SlashNET Forum with Marcel Gagne

weebl writes "SlashNET is pleased to announce an upcoming forum with Marcel Gagne. He writes the 'Cooking with Linux' column every month for Linux Journal magazine. His first book was the acclaimed Linux System Administration: A User's Guide. Recently he wrote a book called Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!, which is intended for consumer desktop users who are curious about Linux and want to give it a test run. The forum will be held on Monday February 23, 2004 at 8PM US Eastern Standard Time (-0500). As usual, the forum will be held in #forum. You will be able to submit questions both before and during the forum which will be used to guide the discussion."

Comments

At least you get a screen.

[bad enema]

I tried getting Linux to work and I ran out of intelligence.

Re:What people should say to interested users...

[stratjakt]

How do you figure that?

Whoopty damn doo, the source is available to me.

However, any documentation I'm lucky enough to find is years out of date. The CUPS manual is basically a longwinded treatise about reading the manual, for instance. Absolutely no information in there to help you get your printer working.

Do I really want to pore through millions of lines of source code to figure out why I can't get a particular machine to join a SAMBA controlled domain? Or start debugging ghostscript to figure out why everything I print heads to the printer with no margins (and thusly always crops a half inch out all the way around?)

There's plenty of stuff on any OSS/linux/gnu/whatever box I've seen that just plain doesn't work. And there are many folks with real jobs for whom "here's the sourcecode, figure it out yer own fucking self!" just doesn't cut it.

That said, how is the windows registry any more confusing than the tangled mess of bullshit in your average /etc folder, complete with cryptic names, inetd.conf? what the fuck is an inetd.conf for?

And I also much prefer user-installable drivers than having to compile all hardware support into the monolithic kernel.

The impetus behind linux is an ideological/philosophical one, not a technical one. It's a screaming pain in the ass to use day to day.