Mr. Day

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 5 Dec 2004, John Summerfield wrote:

> On Sunday 05 December 2004 12:39, Timothy Payne wrote:
> > And who put Mr. Day in charge?
>
> I think you're being a little harsh. His advice to get a book on the
> subject is sound and precisely what I did: I bought a book with CD
> (Slackware, before RHL was visible in the shops).

  ok, let me try to bring this to a close.  please.  so we can all go
back to arguing about top versus bottom posting. :-P

  my beef *wasn't* with a newbie asking questions, ok?  it was more
specifically with someone who:

1) had clearly *just* installed linux for the first time,
2) had, by his own admission, spent all of two hours with it, and
3) joined the fedora list and posted, asking a basic question with no
subject field, spelling a directory name incorrectly and apparently
trying to do some administration (installing software) while
apparently not understanding the notion of the root account and root
versus non-root power.

  this has nothing to do with being a newbie.  this has to do with
investing at least a *minimal* amount of time to familiarize yourself
with a *very* powerful and sophisticated operating system that, if you
don't understand at least a few critical concepts, will turn around
and bite you in the butt really hard.  and all that before asking the
FC community to start solving your problems for you.

  was i being rude?  probably.  but i was in a bit of a snarky mood,
having just upgraded (very carefully, backing up all the critical user
data first) a system from FC1 to FC3, only to learn afterwards that
the previous admin had, via symlinks, installed the main project's web
pages in /usr/tmp, for gawd's sake.  grrrrrr ...

rday