self introduction & comments

["Martin Jackson" <mjackson@deskmedia.com>]

Hello,

I am new to SEG, having seen it referred to by Omega on one of the Hurricane
lists from RedHat.  I have experience with RedHat 4.1 and 5.0, Debian 1.3,
and DOS/Windows environments.  I consider myself particularly proficient
with DOS and Windows.

I do not have a scientific background.  My training was orginally Classics
(Greek and Latin language and literature), but I am now going back for
Computer Science.  I have had some programming training, but am not ready
for "prime time" just yet.

I have had my share of frustrations with Red Hat and Debian.  In Debian, I
had a hard time modifying the window manager menus, as well as getting PPP
to work over my PnP modem.  I couldn't get my soundcard working (also PnP),
but that was not as much of a problem.  With Red Hat, I cannot find any
documentation on the conf.modules file (I used Debian's modconf to manage it
before; a wonderful utility).

What I would like to see are some graphical frontends to some of these
configuration files (especially isapnp, which doesn't get all the attention
it should in this day and age, IMHO) which work either under X or curses and
do NOT require motif.  This may be a very contentious thing to say
(especially for my first post), but I think a project like this would be
better off consciously seeking a Windows 95 look and feel, as well as
standard toolset.  I think this would help the new user get acclimated to
Linux without being inundated by details of administration and learning
unfamiliar syntax.  The advantage, of course, is that as the user gets more
familiar with the system, (s)he has the option of hand-hacking the config
files rather than using the tools (this alone makes the basic system
superior to Windows).

The installation routine should presume that the user is setting up a
dial-up connection via PPP, rather than presuming a home ethernet, as many
distributions seem to (selecting this at installation would be a good idea).

These are comments intended for discussion, so please be gentle <g>.  I look
forward to being part of this.

Martin Jackson:  mjackson@deskmedia.com
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Information Science Major
Mankato State University
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