JohnS
Group: Members
Posts: 23
Joined: Dec. 2004 |
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Posted: Dec. 22 2004,03:18 |
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Hello Cappy,
actually I've been using Unix (mostly on suns) for about 20 years but this is my first foray into linux land. On the suns at work I never had to deal with PC wireless connections etc.
The two major stumbling blocks here have ben the lack of persistant store (both machines I'm running DSL on have XP and NTFS file systems so I can't write to disk without repartitioning the disk, and I don't want to do that just yet. The laptop has a floppy but you have to swap out the CD to do that which makes it difficult to boot off the CD!
The other problem has been the lack of man pages, I'm used to just doing a man on something I'm not familiar with, but on DSL that goes off to a web page, which makes things a little difficult when you are trying to debug the network connection. Even when I do have the connection working I get a "don't have permision" message when I try and do a man. Its made things a little difficult to track things down.
As to shells I'm motly used to csh and tcsh, bash is new to me but seems to be quite similar. For scripts I'm an awk expert and like to use python. I don't really like perl much though. Many years ago I actually wrote a word processor in awk, primarily just for the name: awk-word.
The linux boot procedures, how drivers are loaded, what config files control what and where they are located is quite a bit different than what I am used to, I'm having to unlearn a lot!
All the detailed technical articles on the net assume the audience already knows all the details about how linux boots and installs drivers etc, and the beginners stuff doesn't come close to covering what I'd like to know, its that middle ground that is always the toughest to find. I'm picking up bits and pieces here and there but it would be nice to find one place that had the basic technical aspects of linux. I'm sure its somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.
We just did a massive clean up of the house and I found the USB card reader and smart cards, so now I can actually try doing a backup and restore and writting some scripts. 
I haven't gotten to the point of remastering my own custom live CD yet, thats going to take a little digging.
I am having a lot of fun working through the problems I'm havin with DSL. Hopefully sometime I'll have figured out enough that I can start helping others out.
John S.
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