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Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote: | At 03:06 PM 7/7/2004, Geoffrey Leach wrote: | |> My question to the list is this: When is a newbie no longer a newbie? | | | Hmm. Food for thought here... a newbie is no longer a newbie when: | | 1. He/she understands that Linux is in some ways far better than | Windows and in some ways nowhere near Windows and has chosen to accept | that (while working to improve it, of course). He/she has a clue as to | why those differences exist. | | 2. He (the "she" is assumed) can solve some of his own problems | by reference to /usr/share/doc, Google, LDP, MARC archives, etc. | | 3. He has learned how to seek help effectively on mailing lists, | fora, or IRC when self-help fails to provide results. This is probably | equal parts netiquette, smart questions, and common sense plus common | courtesy. | | 4. He has managed to successfully accomplish some of his core | tasks using Linux. That is, Linux is now an actually useful tool to him, | not just a neat curiosity item. | | How's that for a starter list? | | I fail on questions 2 & 4. /usr/share/doc is difficult to browse unless you know exactly what you are looking for. There is no cross-reference or grouping for similar applications. For example, if you need help in setting up a news-server, there are at least 2 flavors to choose from innd (being one). Then if you want help on setup of a news reader, were do you go.... I've heard pan, mozilla, etc. passed around, but no clear place if you didn't know that already. I still think Linux is very neat curiosity item. I've setup a full blown server, setup a firewall (even though our company also has a hardware firewall installed), setup a news-server (only for our local users), setup samba file sharing, etc.... I still find it stimulating when major changes happen, like when named went to a chrooted area. I'm glad someone helped me with that.... I couldn't believe I was changing all those files and nothing was changing. And also when they finally decided to give up ipchains in favor of iptables. This took a little getting use to and rebuilding some of the scripts that I used (downloaded from someone else's documents) to setup the firewall. Even the latest thing I found out about port 445! that I wasn't aware of. Don't worry, samba is only setup to accept from our domain anyway; but, the logfiles were filling with xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.log files with IPs that were not from our network.
So, I guess I'm still a newbie! James Kosin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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