From: ajr@pug.hri.com (MFHorn) Subject: RTFM? *WHAT* FM? Date: 21 May 1993 14:15:57
In article <64JT4B1w165w@xivic.bo.open.de> ws@xivic.bo.open.de (Wolfgang Schelongowski) writes:
> Wrong newsgroup. RTFM (the DAILY posting "READ THIS before posting").
Just out of curiosity, but how daily is this daily posting? I've been
reading c.o.l. for about a month and saw it for the first time yesterday.
A quick grep of my news spool shows:
bigbird# grep '^Subject: ' * | grep -i 'READ THIS'
43406:Subject: *** READ THIS BEFORE POSTING *** (1.8)
bigbird#
Articles are kept here for four days. If it's daily, shouldn't I see
four articles?
And having the documentation doesn't always help since some of it is
terrible. For example(s)..
I ftp'ed SLS 1.02 from uunet just a few weeks ago. One of the README
files said to make the a1 floppy on a Unix machine (in my case SunOS
4.1.3), I should run "dd if=a1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024". That didn't work.
Instead I had to uncompress a1 and then "dd if=a1 of=/dev/fd0".
It also said to the same thing for a2. But a2 is a collection of gzip'ed
tar files that you put on a DOS floppy (just like a3, a4, c1-3, d1-2, s1,
t1-3 and x1-10).
It also made no mention of a second boot floppy (which needs to be DOS
formatted) that doinstall writes that will mount your root filesystem
from the hard disk.
I've been trying to get XFree86 1.2 running at a higher resolution than
640x480 with my SpeedStar 24X (I know 1.2 doesn't fully support the 24X,
but if it works at 640x480, maybe it'll work at something higher). I
tried reading through the two or three tutorials and the two or three
databases, but they're all way too complicated (I admit I don't know much
about monitor or VGA hardware, but I have a college education and have
been running Unix networks for seven years; that should be adequate).
Plus, they ask for information I've *never* seen in *any* monitor or VGA
controller manual.
I've just started looking through the dosemu documentation. It doesn't
seem much better.
In all cases, I'm looking at the READMEs and man pages that I ftp'ed from
uunet in /systems/unix/linux/packages/SLS.
Any flames along the lines of "you get what you pay for" will be ignored.
Just because something is free doesn't mean you can't complain about it.
And I don't mean to insult anyone who has contributed to Linux or the SLS
release. I count myself among the satisfied Linux customers and I
recommend it to anyone who wants Unix on a PC. I miss the days before
this wimpy "ok boot cdrom" junk, so a little inaccurate documentation is
fun for me. But don't bite the newbies heads off everytime they ask for
help. It's not their fault.