In article <1992Aug10.184623.1572@crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
quoted text
>In article <1992Aug9.003422.15656@athena.mit.edu>, f6930910@scheme.cs.ubc.ca writes:
>
>| To become an operating system, Linux needs to look like Berkeley's
>| Net-2 tapes, or the USL source tree, or the VMS source tree, or
>| any other complete system.  This will be a major undertaking
>| (seeing to it that there are manuals for everything would alone
>| be a major undertaking).

        I do not see an easy way to fix the distribution, without a *lot* of
work.  One of the main advantages of linux is that it will run on a minimal
system, say 2Mb ram, and 10 Mb disk.  Would a standard distribution contain
Emacs?  X11? MGR?  Which X utilities?  Would we include GCC, or would this be
an add on for those who do programming?  How about TeX?  Right now we have a
modular approach which makes it easy to add the tools that you want.
Unfortunately this also means that new users have a hard time figuring out
what is going on.

quoted text
>
>  A major problem, as I've noted before. Right now I have lots of files
>I've ftp'd, handwritten notes on 3x5 cards, and my memory. Not a nice
>clean bit of documentation!

        Yes, documentation is a real weakness, right now, and  I am not sure
how best to fix it.  Writing documentation has about as much sex appeal
as a road accident, so I cannot see it getting much better, anytime soon.
Of course, if someone wants to work on this....

        Seriously, if linux really catches on, I would expect someone to start
writing a book about it.  Right now linux is really only readily availible to
people who have net access of some kind (A bbs distribution would seem to me
to be too painful to contemplate).  An author would need a guarantee that new
users could have ready access to linux, and a CDROM would do this.  A package
that included a CDROM with the book would give a new user everything they need.
Right now the rate of change is still too high for a book to make sense, but
once things settle down a little more it would be a more realistic project.

quoted text
>  A good reason to buy a CD_ROM drive, though, instead of reading stuff
>off one at work and bringing it home.

        I agree.  I have the Simtel20 disc that Walnut Creek also produces, and
I will never ftp to that site again.  Ftp is just too slow, and browsing can be
an agony.  With the disc, I can grep all of the readme files, or pluck out one
file that I need.  I can fire up Emacs on the master index and search for
specific things.  Something look like it might be interesting?  Unpack it into
/tmp and see.  Come to think of it, I did see something on the simtel disc that
was essentially like mtools, except that it runs from dos and can read a minix
partition.  Without the ability to browse, I probably would have never found
it.  It needs a little work, but it is there for anyone who wants it.

        With the linux disc, I would suspect that all of the FAQ and c.o.l.
archives will be on the disc, without taking up precious hard disk space.  A
shared library update would mean just plucking the source for an application
off of the cdrom, recompile and then delete the sources from the hard disk.

-Eric
--
Eric Youngdale
eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil