

Helping Linux Newbies Move to the Next Level 79
NoWhere Man writes "PCWorld has a "here's how" article on how to get the most out of your Linux box. It's basically a very extensive and userfriendly step-by-step instruction on how to recompile your kernel to make it smaller and more compact." Kernel recompilation and optimization is old hat for experienced Linux people, but articles like this, especially in "non-Linux" publications, are necessary to help new Linux users become more adept. Kudos to PCWorld for running it!
Linux for newbies? (Score:1)
Linux would be definitely easier to use if you could just have "massive" kernel, without modules, IMNSHO.
Re:Linux for newbies? (Score:1)
Having modules just means that you save a little memory, and don't have to reboot or recompile to support new hardware. That's why distributions use them. It isn't for speed, it's just more flexible.
And on the "flamebait" topic... I'd move away from OpenBSD in general, just on moral grounds. I'm amazed at all the positive press it's gotten, since it should be known as "the OS by and for 31337 d00dz", with Theo at the helm....
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Modular Kernels vs. Monolithic Kernel (Score:1)
> could just have "massive" kernel, without
> modules, IMNSHO
I'm not sure what you mean by this. How would everyday usage of Linux become easier with a monolithic kernel?
As for Linux adopting a monolithic kernel like the BSDs, the modularity of the Linux kernel was definitely a design feature, not an accident. By allowing you to load modules dynamically, you can keep the size of the kernel down (and extra complexity out of the kernel). If you really want, you could always recompile a kernel with _everything_ enabled.
I could be wrong, but I think that is what the generic kernels are for BSD. I know with OpenBSD one of the first things they recommend (man afterboot [openbsd.org]) is to recompile a kernel with only what you need.
Just my $.02
- Haplo
On Top of This... (Score:1)
I think another good idea for an article is "Not running all those unneccisary services."
This falls along the same lines of not having a bunch of un-needed crap in your kernel, and also takes care of some security issues.
Oh, by the way, lets not flame Linux newbies please. If there weren't newbies, there wouldn't be this huge crowd of Linux users.
Tyler
RTFM (Score:2)
If this makes any sense, I am glad... its 4 AM and I can't sleep so take that in mind.
_joshua_
Re:Linux for newbies? (Score:1)
But, you can have it either way... it's nice to have a choice, imho. Thou do agree that the article probably shouln't have mentioned modules without going a bit more in-depth about them... "make modules; make modules_install" isn't enough after you recompile a new kernel if you're a newbie, imho. Guess they're counting on RH's gui stuff to allow for configuring/loading module, thou as I don't use RH, that's just a guess.
Re:Modular Kernels vs. Monolithic Kernel (Score:1)
Even as non-newbie, I've had great deal of pain dealing with some-modules-that-do-not-work-as-modules, and the damned 640k/1M boundaries the current loading architecture sets for the "monolithic" kernel.
Example: My current kernel is 613kb[1]. I cannot even include ext3fs for root device purposes to it without hitting some mystic boundary (make bzImage works; after boot, it says "out of memory". huh).
[1] ext2+nfs+reiserfs fs:es, couple of network card drivers - almost all irrelevant is done via modules. reiserfs-as-module did not work, nor did nfs-as-module at most recent try. And yes, this is frigging "stable" branch.
Silly lusers, source is for hackers... (Score:2)
Maybe if you know what your hardware is, you can take out a few options, and end up with less total modules compiled and installed, and you'll end up with a leaner system. As in, Ooo, I just saved 10MB of valuable disk space. Big deal. You could have done that using 'rm' on some useless modules.
Maybe if you knew what you were doing, you could compile in something you always plan to be using as part of the kernel instead of as a module, and get some speed out of it instead. And maybe if you really knew something about egcs, you could change those silly default compiler options to something useful (-fno-strength-reduce often isn't necessary anymore, I hope!) and get some more performance gains. But this article wasn't about that.
