Just wondering what areas of Linux scare you people. For those who were provided man pages while in the womb please try to refrain from bashing us as we give away our weak points.

There are two things, commands actually, that really intimidate me:

awk and find

The syntax makes me run and pull a blanket over my head.

those viewing this thread are going to be from one of two camps...

in one camp you'll have those who are intimidated and scared of the lesser used or foriegn looking commands and applications.

in the other camp you'll have those who view those same commands and applications as yet unexplored territories and instead of being apprehensive to try them out will (for better or worse) just start playing with it.

I unfortunately am from the second camp so not much intimidates me but there is still _ALOT_ I don't know. Kinda gives me a warm-fuzzy in the middle of my penguin-luvin-heart.

Perl doesn't SCARE me per say, but I find it intimidating...I have a couple of O'Reilly books, but grokking it enough for it to be of use is daunting me...I seem to have some sort of mental block.

Otherwise I happily trash one of my linux systems on a daily basis trying out stuff....I should develop a little MORE fear I think

Vi or vim in vi mode. I really don't understand jack shit about vi. But vim is okey.

dealing with X server. all the files and their confguration scares the wits out of me. everytime i set to do something with them i do with a racing heart

What scares me is trying to install new software. I know that seems funny but it's true.

I'll tell you what it is that scares me, it's the fact that most times I install some new software (I use apt) it will install or upgrade the dependencies needed and something else will almost always stop working.

what scares me is the fear that i will always be looking for a driver for my laptop or printer or videp card or whatever and that by the time some one makes one ill need a new one
but i love linux

1) Not being able to undelete very easily.

2) Root having complete/total-no-holds-barred-control without any checks. (This is one thing I happen to really like too, I can finally kill a process or delete something without having to beg the OS)

I've made some horrific mistakes while accidently logged in as root.

said it once already but...

http://www.tomchance.uklinux.net/pics/tom-alan-bob.jpg

alan cox scares me.

What scares me the most is Sytem V boot scripts. Its overwhelming opening them up. I like to hack my init scripts. Thankyou BSD-Style ^_^

Iptables. Makes me cringe to even think about writing rules. Everytime I go to compile a new kernel, I just think "Screw this up, and you'll be re-writing rules in iptables again". It's enough to make triple check everything before I boot the new kernel.

Not really in Linux, but in certain windowmanagers;
Icons on the desktop, I get really scared when I see that.

I know this is pathetic but the command line scares me...a bit. I just started out with linux running an x-server and I have never really learned to use command lines. I know how to do a little bit but as of now I don't feel comfortable with X.

That would be because you are looking at it wrong.
Don't feel intimidated because you can't sit down and hack a computer or write a program in 30 seconds like you see in a movie.
Don't think of the command line as a large unknown chaos.
Each command is a tool. Like a screwdriver, hammer or saw. You pick up the one you need for a job. When you first start out you may not know which tools are best, but you learn as you use them.
Don't feel you would be the only one to review a man page for a few minutes before typing the correct command parameters.
Good Luck.

I don't know enough about it to be able to fix a lot of my mistakes/system problems.


I sure had a lot of experience fixing 100's of problems in Windows, and that was only the first week!