[lug] Frustrated

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Matt James wrote:

> For the last ohh year or so I have been trying to learn Linux/Unix and
> have gotten real mad in a real hurry.

Hmmm ... that doesn't help either of us.  Let's take a deep breath and see
if there is anything we can do to help.  

>  I have a few different systems that I have tried a multitude of
> things on and I have gained little ground.

What kinds of things have you tried on what different systems?

> I guess how it all started is I got a SPARC 5 station donated to me as
> something to "Learn" on.  I have successfully installed Solaris 2.5.1
> on it and have learned some basic commands and such for browsing files
> and some VERY basic network type commands such as netstat.

If you've got Solaris running on this thing you are probably in a fairly
decent starting position.  

It seems that the first big hurdle to cross when jumping from a "canned"
OS such as MSDOS or MSWindows, is that you've gone from a monolithic OS
that can't be modified to a system that consists of literally 1000's of
building blocks that can be rearranged to do whatever you want it to do.  
That opens the realm of possibilities quite wide, but also means that it
is very possible to stack the blocks in unworkable ways.  Maybe an analogy
would be the difference between buying a Tonka truck (the "canned" OS)
versus Lego's (Unix).  If what you wanted was the Tonka truck that's fine,
but you can build an awful lot of other neat things with the Legos.

> I have tried to get a number of things to work on it with no luck.  
> Been to TAR.GZ hell trying to figure out how to get the thing to do
> anything.

We'd need a lot more detail to help you sort out the problems here.

> I was told I don't have a compiler on the machine yet when I download
> the compiler it says I need a compiler to "Make" it. (which came first
> the chicken or the egg?)

Solaris usually comes with a minimal compiler in order to configure the
Kernel.  Yes, you can end up in a "chicken versus the egg" situation, but
there are usually ways to bootstrap around the problem.  

> I have attemprted to do the same with both RH and Slackware linux on
> my Intel PIII 1000 machine and had slim to no luck.  Everyone I seem
> to talk to blows it off like it is some sort of walk in the park to
> get linux up and running.  I however have had nothing but problem
> after problem.  When I start the install I get all kinds of crap about
> how my hard drive won't format and that it can't write here or can't
> read there and the install just quits.

This doesn't help us help you too much.  What kind of "crap" are you
seeing?  There are several possibilities I can guess:

   - You may have some hardware that is not recognized by the generic
     Linux kernel and the system may not see it.  However, if the install
     starts at all, and something is saying it sees your hard drive, then
     maybe this isn't it.  In any case, I'd agree that your hardware
     is probably working.

   - Are you attempting to repartition your hard drive?  This is usually
     the first step in any installation even if it is for MSWindows/MSDOS.
     However, not too many Microsoft users have ever done this.  This step
     can often cause some confusion.  (Solaris' overlapping partitions
     still confuse me.)

   - Linux doesn't "format" drives in the same sense as MSWindows/MSDOS.
     In the Unix world the roughly equivalent step is "creating a file
     system", and once the file system is created it has to be mounted
     into the directory structure recognized by the system.  Microsoft
     automates this process and solves the problem of knowing where to
     mount the disk by assigning arbitrary letters (a:\, b:\, c:\, etc.).

> I tried this on both the Intel machine with RH 7.2 and on the SPARC
> with RH 6.1 and nothing seamed to want to work.

Again, if you wouldn't mind providing some more details we may be able to
help understand what is wrong.

> story to make a point I guess - I'm not very impressed with this so
> called wonderious operating system "Linux" as of yet.

Not sure any OS is particularly wondrous.

> I realize I probably offended some people in this message so I
> apologize in advance but I'm looking for advice on how to make things
> go a little easier becasue I would like to learn how to make this
> work.

No offense taken, as long as you are honestly looking for help.  We'll do
our best to answer your questions.

You "might" want to take a look at the newbie columns I worked on a while
back <http://lug.boulder.co.us/docs.html>.  Hopefully these aren't too
pedantic, but it might give you a better feel for the underlying design
philosophy.  That might help some of the explanations make a bit more
sense.


- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)

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                        ISART 2002                          
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