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Linux/RedHat documentation



I have a friend whose NT4 server at his house has become unstable and
the filesystem is slowly corrupting into uselessness. He has been asking
and talking to me about Linux for a couple of years. Well, he has now
gone and put together a machine and installed RedHat on it, and plan to
make it his "PDC" at the house.

I walked him through Samba basics, cause that's about all I know, and he
now has all of his windows boxes talking to each other and the printers
through this machine. A very good thing.

sidebar: this guy owns a computer store and works most of the time as a
network administrator (Windows) for some businesses here and in STL.

Anyway, He wanted to put in a second hard disk, as storage for future
migration and of course got the drive physically installed but was
unable, even after reading and following the RedHat docs to get the OS
to find it's mount point. Now to the point of this whole rant..

What has always been my biggest bitch about any flavor of Linux is the
lack of cohesive, coherent and reliable documentation. A newbie can get
lost and befuddled by the tremendous amount of technical "man pages",
"HOWTO's", and "mini-HOWTO's" that all point to each other and sometimes
cause more confusion than help. I think some in the community have lost
that lovin feeling because they are far beyond the newbie stage and
don't remember. If we want new people experiencing the open source
revolution then we must make it friendlier and easier. Linux is still
not ready for the Home Desktop, out of the box.

BTW, I got an email from him this morning thanking me for pointing him
to www.tldp.org and the new hard disk HOWTO. He's sticking to his guns!

Comments?
-- 
Stephen D. Reindl
sreindl@apci.net
RLLNW / PRS
Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If
American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day
and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism
will grow in strength in our land."

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