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There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.

I'd be amazed to find out it's impossible for Open Source folks to create an infrastructure with books, online material, and training.

Ever seen a help system for a Linux distro?

Well, there's that little red-and-white lifesaver icon. That'll bring up the help system in Gnome or KDE. Then there's the speech bubble with the ? in it, that'll give you context-sensitive help. Or you could just start the KDE help center app and search in that. Or maybe you could open a terminal and type "apropos " and Linux would tell you which commands are relevant. Then you could type "man " or "info " and get some compact reading material. If you're still stuck, you could look into whichever distro you're using's forums. People there are almost always ready to assist. Or you could pay for commercial support - plenty of people willing to take money for tech support. Then there's http://www.linuxhelp.net/, which seems quite, umm, helpful. Typing "linux help" into a search engine will give you just under two hundred million hits to look into too - maybe one of those might be useful, do you think? Of course, for the traditionalists, there's always usenet. If you log onto any of the several hundred groups devoted to the various flavours of Linux, there just might be something to look at perhaps? Or maybe there's a local Linux User Group you could phone and talk to a real geek.

Apart from that, you're right. Linux does really leave you high and dry.

Silly IT departments.

If you "upgrade" a piece of software, then discover it requires a complete manual system restart to remain stable, the prudent thing to do in any other circumstance would be a rollback.

Unfortunately, since this is an IT department, it must run Windows; after all, where could you ever find support for Linux?

The post should have been "YDL Linux now available for download through Enhanced.net, the YDL paid webspace/support/membershipthingy service."

If you want to download for free, there are many good mirrors available. Just go to the linuxhelp website (this page has links to all iso's out there for every distribution available) which is btw an excellent starting point for newbies like myself...

Umm all of them?

I would assume. They'd have to do something pretty damn lame to break pppd.

http://www.linuxhelp.net/guides/janou/pppoe.shtml

As an aside: everyone talks about how Linux is open source and free. If Linux is so free then why do I have to pay Debain, Red Hat, LinuxPPC for a free program?

You don't have to pay Debian, Redhat, LinuxPPC, SuSE, Slackwear, or anyone else for their distro. You can download their software from many ftp sites, burn onto a CD, and install. In addition, many distros have a network install, so you can download the distro and install right over the net (Redhat does, Mandrake does, I think SuSE does, not sure who else).

HTH.


What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

I cursed and cursed. I learned emacs. I unlearned all those windows keystrokes. (not really, its kool to switch my fingers to windows mode on a win box). I killed gnome and kde and installed a gui that used only a few megs (in code and execution) and was as foreign looking to Windoze as possible, Windowmaker

But as I learned to make major changes to my system without a gui or goddamn, *f-ing rebooting every 5 minutes I began to feel that godlike power agian that hooked me on computers back when I was 9. I began to love Linux. I feel natural with it and can really get around.

Funny, but just after that transition phase I took an engineering management role in a dot com and help in the setup of a several hundred K in unix hardware (smp sun boxes, linux, raid arrays, yada). I can tell you being able to live at the command line (and I mead live - getting help, light browsing, writing code (java and c++), working with multiple apps, email) was incredibly useful - I'd say mecessary

Though I've said alot, I don't know what to say. Sometimes I actually don't want every joe 6 pack to be running linux. The prideful part of me says, "learn the goddamn system and stop complaining. And if you can't, puleeze go back to windows. Grandma shouldn't be anywhere near a linux box anyway." The human part of me (oh, pride IS human, Doh) says, "*sniff*, try these:"

linuxhelp.net
linuxhelp.org
linuxselfhelp.com
linuxnewbie.org
How To's