Nope, to get any real speed-up in the kernel, you'd have to already know something, and this article assumes you don't. Why make newbies go through this process when it won't help them any? Either document the whole thing for those who *really* want to learn, or don't bother. But don't confuse the people you're trying to convert. They don't know -ffast-math from xcalc.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Good article (Score:2)
On a related note, has anybody seen that new magazine Maximum Linux? In my opinion it was nothing as good as it's parent Maximum PC. Some articles were Okay, but the interview was godawful dull, and a lot of the writing was pure palaver. One would expect more from them.
Re:RTFM (Score:1)
At the very least, I'm with you on the 4am/no sleep thing.
W
idea for a Linux help site (Score:3)
The design of this site would be centered around "users helping users". Those who feel adept in helping newbies could sign up as "helpers", where their particular skills and areas of expertise would be kept track of. Newbies in need of help could then fill in a form requesting for help, from which the system would match their particular problem with a suitable "helper" - who would be emailed their information.
Of course, to remove common questions, users would be taken through maybe some kind of Wizard (ick I hate that word
In effect, what would be created would be a large scale "help desk" system - however free for people to use.
The incentive for people to become "helpers" would be simple - the best helpers each month (derived from positive feedback from users) would revieve free hardware/software from sponsors of the site. I'm thinking people like VA, PenguinComputing, and Redhat could be suitable "sponsors".
Help requests and solutions would be recorded and put in some kind of Linux help knowledge base, which would be free to search.
I have confidence that (once above the ground) such a help system would really benefit the Linux community.
A) People could get personal help with their problems
B) Those who help would be rewarded from sponsors
C) Sponsors get exposure
D) People might feel easier about learning Linux is they knew a free help system existed.
Well, I hope that gives you guys enough of an idea as to what I would like to see. I am eager for constructive critisism/ideas/comments/questions for this idea.
cheers,
semis.
The linux *side*? (Score:1)
That's a huge assumption they're making, that anyone who uses linux is so attached to windows that he can't do without a windows "side". I almost offended.
If Linux is only one "side" of my box, I have a pretty darn lopsided box
But seriously, I have to take the time to say: 99% of the time, anyone who dual boots will never really learn linux. Things are easy to do in windows when that's what one's been brought up with. Until someone decides to take the plunge and go all linux, i would bet money that person is never going to do more than dabble in it. That's the way it was with me.
Jeremy
Like MacOS in that respect... (Score:2)
But the plain truth is that OSes require maintainence. Some more than others, of course. (As I recall, there still are no disk utilities for BeOS, simply because the problem hasn't come up yet.) Anyway, nothing is worse than a computer-lab Mac with 400 extensions in it and a disk fragmented to hell, and the user asks, "Why does it crash?" It would be like a motorist asking, "Why won't it go?" after failing to change the oil for 8000 miles.
Anyway. Eventually we'll get to the stage where no OSes ever require maintainence, or we'll get to the point where computer users are smart enough to realize that they do, and stop expecting miracles.
Now moderate me down for being off-topic, and off-OS.
- James Schend
Wishing I'd had something like this. (Score:2)
I remember being quite lost when I started using Linux. Recompiling the kernel for the first time scared the hell outta me. (It would've been better had I known about 'make menuconfig' or even 'make xconfig', which this article covers.) I definitely agree this sort of article is needed, even though the requisite information is doubtless available from already existing sources (like the linux/Documentation directory).
There are a few points which could've definitely used improvement. For one thing, the article's quite biased toward Red Hat. Understandable, as it's a choice for many who are new to Linux, but still there could be mention of other ways of doing things--to satisfy curious gurus-to-be, at the very least.
Along the lines of edification, perhaps some more detail could have been given for the hows and wherefores of using certain commands. Since this article seemed to use RH as a basis, perhaps some explanation on what exactly that ugly rpm command was doing would be in order. To their credit, though, they did have links to related articles.
