RE: Linux Answers.......

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Mon, 01 Nov 1999, Paul Sims wrote:

>Bear in mind this is a pilot issue, and aimed at getting as wide a
>readership as possible. The RH6 installation tutorial will by it's very
>nature get more people using linux. This is a good thing. I think the first
>real issue (post Cribo, they reckon) will be the one to form serious
>opinions over.

I have no problem with the first issue being aimed at newbies. They have to
grow their market so if they are sensible the bulk of their initial coverage
has to be newbie-driven. My objection is how much of it seemed to be _written_
by newbies. There were too many mistakes and things that will cause newbies
trouble for the editor to have been happy with the first issue IMHO.

To give some examples:

The connecting to freeserve with kppp tute will produce a machine from which
x apps cannot be launched (it is mis-configured to change the hostname). The
compiling the kernel tute skipped over the non-trivial part (i.e. deciding
which options to choose in make xconfig), chose to position the kernel source
in a weird place, and didn't mention any of the gotchas like the System.map
file. None of these things are really awful but they show that some of the
people writing aren't really happy with linux.

Still I hope that they continue. But at some stage they have to appeal to more
experienced linux users if they are going to survive. They also have to get the
PR right too. Designing the web pages with front page and then giving an
apology that says essentially you can't design web pages in linux was a
terrible mistake.

atb
Martin

--
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph

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