Re: [tlug] maybe a repetitive question about distros

[Pietro Zuco <pietro@example.com>]

Tlugers.
After talk about distros I only would like to express the problems that I 
have, that maybe a lot of beginers like me have.

Maybe this text is too long, so I don't wait some answer about it. I only want 
to explain my witness of my contact with linux, for those people that maybe 
are interested about to write some manual, book or howto.

As a lot of people I only used Windows in the past, and some day I read in a 
computer magazine that Linux exist. I tried it and in some way it charms me. 
I was tired of all the Microsoft stuff and I found in Linux the OS I always 
wanted.
At the begining I undertood that it's normal that I had some difficult to 
understad a lot of new things of Linux, specially because I was affected by 
some disease produced by Windows that dind't let me think. I really think 
that is dangerous for the main to use Microsoft products for a long time.

After some time, I felt good booting Linux and I wanted to migrate completely 
to linux but there was some little problems, that began big.
The man pages are full of information but they explain too many things. For 
example I only want to do a simple think with tar or bzip2 and I had to read 
out all the document where explain to me capabilities that I will never use!
At the end of the document I was so confused that I lose myself in the 
lines... I'm happy that the documentation is so wide but sometimes, people 
are not interested or don't have time to read all the history of how some 
command, driver, hardware or something else was produced or work. The mini 
howtos are so mini that at the end I had to look for a complete howto.

So at this point, I don't know:
How to configure 800x600 text mode resolution
How to configure my usb optical mouse
How to configure a trident ciberblade generic video card
How to configure a pcmcia 10 BaseT network card and so forth.
How to pretty configure japanese input.
How to configure sendmail. It's like a mysterious software.

And the think that more frusrtate me is that all this hardware and all ths 
things are fully supported by linux, and that I have to appeal to so very 
automated windows like distros as Redhat, mandrake, etc only because the 
documentation is so disperse and wide that I feel I'm swimming in a ocean of 
words and I don't know where to begin to learn!!

I know that the equilibrium between a lightness of configure manually a system 
and an automated configurable system is very difficult, but maybe if the 
documentation was structured in some different way, and not as looong text 
files that some times talk about of obsolete hardware, will make easy to 
people to introduce them in the Linux world.

Thankyou for your attention and I'm sorry if this mail is too long.

Pietro.