Finally, I think some newbies could benefit from information on gathering more information for themselves about the Linux kernel--further reading, to be specific. Every kernel hacker starts somewhere, and a mention of the linux/Documentation directory (at the very least) would be helpful to those wishing to learn the art.
Thanks to PCWorld for this article--though it might not explain everything, at the very least it can help with the intimidating process of customizing one's kernel.
Re:Like MacOS in that respect... (Score:1)
However, I'm proud that I can defragment my linux drives, but it really doesn't help that much. And proud that it's faster to defragment a DOS drive under DOSEmu/Linux as opposed to just doing it in DOS.
Always remember that all operating systems suck, but for some purposes, some operating systems suck less than others, sometimes vastly so...
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Re:idea for a Linux help site (Score:1)
http://www.linuxnewbe.org
& sevral others that IMHO aren't as good....
Re:The linux *side*? (Score:1)
Re:related subjects.. (Score:1)
Re:Good article (Score:1)
Was their article on Compiling as good, & what about the article by Mae Ling Mak (pictures?)
The damn thing costs NZ$ 24.95, is very thin & comes in a plastic bag - so I haven't read it yet.
Comp mags always seem out of date compared to what's on the net IMHO - usually the only reason I get them is for coverdisks, & I already run MDK 6.1.....
Re:Good article (Score:1)
I assume this is a Redhat app? Well, I don't care, I was running Redhat myself, now Mandrake, but they should have given instructions that work for everyone, e.g.
dd if=/whaterverkernel of=/dev/fd0
rdev
rdev -R
Or am I too picky here? I mean, okay, I learned something, I didn't know that my Linux would provide a "mkbootdisk", but many people not using Redhat would fail at that point.
Distribution-biased articles (Score:2)
Interesting article (I find it useful actually because I'm just showing a Linux newbie around and I really don't feel like explaining every single thing to him. Often one doesn't know where to start though :).
I found it a little sad that it was rather Red Hat-biased at some points (like talking about installing the new kernel using RPM). I wonder though, how easy it for authors of articles such as this one to make their articles fully independent from any distribution specifics. It's rather sad to see how many articles talk about "Linux" in the header but when you look at the article itself are really about "Distribution XYZ". :/. Ah well, I guess that's the cost one pays for having all these distros flying around.
Recompiling Fetish? (Score:1)
I'm relatively new to Linux but I'm not new to computers and I can tell you that the last thing a person, any person, should have to do is recompile any kind of code to get something working. Just because you can recompile the kernel doesn't mean it's desirable. In fact, it's a boring hassle.
I, for one, am pretty sick of all the fiddling that has to go on to get something working in Linux, Windoze or any other OS I've seen.
Is anything better possible?
Re:RTFM (Score:2)
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Re:Wishing I'd had something like this. (Score:1)
What a good article (Score:1)
Re:Recompiling Fetish? (Score:1)
Re:Recompiling Fetish? (Score:1)
Face it, computers arn't the simple things flashy advertising would have you believe, and a certain amount of tampering will always be required.
However, things are much better than they used to be, SO STOP COMPLAINING! You can compile a linux kernel in 15 min at the most on a modern machine (and that is conservative), go and have a coffee while you wait. Back in the good old days, compiling a kernel took hours and we were glad to do it
Compiling you own kernel is completely optional. The fact that an article mentions how to do it doesn't mean you have to. Feel free to moderate this blatent flame in any direction you wan't it.
But is recompiling really recommended? (Score:2)
instructions for recompiling your kernel,
but the stated reasons for doing so strike
me as completely insane. The idea that you're
going to get some kind of noticeable performance
boost by tuning up your kernel is pretty
ridiculous. You've really got to have some
pretty specific needs to want to do this.
Me, I recompile my kernels to include support
for an old SCSI card, and I'm actually
beginning think that even this is nutty:
I should just replace the damn card with
something supported by default.
At *best* this article is dangerous! (Score:2)
It assumes that all you can do to an OS is optimise bits of it and that the "power" of Linux is simply it's speed. The benefits of doing what this article suggests are negligible. The only real reason for users to do this is to fix bugs.
