-=> ROY J. TELLASON wrote to JAMES BRADLEY <=-
 RJT> James Bradley wrote in a message to Phil Marlowe:

 JB> PREAMBLE: Experienced Linux users, please check for facts.

Thanks gang!

 -=> PHIL MARLOWE wrote to MAURICE KINAL <=-

 RJT> There's a lot of ease of use in later stuff,  and setup varies from one
 RJT> distro to another,  also with the version -- the later stuff is better
 RJT> at figuring things out with different hardware.
...Kind of a double edge sword if you ask me. I found myself doing a lot of
reverse engineering without the requisite background before I left it alone,
whence it functioned as designed.

Heck, even CUPS ran it's loopback administration screen after I was fighting
with it for a number of months! It was likely my nature to fudgearound with
the install that kept it from working properly until then. (IE: 
Trying to turn on CUPS before installing the RPM et al.)


 RJT> You can have as much control as you can handle.  :-)
...And then some.


 RJT> The whole point is,  the GUI sits on top of things,  but you don't have
 RJT> to run it,  and you can do both if you like.  Right now I've got a
 RJT> session going on one textmode console on my workstation box,  after
 RJT> establishing my connection on another console,  which is actually
 RJT> talking to a different box,  at the moment there are eight different
 RJT> textmode consoles active,  and I'm using six of them.  AND I have KDE
 RJT> up and running and active on tty9.  :-)  Different tools for different
 RJT> jobs.  The session ontty1 is talking to my firewall/router which is
 RJT> also running slack,  but has no GUI installed,  and is living on a
 RJT> 386dx40 with an 80M (!) HD...
...And try to do *that* with a non-*NIX OS.


 JB> I, too tried to read up as much as I could on it. It wasn't a
 JB> loss, but it might have confounded me more than was helpfull.

 RJT> The biggest problem with this is that stuff that's printed gets dated
 RJT> so fast...
The exact reason I pointed to the released docs.


 JB> (Partitioning, and multi-boot installations being what they are.)
 JB> Every distro, by law, comes with a complete set of docs. If a
 JB> Linux users group is near you, perhaps a local `good-guy/girl'
 JB> can help with the install. Just be sure others agree (s)he is
 JB> indeed agood-guy/girl, and not just a blow-hard like me. 

 JB> Personally, I can't wait to fire up another Linux box. I miss it a
 JB> lot! The reason I reverted back to Windows on this machine, was to
 JB> run ONE commercial application for dad. (Don't askwhy my Linux
 JB> box is MIA. Ruddy proprietary PS!)

 RJT> Yeah?  What kind of box?  The nice thing about linux in that context is
 RJT> that you can take the HD and pop it into something else and it'll run.
 RJT> Nothing at all like the nonsense you getwith windoze when you try
 RJT> that,  though that may depend on the distro as well.

I described it at a party like this. "An errant Windows driver will halt your
system. Linux will ignore a missing device, and carry on with its chores."

The box... A single board PC with Mandrake 6. I was running it 24-7 until it
started sporatically re-booting. I think the wall-wart (More like a
middle-of-the-cable wart.) found its way under a cushion and overheated. 
 
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