On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Bucky Goldstein,,, wrote:
> If I had a son I'd want him to start out on linux,
> he'll always have a trade to fall back on. Once you
> get him going problems like this don't seem so big
> to kids, they just ask somebody until they get an
> answer or just figure it out.

This son is 24, married, and busy on his own career, no
time for hacking.  His older brother, a Solaris admin,
gave him the machine all set up with Mandrake. It
worked fine for a while, then started freezing for
seconds or minutes at a time.  I wiped that system out
while fighting what turned out to be a bad IDE disk.

His admin brother is now deeply engrossed in his own
Silicon Valley job and no time to play with Linux,
which he considers too immature and disorganized for
"real" work, and he also disdains Intel hardware. (Call
Sun Microsystems and they deliver the part that
afternoon, etc.)  He likes GNU, but prefers a solider
operating system, and packages that just drop into
place and run.

I have no clue what chap and pap are, and don't have
time to learn.mind is pretty well made up here.  I'll tinker with my
own Linux systems -- wonderful platform for Perl
development, etc. -- but should not make someone else
wait forever while I do it.

Vic