At *best* this article is dangerous; It tells users to change the default linux entry in lilo.conf rather than add an additional entry.
They'd be much better focusing on how to use things like cron and shell scripting.
Kernel compiling for newbies. (Score:1)
They are a bit braver than I though. If I compile a new kernel, I first copy the kernel to a floppy disk, boot from the floppy disk, check if the important things still appear to work (vi, ppp, telnet, perl, mail, and news - nothing else is really important) and only then I tell lilo about the job I did.
-- Abigail
Re:The linux *side*? (Score:1)
For the record, you can make "all your sides" inoperable by recompiling the kernel and running LILO, in case you're booting the other operating systems from LILO. If you've screwed something up in LILO configuration, chances are that you'll get some LILO error codes on your screen instead of that nice boot prompt.. I've seen this happen quite many times..
Having a bootdisk is a Good Thing(tm).
Helping Newbies...the good, the bad, the ugly (Score:1)
Re:Good article (Score:1)
Re:But is recompiling really recommended? (Score:2)
If you're running a n-86, why not run with n-86 optimisations? Often recompiling can give a substantial boost to some applications, the X screensavers that are heavily FPU intensive, for instance.
Re:idea for a Linux help site (Score:1)
Re:Good article (Score:1)
While on a general basis I agree this is a Good Thing, it's sad to find out this is distribution specific. What's worse are things like:
(strong emphasis mine) Linux? Linux!?!? it's rpm, and it's rpm taking a look at its own database and telling you what is in there. I read a few mailing lists where newbies ask questions, and I do read them because of that... on one hand, I like to help people that are starting with Linux... I don't do hand holding, I just explain things to them, give them enough information so they can find the answers by themselves, this helps them and it also helps me to get less RTFM type of questions. On the other hand, it helps me spot flaws and problems in my favorite distro, so adding all up, I get something out of it, they get something out of it, and many other people get something out of it... but I do get sick of two things:
This is also "funny", to say the least:
That's no problem? Well, it can be a problem... not likely with "recent" versions of RH, but I know some people that like pre 6.0 versions of RH better, and they recommend those pre 6.0 versions to newbies, which means there are cases where it might be a problem.
Re:The linux *side*? (Score:1)
Yes I dual boot
Yes I still have that damn Winmodem
Though I use Windows less and less it will be a long time before i get rid of it completely. Why?
1. X-wing VS Tie-Fighter
2. Jedi Knight: Dark Forces2
3. Rougue Squadron
4. Pod Racer
Mr. Lucas, if you or one of your lackies (ewoks, droids, whatever) are reading this beware the MicroDark side!
I used this article...... (Score:3)
Re:The linux *side*? (Score:1)
I'd never use Windows to do serious work, but you just cant live without it, as long as there is hardware that has no Linux drivers (e.g. parlallel port scanners, DVD decoder card. I don't have the money for an SCSI scanner or the Linux-based DVD decoder), and no good movie players, as well as a lot of other stuff.
Apart from the errors (Score:1)
typing tar filename.tar.gz isn't going to do anything but give you a bunch of error messages.
You don't need to go and have a snack while you are compiling your kernel. Linux is a multitasking operating system. You can do something else while the kernel compile is going on. Why do you have to shut everything down first. Fine, if you're really really low on memory, getting out of star office and X will speed up your kernel compile, but if you've got enough memory (64MB) then it won't make that much difference.
Re:I used this article...... (Score:1)
And I just were going to flame it. Well, your message stopped me
Anyway, kernel recompilation is one of the best documented procedures. You just have to read (not so big) docs and try to understand what you do. It's a vital procedure after all.
