jjmac wrote:bigjohn wrote:
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(I find some of MSs' marketing techniques distasteful, but my selection of linux so that I have some choice often leaves me bewildered. Because IMO too much choice is no choice at all).
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hmmmmm, MS have been very good at training their resource baseto accept a particular standard level as being <cough> normal </cough>. It is a hard habit to break. When you go into a major deptment store, you are able to ignore all the things on the shelf if you want to ... but just 'cause your not into skiing (grin) does that mean they shouldn't be on offer. The whole thing is silly, but then ... i haven't really read it through yet. Is it worth it ?
Yeah OK, I can see that - but even after 3 years of trying to learn this thing that is linux (various distros), I still suffer because I find it difficult to get into the mindset.
Plus, IMO, the "how to do stuff" type articles are aimed a little too high. Why, because the uninitiated don't even know where to start.
I feel that with things explained at a "lower" level, the newbie has something to follow, the more experience have something to follow or if their levels of knowledge permit, they are better placed to be able to skip read those parts of the article as their experience is often enough to know that say, after ./configure, you normally do make, and so on.
Like my example in an earlier post. Openlaszlo, OK yes, the app is too advanced for me to make any use of it, but I can see that it appears to be "one hell of a piece of kit"!. Sure the article that reviewed it gave it a good write up, but I don't recall it saying that I'd need the java SDK, rather than the JRE that is either shipped with lots of distros or is just available straight forward rpm/deb/whatever format - I feel that it requires a bit more "bottle" to install it from the Sun site. Plus the review didn't even hint at possible problems at install stage, as though it just presumed that the reader would know.
So OK, if it's a "space" type concern of how to fit everything into the mag, then maybe some "newbie notes" for articles that requires some additional assistance or some similar arrangement.
The mag writers aren't just journo's, lots of them are very knowledgable people (well if they aren't then they need a pay rise as they're doing a vvv good job of faking it), but as with most knowledgable types, it's very easy to overlook how hard something might be to those with lesser levels of experience/knowledge - surely you must have seen the "just do whatever" type comments around the net? which then begs the question of how to "just do whatever" - if you know, you know, if you don't , you're stuffed.
My earlier example of samba. in a different thread http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=799&highlight=
"Nigel" very kindly explained how to configure "it" in a way that easily made sense of what I feel is a very complicated issue. Sure, I'd tried to read the O'Really guide on using samba, but was getting bogged down with so much extraneous info that it made it nigh on impossible to follow/understand/implement. In other words, overkill!
But the way that Nigel explained it, means that I now have the samba up and running to be getting on with, and I can now take my time (maybe with the O'Really site or something else) to see if I can get my head round configuring (actually learning why, I have to have the various options that I have in ) that most confusing of files, the smb.conf!