[geeks] Am I getting too old or something.....

[Amy]

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Jennifer Sharp wrote:
> I mistakenly decided I wanted to learn UNIX because I thought it would be
> better since that is what everyone says. Well, for me (yes, me, Amy, not the
> rest of the world) it sucks and I don't like it.

I'm going to bite my tongue here for the sake of peace and happiness.
Why don't you quit the snide comments before you bite off more
than you can chew? Because you are really beginning to piss me off with
this bitch act and I really don't want to say something that I might
regret.

As for unix or windows, christ, use what you like. I learned *nix because
I was bored. I certainly didn't choose to install a cd because some twit
on a mailing list or wherever said it was sooo much better.

> I read the UNIX for dummies book and did not understand it but when I asked
> questions I became further confused.

Reading does only x much good unless you grab a cd and install and start
using the things you've read about. But, for most folks, reading about
something (whether here or elsewhere) is where it begins. I went from
reading that particular book (and most was like sanskrit) to using it on a
little Sparc classic (an Ultra 30 is overkill for a learning situation),
broke it repeatedly. Later on I was allowed to learn on ohno (Bill has
guts...). now I can hold my own, although there's not really much point.

I can remember that what confused me the most for a long time until I
asked Bill was permissions. Everything else was relatively easy (but that
may be because of the osmosis factor). I'm competent on most machines
although I use Win98 on my desk because I can't get the SBLive's full
capabilities running under any other OS.

As for Mandrake, I don't think that's a good choice just due to it being
persnickety. Redhat has the easiest 'learning curve', as Dave pointed out.

> I actually want to know what I am doing because I don't want to fuck it up.

That is 98% of learning unix. You will fuck up and you do learn how to fix
it. It is about the only way. I guarantee if you ask anyone on this list,
they'll agree that they're still fuckin' up and still fixing, even after
decades or more of using it. hell, Bill fucked up ohno last night. He
fixed it, life goes on. You can't break the *machine*...always remember
that.

--a