Meetings' Structure was: How is ITEC going?

[Jared Smith]

Linux is composed of people who scratch itches. 
You are describing an itch. Scratch it.

>Along those lines, I think that it might be helpful for those of use with
>less Linux experience to go through something from start to finish in a
>meeting.  

Then come to a meeting and do it. Start with what you know.

>It might be some things that are fairly basic to some of you more
>experienced types, but important things nonetheless.  Many things like
>installing programs from RPM's, configuring a webserver, installing a new
>GUI, or compiling a kernel, are things that I think some in the group could
>almost do blindfolded, but are really intimidating to a newbie or (even a
>pseudo-newbie).

Great. Learn how to do it, and do it. Partner with someone who knows more.
It might mean you have to show up at meetings five times before you
know someone well enough, but surely it's worth the effort.

>I earn a living based on my NT experience, and have a ton
>of Mac experience to boot, but I still don't understand how to do many
>basic Linux admin tasks because the processes are foreign to me, and I
>haven't been able to find out how to do them.  Here's a good example:
>A couple of years ago, I bought several distros in an effort to learn more
>about Linux, and I installed all of them, one after another, on a system in
>my house, and tried to get it to do 4 things:
>1) Use every peripheral in the system (included SCSI, network, 3-D video,
>sound, and modem cards), and put my pagefile on a second 500MB drive
>2) Play Civilization - Call to Power (which came with one of the distros)
>3) Run Oracle8 (which is freely available)
>4) Run a rudimentary Apache web server on my local network
>After 2 versions each of RedHat, Mandrake, and Storm, 8 discs of rpm's from
>Suse, and a copy of Corel (which came with a free foam Penguin), I couldn't
>get any one of them to do everything that I wanted.  Some loaded the video
>and not the sound, some the reverse, one would let me load Oracle but I
>couldn't get the network to start, and one wouldn't even load because it
>kept wanting to load all of the packages on that 500MB drive that I wanted
>the pagefile on, and crashing.  In the end, all I got to show for it is a
>bunch of pretty CD's, a decent Oracle book, a Foam penguin, and a system
>that I put back to Win98 because it couldn't do what I wanted.
>If I knew how to do some of the things that you Guru's know, I could
>probably have made it work on any of these distros.  "Configuring a Sound
>Card" or "Updating a driver from an RPM" might be duck soup to some of you,
>but it sounds like a great topic for a meeting to me.
>Just my 2.48237 yen.

Keep working. You'll get it eventually. That is a principle which is true
no matter where you are, or what you're learning. There is no need to
spoon-feed Linux. But then again, I'm in the Debian camp when it comes
to distribution philosophy, even though the only distro I've been able to
get running is Lycoris (Redmond Linux).

Some day I'll get Debian running, yes sir, someday...

-Jared