🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 26 Jan 2002, Christopher Stacy wrote:

> It is not clear what you mean by "learn Linux". For what
> purpose are you trying to learn, and what kinds of things
> do you think you need to learn in order to do that?

    Essentially email, web (I like opera much better than
the big two; fortunately that also runs on W98), and usenet;
I don't play games, or run anything for anybody else.

> (Regardless, a mathematics degree is not going to be of
> any use in that area: Linux is not any kind of a calculus,
> nor even is it any other kind of regular system, for that
> matter!)

     Well, it is of some slight general use in two ways :
I'm not afraid of computers (just ill-informed -- knowing
the difference), and I'm comfortable with abstract thought,
including non-pictorial. Beyond that, though, yes, you're
right -- even though, in my time, computers were studied in
applied math, and there was yet no such word as "computer
science."

    Many years later, when I was working at the Library of
Congress, we went from using dumb terminals on a mainframe
to PCs with OS/2 -- and I did my email by telnetting into an
AIX machine in the basement running pine.  So I have a first
approximation to knowing the value of a shell account, and
know a few *ix commands.

    In fact, my email and posting now are with pine 4.43 in
a shell account on an ISP that I telnet into from a W98
machine on a DSL connection.

    This machine also has a second, larger hard drive, put
into it by a friend who understands hardware. The LILO boot
into it still works; and I can do a few things from command
line -- thanks to Geoff Goodrum of this group, who talked me
through undoing what a Norton Symantec back-up to the
original drive had done to me.

    But startx doesn't work -- and Geoff's remedy for that
gets me into a catch-22 loop.

   I tried just slugging through manuals -- several -- and
got discouraged. I thought of just connecting that drive to
the Net somehow (connecting it to my verizon DSL seems to be
a major challenge even for linux geeks, but maybe to the
other ISP), and learning from the GUI end. And now that's
stymied.

    Several of you seem to overestimate me : I've never
written a line of code, and if you showed me a page of it, I
wouldn't be able to tell you what language it was in. I
really think I need systematic instruction ... :-(

    And I thought surely it'd be available in Northern
Virginia, and someone would know about it.