[H-GEN] CDROM mount problem on Open SUSE.

[Anthony Irwin]

Anthony Irwin wrote:

>
> One last thing.
>
> Depending on how you wish to use your computer I would highly 
> recommending learning how to use the shell in linux. Search bash 
> tutorial in google and there should be plenty of info on how to use 
> bash. Unless you want to do system admin stuff you may or may not want 
> to learn bash scripting as well.
>
> Normally you wouldn't get the ls -l and other basic info as you would 
> be expected to already know it. The Unix world sort of has a tradition 
> of looking into things for themselves first before asking so 
> eventually you will get flamed for asking something silly but I 
> realise being totally new you would have no idea what to look for so 
> thus the answers I gave in easy way to use.
>
> Anyway hopefully you learn a lot from this and will continue learning. 
> Use Unix for a bit and learn how it works and how to unleash its power 
> and you won't want to use any other system.

Hi All,

Ok now that I have reread what I have written and an email from Andrew I 
can see that it is badly worded and can be misinterpreted. I am not 
trying to discourage anyone from posting messages to things that they 
don't know about or having trouble with. Certainly the mount question is 
a good humbug post and is why I spent time putting together messages to 
explain mounting as best I could.

I was trying to explain that there are many people not so much on humbug 
list but in usenet etc that would flame and not to be put off by such 
things. I remember once being flamed by people in usenet for helping 
someone with a problem that others felt were not relevant for that 
usenet group.

And even when I first went to humbug meetings back in 2002 I had people 
telling me I was silly for using what they called bulky bloat ware 
desktops when window managers like blackbox and windowmaker would do 
everything I need. I could have been turned off by the way it was done 
and the aggressive point of view by people fixed in their ways but I 
looked at it with an open mind and started to use them and after a bit 
got used to them and even liked them to the point of using them as my 
primary desktop.

Another example would be mutt (command line email program) I asked some 
humbugers why they would use such a thing when  you could use evolution 
or thunderbird etc and I got a passionate answer on why you don't need 
bloat ware gui email client etc but I am glad that they did because I 
used mutt as my primary email client for quite some time but eventually 
went back to a gui email client because I receive a number of pictures 
etc in email that would not display and I would have to load external 
programs to view them but I still like the fact that I learned about 
mutt as I use it to view email on remote computers and various servers 
through ssh on a regular basis.

Although I haven't been to a humbug meeting in a while I remember seeing 
someone telling a brand new user (in a not so friendly way) that they 
shouldn't use things like knoppix/xandros etc as a desktop and should 
use debian proper for all sorts of reasons that I forget now. I don't 
like such things as a new user is quite happy with such things and 
doesn't want to manually configure an X server or alsa or anything like 
that and those distros are quite good for new users and can ease the 
learning curve I hate to think about how many people got turned away 
from unix because of such actions.

All that being said I think its important to show people all the command 
line programs and minimalistic window managers and editors like vim and 
emacs because although users coming from the windows world may think 
they are primitive and archaic they are infact extremely powerful and 
flexible and easy to fall in love with. However I think it would be good 
if we could do it without putting off potential unix users.

I still think that the unix culture of reading documentation first and 
posting questions second is good as you tend to learn more about what 
your doing and once you have a good grounding in unix you can generally 
get an answer much quicker by searching for an answer but you do need to 
have that grounding before you know what to look for and can understand 
what they are telling you.

So I would encourage anyone interested in unix with questions to post to 
the humbug list and go to meetings as going to meetings in 2002 boosted 
my knowledge much faster then any book or web site could have and shows 
you the point of view of many different users and if you have an open 
mind and not put off my an occasional passionate unix user telling you 
why your way is wrong then it's a great learning experience.

If my previous post discouraged anyone from posting a question then I 
say thats not what I am about or humbug so post you question and you 
normally will get an answer and if it's something that can get answered 
by email then I can almost guarentee you that someone at a humbug 
meeting with access to you computer will get it up and running for you.

Also I just thought maybe we can put together a list of resources or 
links to another sites for showing brand new users ways to learn about 
bash, vim, emacs etc. If we can get together a list of the best most 
easily understood and straight to the point tutorials designed for 
people who just finished installing a unix on their computer for the 
first time then humbug really could be a one stop place for people 
interested in learning unix.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin