
other "Accessories" whose relevance I was not able to determine at the
time.
Surely I missed something, but all the same I was not exactly bowled
over by the OS .. or the distro.
I don't know for sure, because less than a month later I installed Red
Hat 6.2 and never gave anything Windows another glance.
As to a 1,000-page manual (or ten-100 page manuals, or one hundred
10-page manuals) .. one should probably keep in mind that it's not just
the OS that is therein documented but the entire distro.
I am not a user of FreeBSD, but if you consider that current estimates
of major linux distros run into the _hundreds of millions_ of lines of
source code, I don't see how one thousand pages of documentation could
tell you more than the basics..!
Q. Since this appears to be an issue, how many pages of documentation do
you think there are in /usr/share/man on the average user-oriented
machine?
A. Many. Mine has 30Meg's worth, gzipped so it's likely close to the
mythical 1,000 mark .. possibly more.
And that's only the man pages .. many of them only a few lines that tell
you that the app did not have a man page.
As to my assuming anything Windows is "modern", I'm not sure where you
got the idea..
CJ
Reply to: