On Wednesday 14 February 2001 11:38, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
There is an Old Norse myth which describes a man juggling knives keeping seven in the air at a time. Over the last few weeks I have come to appreciate how painful it must be to learn such a skill. I have also come to realize that the documentation that comes with the SuSE distribution falls a bit short when it comes to real hacking. I would like another book that really gets into the weeds of both SuSE Linux and Linux in general.
Perhaps SuSE would not want to make it this easy to understand the internal secrets of how they make their systems work. That would be an understandable business decision. Nonetheless, I don't see where it would hurt to suggest such a thing. The types of topics I would like to see discussed are:
* how to create an RPM that will install into a SuSE configuration without breaking the current dependencies. e.g., I am trying to build the current OpenSSH from tarball, and would like to apply it as an upgrade to the latest SuSE rpm.
From SAMS publishing: Maximum RPM
* What is the overall architecture of the system. In this case much of the information is in the current set of books it is just not organized as a study guide.
SuSE's manual is still best for SuSE's system
* What is the SuSE prescription for modifying system configuration via RPM scripts.
The best way is to use YaST on the RPM. That way SuSEConfig will fire after the rpm is loaded and do what ever it has to do for the situation.
* More detailed information on what the various features of hardware are. e.g., all the options in Sax and what they mean.
* A better discussion of how kmod and modules.conf works. ** In particular I would like to know things such as how programs use the aliases. ** I'm interested in this because I often get messages such as modprobe can't locate sound-slot-1. Ok, that seems pretty clear. Something tried to get modprobe to load the module named or aliased sound-slot-1 and it didn't find it. What I don't know is: *** why modprobe was trying to locate sound-slot-1 *** what sound-slot-1 is or should be. Will this effect the behavior of my system? How? *** How do I fix the problem? *** How do I troubleshoot this?
* How to use the gnu tools such as gcc, make, autoconfig, and etc.
* How to check the signatures on tarballs that I download.
* How to sign tarballs
Look at PGP or GNUpgp
I could continue with this list for a long time. What I'm looking for is something that covers these issues in sufficient detail to give me a good component-level overview of what is going on in the system, as well as the basics of how to work with core system tools.
Do others have thoughts on this?
Steve
-- Athiests believe they know there is no god. Agnostics know they believe there is no god. Thiests believe there is a god. Christians believe in God through His Son, Jesus Christ.