[ale] Lindows experience

[Christopher Ness]

My friend Allen bought an Evergreen Lindows box from Tiger Direct. So of 
course, I become the infinite support for it.

So the first thing I look for are the standard things I  always use. Wrong.
The first thing I need is man. So...#man swapon...nothing...#man man...nothing
which man? no man found in PATH. locate man. All the man files except the 
actual program! Including /usr/man/man1/man.1.gz. Today Allen called tech 
support and asked about it. "We left man out to save space since these users 
aren't technically oriented". But they included hundreds of the actual man 
files!
So I emailed him man and nroff, groff, gttbl, grotti and all of libgpm. A few 
permissions and it's back. I had to do the same thing with Midnite Commander.

The reason I was looking for man swapon in the first place? Netscape (ugh) was 
crashing with out of memory errors. free showed no swap even though  the 
rcfiles attempted to start it.  It wasn't in /etc/fstab, but fdisk showed the 
swap partition existed.  They had never put it in fstab. Swapon was in one of 
the rc files. So what was it? They had never run mkswap! I wonder how many of 
their customers will ever know?

I think they need to do a little better if we are going to get the public to 
understand Linux to be as easy as we all find it.



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