Eternal Searches

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Eternal Searches
started by: Trapper

Posted by Trapper on Sep. 13 2005,13:55

Is there a bonafide FAQ page for DSL somewhere? I ask because I am finding myself doing lots and lots of searching but am not coming up with a whole lot of answers.

As an example: There was a question in one forum concerning starting the xscreensaver daemon automatically upon login. ICO2 responded to that post but rather than describe the procedure in that thread, he/she posted the procedure in UserFeedback and referred the poster to there. Having the same question, I went there. I did a number of searches, and lots and lots of reading but have yet to find the answer to the question.

That is just one example. I am no Linux journeyman and I surely do not mind at all learning new things and ways and expect that I have to hunt and research. It seems though that with DSL it is more difficult than it should be. There's a lot of hit and miss and much time consumption required for a very small amount of information.

I just believe that a regular web page devoted to a comprehensive collection of specific FAQ's and specific answers would save a great amount of forum bandwidth and time, rather than having to fathom thru tons of posts and it would somewhat eliminate many duplicate questions.

Perhaps there is such a webpage or even a FAQ file of that nature in DSL. If that is so, I have yet to find it. A desktop icon linking the user to a real, comprehensive, and useful FAQ on the disk or at a website would be a tremendous timesaver for everyone.

Trapper

Posted by Max on Sep. 13 2005,14:18

Do you mean like this one??
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ >

This link is on the homepage of damsmalllinux.org

Posted by Trapper on Sep. 13 2005,15:23

Thanks Max. I can't believe I missed that link on the homepage but I obviously did. That's pretty much what I was meaning. I do think things such as the Common Issues subcatagory and several others should be a bit more comprehensive, seeing they either contain very little or nothing at all but it is a good reference FAQ.

For the record, I did resolve my xscreensaver issue by going to the xscreensaver homepage and read about auto starting of xscreensaver in various scenerios. I took a stab and added this to my .xinitrc:

Code Sample

xscreensaver-command -exit
xscreensaver &

I'm not sure I need all that when booting up because I am not actually stopping a running xscreensaver but this does automatically start xscreensaver for the logged in account.

Thanks,
Trapper

Posted by Max on Sep. 13 2005,15:35

Yes...the FAQ and wiki are a work in progress. But believe me, what we have now is a tremendous improvement from a year ago.

If you have a passion for good documentation, there's always a need for a helping hand.

Posted by Trapper on Sep. 13 2005,16:14

Needless to say, I need to become more familiar with DSL and Linux, both, before I start considering becoming involved with the FAQ development but I am interested and will be happy to give a helping hand in the not-to-distant future. I just need to become more knowledgable in what I am doing. I am taking lots of notes concerning the situations I am personally encountering and how I am resolving them. Hopefully I can turn that into useful information for others.

I will say DSL is pretty slick, putting it mildly. Being from Florida, USA, it's not too uncommon to be uprooted for periods of time because of hurricanes. I'm not able to afford a reasonable laptop to cart along with me but I have had an old Umax 318T lying around for years. It only has a 3 gig hard drive, a 300 MHz processor and 48 MB RAM but DSL is thin and works quite well on this setup. It's no speed demon but it sure beats a Fedora, Slackware or Win2K install, by far, performance wise, for what I need temporarily.

I do have a couple of 64 MB RAM modules I could put in this old boat but I have absolutely no documentation on an Actionbook 318T, cannot seem to find any that would help. I have totally torn down this laptop as much as possible but still cannot get to the memory slots to install new memory. The slots are sandwiched between 2 boards and everyone that's tried have not been figured out how to seperate those boards and lock in the new modules. Whatever, DSL is easily workable with 48 MB. It's not like I am setting up this box to run quake or something. Just mail, ftp and a bit of browsing. It's a perfect solution.

Thanks Again,
Trapper

Posted by Max on Sep. 13 2005,18:06

I hear you. I think DSL is great. As my friends ask me to help upgrade them to new notebooks, I collect their old ones and they make perfect machines using DSL. Also, they're great for kids. After 4 re-loads of windows on their machines because of various IE virus and malware downloads, I switched them to Linux and have not had to touch their machines since!