Maybe it would be helpful to post the manual contents relating to this issue as a sticky post, with some wisdom and guidance from the experts. That may minimize further posts in this thread. Alternatively the best could be extracted from the existing post.
I am not offering an opinion as to the accessability of Slackware documentation, but it seems like a way to minimize a whole lot of repetition.
Does anyone really want to spend hours reading this post in detail to extract a few relatively basic concepts that are published elsewhere in anycase.
Alternatively, Slackware documentation could be posted in the howto section, or instructions as to where to find it, on the disk and on the site.
Seems dumb I know, but a self help program might solve some of these time consuming and embarrassing issues.
Would it work?

Well, you can post step-by-step instructions to edit group membership and other basic unix usage, but if you do that, are you *really* helping? Will you be there to explain job control, and basic grep usage, and so on? At what point do you expect the user to have done some basic research on his/her own?

I'll be called elitist for this, I suppose (even though I *do* help as much as I can on this forum and elsewhere), but does every OS have to stoop to that in order to be accepted? Have we completely strayed from the expectation that our userbase have some requisite knowledge before trying to go all-out with Slackware?

I think I agree with rworkman. I was a newbie once too (I started with Slackware 11.0) and in many, MANY ways I'm still a newbie. However, I don't think I asked TOO many questions at the beginning because I did a whole lot of off-site (and on-site) reading about Slackware and Linux in general. Slackware is newbie-friendly, but if you're not willing to go and do some research it's probably not the distro for you. Slackware is designed to be utterly transparent and simplistic, which allows great stability and usability. However, that comes at the price of being more knowledge-dependent instead of intuitive until you get the hang of it (ie unless you know what file to edit, you won't be able to fix your Xorg problem). That being said, I think the people on these forums are very newbie-friendly and do help out as much as possible, even with the simplest of questions (even PEBCAK ones). I think if you want an elitist distro with incredible documentation you should move to Gentoo (I am always impressed by their documentation and find it helps every Linux distro and not just Gentoo itself).

I agree with you gentlemen. But do you think that in some cases, a strategic shove in the right direction might be an advantage.

There is no need to post the entire Slackware manual or basic linux stuff, people can acquire that for themselves. There may be merit however, in posting details of issues that are new or unique, and may possibly be problematic - which was the original intent of this post.

Thank you so very much for the info.

My apolagies if I have upset folks with my question...

Gord

Perhaps I was wrong to attempt to run Slackware. It comes highly rated as an OS to learn Linux. Yes there is a large amount of documentation.
But much of it assumes a person has basic knowledge. But where is a person to find that knowledge.

I am sorry if I have upset some on this forum.

Gord

I don't think you are "wrong" to attempt it; in fact, I'm glad you did. It might or might not be a good match for you, but if that turns out to be the case, it doesn't make you a bad person any more than it makes Slackware a bad operating system.

There are quite a few places around. For basic unix, there's the RUTE tutorial <http://rute.rlworkman.net/>; for Slackware specific documentation, there's the Slackware book <http://slackbook.org/> and Slack Basics <http://slackbasics.org/>. Once you've got the basics out of the way, you'll understand the rationale for the responses. Forums, IRC, and in general, interactive online arenas, are poor places to learn basics of anything - that's best done in either a classroom setting, one on one instruction, or reading various literature on the subject.

Who's upset? I'm not sure who you thought was upset, but um... no.
Nobody was upset - I promise.

@ Uncle57

I very much agree that the first post in this thread is quite confusing, especially for someone new to Slackware, I'm sorry for referring you to it. I forgot it was confusing.

Now, I think there should be some simple instructions to run that will fix this, so I will edit my older post on this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post2916940

Also, I believe editing '/etc/fstab' is optional, am I right ?

I believe it is optional...

The "gpasswd" command you gave me was the ticket for my DVD drive. My biggest concern. My install drive now tells me I do not have the rights... But the system writes to it fine so I need to do some reading here to find the resolution to that hickup.... Along with a couple others....

Thanks again..

Gord

I found the solution!!!! When I'm installing Slackware, I don't instal HALD . It works!!! Old style!!!

I didn't know the other way to find USB sticks. Also, this does not work in some other versions of Linux, like Fedora Core 4 (the only RedHat distro I tried). I don't know what distros have the "/dev/disk/by-label" directory. Slackware 12 does.

ShellyCat, that's pretty nifty. I didn't know about that. I'm pretty sure that it's a kernel thing, so Fedora Core 4 could probably have the same functionality if you recompile the kernel -- but I'm not sure. Anyway, if you set up automounting in a WM/DE that supports it, you shouldn't need to mess with CLI stuff like that -- but if you don't like automounting, it's a nifty solution.

I think the by-label and by-uuid require 2.6 kernel + udev.

Hi. Anyone can kindly help me with this issue I have? Thanks.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...y-udev-639751/

Im just thinking about this guys

Ive got an external card reader.

if I dont set HAL at start up, and then go on to slot a memory card into the reader after boot, the system wont pick it up (DBUS?)

but when I put a usb pen drive directly into a usb slot after boot. the system (DBUS) does pick it up.

going back to the card reader, is this because DBUS is only seeing the cardreader itself and not the memory slots?

so HAL is needed to monitor the card reader slots for input of a memory card and pass that info onto DBUS?