I recall, that I had my own kernel version running the next day I installed Linux thingie a couple of years ago. And I had *zero* background in Linux and UNIX in general. It's not that hard at all - other problems will be trickier
Re:RTFM (Score:1)
One thing people forget: All of us have a limit to how much information we can take in at any one time. I'm not a professional tech-support person but I have had to work problems over the phone with computer-owning relatives (complete with screaming kids in the background!) If you've been that person and a disembodied voice over the phone is giving you a series of instructions, the omission of any one of which will hose your system, perhaps you'll see the problem.
And even when one RTFMs, it never seems enough. I am a new Linux user and I have spent the past month reading about Linux, picking a distribution (or two), installing it and RTFM again and again to get all my stuff working.
I'm an experienced computer user (20 years) with a CS degree and I was (and am) still impressed with all the endless minutae one has to know to get Linux running. Sometimes, I think Linux embodies hard work for its own sake, and many (weak-minded) people in the outside world embrace that philosophy.
And "RTFM All The Way" is a good philosophy only if the M's are all perfect and tell you all you need to know. For example, I have two SCSI controllers in my system. Neither of them are set up, though I've low-level drivers for both of them. There is no HOWTO for setting up SCSI, only the SCSI Programming HOWTO.
What I've been able to learn about Linux SCSI comes from little bits and pieces, notably the source code for one of my drivers (an NCR53C400, my scanner's card; an AHA152x is the other.)
Source code? I am a geek and have read source code in various languages for years. But really. That's end-user documentation? Please.
I now know what address to feed the NCR driver, but I still don't know how to take Linux by the hand and say, "See! There's your SCSI controllers! Old, maybe, but they work!"
I suppose if I work on it in my spare time for 10 years, I may get a gold star.
Take care,
Dave
System.map (Score:1)
Re:Good article (Score:1)
Good for print business (Score:1)
Chuck
More like windows? (Score:1)
one week spot in kernel compiling (Score:1)
Consider a users that doesn't know the difference between RAM ROM and hd space: doi you really think it is a good idea for someone like that to compile a kernel?
send flames > /dev/null
Re:Kernel compiling for newbies. (Score:1)
Re:Kernel compiling for newbies. (Score:1)
That was my first reaction as well. But then I realized they were assuming the reader was unfamiliar with a text editor. Given the limited amount of space, I don't think there was enough room to explain both which lines you would need to copy and how to do that. Of course, you might wonder how sane it is for someone not knowing a text editor to configure and compile kernels....
-- Abigail
Keep them using it (Score:2)
monolithic -- hooray!! (Score:1)
aure, modules are slick and cut down the size of the kernel, but i still think it's a good idea to compile all "necessary" stuff into the kernel (like ethernet, mouse) and never have to fuss with it again.
just my $0.02
no joke (Score:1)
Re:More like windows? (Score:1)
i've spent the last week trying to get a stupid ethernet card to work. i've read all of the how-to's, all of the newsgroups, all of everything else i can find. and, i still can't get the friggin thing to work. yes, the card is supported. i know there is some little bit of script out there somewhere that will make it all fall into place. but, damned if i can find it..
and here's the kicker. i put an identical card in my NT box and it took one, two, three, four mouse clicks and five seconds of floppy drive time to install to the point where i knew the card and OS were alive and well and happy with each other.
a real OS should not have any excruciatingly difficult setup procedures. instead, it should allow them to get onto actual productive use.
or, is a "real" OS only for people who just want to configure stuff?
Better documentation would be better. (Score:1)
Linux documentation is _very_ confusing. I'm not a 'normal' win. user, I used to write programs with turbo pascal 6 for DOS, and now I write a lot of CGI stuff, and some C++; maybe the reason I'm not using linux is because here (Buenos Aires) we didn't have good internet until 2 years ago, so I got used to windows. But I _can't_ read those "man pages". They are very confusing, log, with no examples. HOWTOs are fine, but if I want to do something different, I don't know where to consult.
