[techtalk] request for ideas

[R Pickett]

On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Jim Browning wrote:

> Sorry, but I disagree. Having played with DOS, Win 3.1, Win 3.11, Win95,
> Win98, C, C++, Visual C++ and Visual Basic, rebuilt several computers from
> the motherboard up, and installed more drivers and configured more dip
> switches (remember them?) than I care to count, the idea that an operating
> system has to be told that a disk has been inserted into a drive is strange,
> at the least.

Not meaning to make waves, but you just named five operating systems that
are all DOS, give or take the complexity of the Windows system running over
the DOS kernel.  And IMHO the DOS "all disks are represented by a single
letter at the top level" is just plain broken, not to mention completely
unscalable.

> I'm planning on looking at (installing, etc.) Linux. It would
> appear Linux has quirks that would not be apparent to those coming at it
> from a personal computer angle (as contrasted with the Unix angle).

Totally agreed.  If I were to make suggestions about educating newbies about
Linux or the like, I'd start with the abstract hand-waving definitions of a
multi-user, multi-processing operating system.  It's the multi-user nature
of the system, really, that makes mounting and unmounting necessary -- we
can't have you forcibly ejecting disks that other users and processes might
be using, you know....

The actual issue is that PC hardware is stupid.  On almost every other
platform ever built, the floppy drives have a two-way communication with the
OS, so that ejects can only take place under the direction of the OS, and
conversely inserting a disk can tell the OS to do The Right Thing (tm), be
it mount the filesystem, put the icon on the desktop, whatever.

In any case, to roll this back around to the topic at hand, a discussion of
the Tao of multi-user OSes should be one of the first things in newbie Linux
documentation.  Closely followed by a nice clean description of the
single-root hierarchical filesystem, and the way that arbitrary media can be
mounted at arbitrary points.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
R Pickett                Look around you. This is what the world
emerson at hayseed.net      looks like at the end of the millenium.
----------------------------------------------------------------


************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org