What is a newbie? (Was Re: Assistance for newbies?)

[James Kosin]

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Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
| At 03:06 PM 7/7/2004, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
|
|> My question to the list is this: When is a newbie no longer a newbie?
|
|
| Hmm. Food for thought here... a newbie is no longer a newbie when:
|
|         1. He/she understands that Linux is in some ways far better than
| Windows and in some ways nowhere near Windows and has chosen to accept
| that (while working to improve it, of course). He/she has a clue as to
| why those differences exist.
|
|         2. He (the "she" is assumed) can solve some of his own problems
| by reference to /usr/share/doc, Google, LDP, MARC archives, etc.
|
|         3. He has learned how to seek help effectively on mailing lists,
| fora, or IRC when self-help fails to provide results. This is probably
| equal parts netiquette, smart questions, and common sense plus common
| courtesy.
|
|         4. He has managed to successfully accomplish some of his core
| tasks using Linux. That is, Linux is now an actually useful tool to him,
| not just a neat curiosity item.
|
| How's that for a starter list?
|
|
	I fail on questions 2 & 4.  /usr/share/doc is difficult to browse
unless you know exactly what you are looking for.  There is no
cross-reference or grouping for similar applications.  For example, if
you need help in setting up a news-server, there are at least 2 flavors
to choose from innd (being one).  Then if you want help on setup of a
news reader, were do you go....  I've heard pan, mozilla, etc. passed
around, but no clear place if you didn't know that already.
	I still think Linux is very neat curiosity item.  I've setup a full
blown server, setup a firewall (even though our company also has a
hardware firewall installed), setup a news-server (only for our local
users), setup samba file sharing, etc....  I still find it stimulating
when major changes happen, like when named went to a chrooted area.  I'm
glad someone helped me with that....  I couldn't believe I was changing
all those files and nothing was changing.  And also when they finally
decided to give up ipchains in favor of iptables.  This took a little
getting use to and rebuilding some of the scripts that I used
(downloaded from someone else's documents) to setup the firewall.  Even
the latest thing I found out about port 445! that I wasn't aware of.
Don't worry, samba is only setup to accept from our domain anyway; but,
the logfiles were filling with xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.log files with IPs that
were not from our network.

So, I guess I'm still a newbie!
James Kosin
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