* Sun, 01 Jun 2003, jsowden@americansentry.net: Again: please direct replies to the list, do NOT use personal replies unless OT or requested. And read up about quoting howto's because I have no idea to what you are replying.
I am a newbie at this, and one of my complaints has been the use of the 'nix language to explain something. Consider giving your text, section by section, to someone who has never used Linux. Have them read your text, then explain to you how to perform the task described. There are technical nouns used in explaining that are used a verbs, leaving the newbie lost.
It's not only Unix/Linux, every specialization has it's own dictionary of wtf-s and [e]tla-s. Newbies just have to get used to it, and use the available help to get into the 'scene'. You can't expect a 30 year old specialization to change its habbits because newbies feel lost (a medicine course doesn't change the Latin words into english for new med students either).
There are also other suttleties (sp?) in linux. If you change a config file,
$ echo suttleties | ispell @(#) International Ispell Version 3.2.06 08/01/01 word: how about: subtleties
often you must execute a command to put the new config data into play. This needs to be explained.
These are admin tasks, not Joe Luser's
Finally, as we all know, this operating system has more documentation than any other to date (afaik). Lots of doc does not mean that a newbie can understand it.
Most of which is written as reference, not as tutorial. A man-page of bash does NOT teach anyone how to use bash, just where to find some (hidden) option to change bash's behaviour. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 27N , 4 29 45E. SuSE 8.2 x86 Kernel k_Athlon 2.4.20-4GB See headers for PGP/GPG info.