When I was learning Perl, a friend of mine gave me one of those O'Relly (or something) books, and I was like the logenst book I've ever see. I like a good book, but I don't want to go through 100000000 pages just to get some data from a <form>, and open a text file.. I culdn't find a decent Perl tutorial on the net, and the perl man page is _very_ long and confusing, with no examples (I found an HTML formatted perl man page, but it's still no good).
Maybe I understand man pages now better that 1 year ago (when I installed the first FreeBSD), but it's still not good..
Imagine a normal Windows user..
Re:monolithic -- hooray!! (Score:1)
However, I was pretty thankful for modules the other day when I needed to add a weird parameter to my ethernet card driver to get it to work better. I didn't know which one it was, but I knew which one I tried that *didn't* work.
Okay, that was just silly, but I was using stock Red Hat stuff, and didn't have the source installed. What can I say, I deserved it....
But yeah, if you get a good, working monolithic configuration, god don't change it. That's what I had in the early days of Linux 2.0 when I was deciding whether to use modules or not. I'm glad I know how to use them now, but it took me a while to get that #@*&in' sound card to agree with me on that point.
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
Re:Good article (Score:1)
Rituals of computer life... (Score:1)
However, I have a perfectly well running linux box and I have yet to recompile the kernel. I put the sucker together last week and it rocks. Eventually I will have to recompile the kernel though for APM support. I don't care to. I would rather the damn install have had a laptop choice so I did not have to be bothered with it. I give newbies the simple advice of if it ain't broke don't try and tweak it without reason.
I will code and I will add things but I do so with a purpose. If you have the time to completely change your system around twice a week then you need to go and find yourself something better to do.
practical matters (Score:2)
At the suggestion of this article, I took a look at my config, and I found that almost everything that's optional was dynamically linked anyway.
I have a PII processor. Do I want to change my processor type? I don't know. What does it buy me to change from 386 to PPro? Is it worth the trouble? I assume that 99% of people are running the default 386. Might there be some subtle kink in the PPro kernel that isn't as well tested? Hmmm.
There's all these little features that I can turn off. How much memory am I saving with each one? It would be nice to know. Is it worth it to turn off a dozen features to save 64k on my 64Mb box? Nope. What kind of gains can a typical user expect from a reconfig?
Last lick. Of course, It's useful to have a kitchen sink kernel so that people can boot it on random hardware, but once you've booted, Linux knows what's there, and writes a /var/log/dmesg file with all that useful and mysterious info about your very own system. How about a prog that takes this custom data and builds a lean Linux kernel config from it?
Re:Recompiling Fetish? (Score:2)
You don't *have* to touch a compiler, in the same way that you shouldn't have to mangle the Win9X registries just to get anything done. You might have to in the latter case, but...
Re:But is recompiling really recommended? (Score:2)
All in all, there is little incentive to compile your kernal other than to be one of the elite.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!
Re:idea for a Linux help site (Score:1)
Check out www.experts-exchange.com for some ideas. Look at the concept, not the interface (I think its lousy >> No clear site map).
Re:idea for a Linux help site (Score:1)
(actually, I think that a running "help" converstation on slashdot would be better, since a lot of knowlegable people are already hanging out on slashdot, plus, good answers=good moderation = more karma.)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Recompiling Fetish? (Score:1)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Already one for Slackware. (Score:1)
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Re:More like windows? (Score:2)
The reason is that you absolutely need a way to both get more details and change them. Why?
I've seen a freshly unpacked PC with remarkably vanilla hardware die during a similarly vanilla NT4 install, deterministically, before any user decisions, while a machine with an almost identical configuration (perhaps a different IDE drive and keyboard) sailed through.
Hitting random keys during a check for a non-existent SCSI card let it survive -- but there was no way of determining what *actually* was going on, nor no meaningful, reasonable solution. That's illogical.
I've also seen point-and-click systems decide, repeatedly on boot, that it knows what network card you have instead of the actual one, undoing the user's (correct) settings, and switching drivers followed by requiring a reboot. The interface *really* needed a way to bypass it. On a Linux box, OTOH, if your driver is, say, detecting the wrong card, you can simply force the choice...
