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Old 3rd August 2008
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scottro scottro is offline
Real Name: Scott Robbins
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: NYC
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@Vermaden--while I agree that alsa seems to be the answer to a question no one asked, isn't that part of the issue with Flash 9? (The reason, when I worked in a more BSD environment, that I kept Linux on a machine--Arch, in that case. Oh, and for VirtualBox.)

If I'm correct about that--not sure that I am--and I were back in a more BSD oriented environment, it would defeat the whole purpose of using Linux in the first place. I did look at it last time you mentioned it as it seemed interesting, but it didn't seem well documented at the time, which is usually my biggest complaint about Linux--it's another plus for Arch, they have an excellent wiki, and they seem to pay attention to getting things documented.

As an aside--I think that one reason Gentoo exploded on the scene when it came out was due as much to the docs as anything else. Daniel Robbins, who writes some good articles for IBM developer works, writes great docs. He documented what was, especially back then, a rather complex installation process, enabling newcomers to become geeks quickly.
As we all know <cough>cacti</cough> often, the biggest problem isn't that a program is so complex, it's that the documents are lacking.

He had the right (in my opinion) attitude as well. Originally in describing the creation of /etc/fstab he would use hdXX. As Gentoo quickly became more popular, a lot of newcomers made errors with that, copying it exactly---rather than whining about their lameness, he added a line explaining the XX.

That's just one example. Far too often, when a newcomer can't understand documentation, it's blamed on the newcomer, rather than the doc itself.

But that's another thread. Still, as time passes, you get more people, such as the aforementioned Vermaden, who when they write a howto and someone doesn't understand it, takes that as a bug in his software (the howto is software in a way) and fixes it rather than blaming the user.
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