Dear all, <snip>
> Forgetting the version numbers matter (that was showed to be somehow silly > after George remembered LSB in his *second* posting), what I really could not > understand and neither expect was the hostility to newbies. > > Oh, yes, I agree with that community staff. This is one of the major issues in > Linux that atract me. But shouldn't we be a community open to the others? > Shouldn't we initiate people into "light" of open software? Surely lots of > people that don't "contribute to community" may start after a while. Maybe, > like me, they won't be developers (some surely will), but they can share their > knowledge with freasher newbies, they can say: hey, you have a choise, you're > not supposed to use this or that OS, you don't have to fight againt, but you > may fight with. I agree entirely. As an absolute newbie it was hard to get started with Debian; fortunatly friends at College and this list helped me get started. Unfortunatly some of the responses I have seen on this list to obvious/silly problems have been somewhat flamelike. We should _all_ remember that some people out there do not have the experience nor the expertese that we do: what might seem a trivial or stupid mistake to us might seem impossibly difficult to a newbie. Yes, in some cases a need to RTFM should be expressed, but gently, and with the answer to the problem as well: "You need to do this, but RTM as well to understand why". Yours, Matthew -- Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo Steward of the Cambridge Tolkien Society Selwyn College Computer Support http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/8841/ http://www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/Societies/tolkien/ http://pick.sel.cam.ac.uk/ -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