Computers are inherently complicated -- especially when hardware comes from a variety of vendors. Ergo, either the interface allows complexity, or you lose necessary flexibility.
My so-called two cents (Score:1)
Thinking back on it, I was once a Linux newbie. But I had a 486 to fool around with. So guess how long it took to recompile that beast. And configuration was a mess! I blew it away, so does anyone know if they had menuconfig back in the 1.x kernels? That really would have helped me a lot if I had known.
Enough reflections. My two computers that run Linux run 2.2.12 and 2.2.13. I use menuconfig. I compile my kernel in 5 minutes. I have fun.
I was a bit distressed to see that the article left out modules. When I got RH6, I eventually got over my party over how great it was in comparison to a 3-4 year-old Slackware distro and got to recompiling my kernel. If they even had modules back in 1.x, I had never needed them because I had so little hardware. But now I have an ethernet card that likes to know its hardware address, a ppa Zip drive that I use so infrequently that it shouldn't remain in my kernel, and a few other things, so I started to think about how I could reduce my kernel size a bit. I saw these things called modules. Okay, got it, something that plugs into something else. Well huh. Why do I care, I asked myself. After parsing the kernel docs about modules a couple of times and then recompiling about ten times, not to mention crashing my poor computer to the point where the three-finger kick (that fourtunately tells init to bring the system down nicely) to fix it up. I finally figured modprobe out, and kerneld/kmod, and conf.modules, and /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ and depmod and all that stuff, but not without a lot of headaches. If this had not been during my summer break I would have forgot about the whole thing. In short, I could have used an introduction to modules like the article introduces kernel compiling.
Kernel compilation is one of the things that, at least for me, really separates Linux from Windows. In Windows, you get a kernel and a whole bunch of drivers that sort of plug into it but generally stay in their own everything-space and have more often than not been one factor causing it to crash. In Linux, I get complete control over exactly what goes into the most fundamental part of my computer, and I know what gets "plugged in", why, and where the stuff goes. I can put stuff in, take it out, tweak parameters with it without a restart, and, as usual, have fun. Linux gives me just the right mix of power to make it do whatever I want, to the point of changing how the core of my OS works, but at the same time the power to forget about it if I'm not in the mood. Most other stuff with Linux is like that. If you want to mess with it, you can, and you can do most anything you want with it, but if you don't want to mess with it, and you have a relatively normal configuration, you can just forget about it and get to work. Speaking of work, when are they going to have a Microsoft Word for Linux? StarOffice just isn't cutting it for me, although after working with emacs for a while, I appreciate its advanced features. Never mind; I see an ad for Applixware up at the top of my Netscape window. That's another thing that newbies could use: a good office suite bundled with the distribution. "They" should "standardize" the office suites for Linux and get one good, familiar, and cool office suite that is integrated as well as MS Office, retain full file-format compatibility with MS Office applications, and bundle it with every distribution pre-"installed". (I was puzzled to see that StarOffice actaully had an installer--RPMs work just fine for me. I know, not everybody has rpm.) You don't want to hear me talk about what else in Linux should be standardized. Believe me.
This is getting long, and people don't like long posts very much. Replace this sentence with a closing remark.
Kenneth Arnold
PS - I have homework to do. Don't make me feel like taking time away from it to write this was a waste of time.
PPS - Don't yell at me, but I'm getting really annoyed at Netscape and Slashdot. Netscape keeps crashing (twice today), and Slashdot has these huge tables that load up even if I don't want to see them. But I've found that the reduced mode reduces it too much for my tastes. Could we strike a balance?
Re:Modular Kernels vs. Monolithic Kernel (Score:1)
Re:idea for a Linux help site (Score:1)
Do inform me if the idea takes shape.
But why should the site be restricted only to novice users? Even experianced users, novice developers ( thats me, for sure :-) ) have great many things to ask and no where to go.
If they are also catered to, the site will really get busy. Delve on it