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Re: HOWTO's For The Newbie
>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Tickle <s.tickle [at] quarndon.co.uk> writes:
Steve> Many 'newbies' (maybe not the true 'Home Users') will be
Steve> only too willing to twiddle with the settings given the
Steve> confidence that comes with sound information.
Of course. That's why I distinguish between the "old newbies" (the
ones who don't stay newbies very long), who have found Linux a
sufficiently attractive playground to generate spectacular growth
rates to date, and the "new newbies" aka "Home Users", who are the
ones Linux needs to attract if it wants to continue its current rate
of growth.
Thing is, it's relatively hard to break Linux completely, because
you've almost always got the "boot: linux single" option. So as long
as you're reasonably careful (make changes one at a time, always back
up the old config file), once you get a working configuration you can
tweak it without much danger.
Yes, you could change /sbin/init or something like that, and put
yourself in a situation where you have to boot from a rescue disk.
But even there, it doesn't matter which rescue disk you use! Once you
get to the root shell prompt, you can mount partitions, edit config
files, etc. If you forget what you did, `ls -lt' gets you your most
recent changes. (Obviously "reasonable care" means you don't do "rm
-rf /" or anything like that, which would be pretty unrecoverable for
the novice.)
--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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