On Mon, 6 May 2002, David Smead wrote:
>
> I'm a newbie to Debian, and presently doing more sys admin than I prefer,
> but I've been `computing' since the early 1960s. Documentation has
> improved little since then, but now we have more powerful seach machines.
hi dave
i first programed on an ibm 1620 in about 1965. it's fun telling these
kids that i was programming for money when your grandparents were in high
school!
> There's a lot of good documentation for Linux and Debian, but much or most
> of it is appropriate for instances where everything goes according to
> plan. What's missing is most often provided by email lists, but usually
> with a lot of trial and error.
>
> What I haven't found yet is a condensed version of things that a slightly
> more than newbie would want to do, like mkboot after installing a new
> kernel. Maybe someone with better search skills than I can turn that up on
> the Debian site, but I couldn't.
>
> I know now that if you make partitions for things like /var and later want
> to mount them via nfs that you can't mount / and expect to dive into
> subdirectories under /var, but finding that in the documentation isn't
> easy - and the nohide option is mostly worthless from my experience.
>
> My pet peeve is the fact that error messages are not identified with a
> line number and source file that emits them. This is the ultimate means
> to finding a problem.
>
> But hey, any OS is worse than Linux!
>
remember the old ibm mvs messages and codes manual. just what you
described.
you really have your finger on something that we need. i have been
printing, sorting and collecting posts from the list for more than a month
now... problem is that it becomes a huge book too fast. archive searching
is poor. the newbies reference is very good... but there is another level
of detail needed in there. i find myself printing and saving postings
that cover things still on my 'to do' list.
i came back to debian maybe six weeks ago when i got fed up with trying to
get my scanner working on r/h. i knew that this would force me to keep at
it until the problem was solved. i started linux with debian back in '97
but got lured away by the ease of r/h installs. i knew that deb would get
me where i want to go... but a a big cost in time. (which i seem to have
in abundance!)
i think we need something like a meta-faq... sort of a master index of
threads driven by the list postings, sorted by topic like the tab dividers
i have in my binder (ssh, usb, x, video, printing, kernel, sound, java
etc) and kept current with links into the archive. how many posts about
the installer loop have there been in the last week?
anyway, my two cents...
dave
--
Dave Mallery, K5EN (r/h 7.2 krud; debian testing)
PO Box 520 Ramah, NM 87321
.~.
no gates.. /V\ running GNU/Linux
no windows! /( )\ free at last!
^^-^^
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