[ale] simple question, impossible answer

[R I Feigenblatt]

>Hey...
>I'm totally frustrated (yet again) trying to configure something simple
>in Linux.

Well, I've always considered UNIX as the advanced version of "Adventure"
myself. 'Entertainment' has priority over rapid genuine accomplishment.
Despite flaws, I am rather pleased with the lastest RedHat Linux release
in light of this shameful history.

>It seems that every time I need any info about Linux I spend _lots_ of
>time pouring through stacks and stacks of documentation - does anybody

By the way, this is why reference documentation should be electronic.
Printed manuals are very cheap for linear off-line (i.e. portable)
learning, and so have not disappeared despite performance/price advances
with laptop computers, but manual reference use is EXTREMELY slow.
At the least, one can grep an electronic document collection, and
perhaps one even has a nice search engine and hyperlinks as well.

Attempts have been made to hyperlink Linux information (e.g. "info"),
but the Linux docs are still in the dark ages compared to something
like the Microsoft Developer Network CDs. Now that we have finally
decided on what "THE" hyperlinking mechanism should be (viz. HTML, even
Microsoft has said it will abandon its "Help" engine format for it)
it is time that Linux docs migrate in this direction.

It's been said that the Web can be the basis for living technical
"Talmud"s (the famous iteratively margin-noted Jewish religious commentary),
but so far people still create documents largely in isolation, only
cross-referencing entire documents over the WWW. The Talmud has the
advantage that there is a universal canonical starting text which provides
a skeleton on which to hang things, sort of like the West's page numbers
for US federal court proceedings, or the Dewey Decimal system. Maybe
creating a set of universal reference coordinates like these should be
a priority for the Linux Documentation Project.