Re: Restart after long silence

[Kevin Forge <forge@myrealbox.com>]

jfm2@club-internet.fr wrote:
> 
> >
> > Once /usr is monted you have a plethora of editors but one day in a
> > store I met a guy in trouble whose /usr was not being mounted.  I
> > could tell him how to fix but the only editor available was VI and
> > this I could not explain him as I could not explianed him emacs.  So
> > it is enough to have auser freizendly editor it needs to be in /bin
> > and not need libraries from /usr
> >
> 
> should read "it is not enough to haved user friendly editor"

Two additions to this point.  

#1. /usr should not be a separate partition.  At least not on any 
system operated by a novice.  For such users the '/' partition 
should include the whole OS.  '/opt', '/var', and the rest can 
be made into separate partitions after the user figures out why 
he wants to do that.  '/home' could be made a separate partition 
from the start however.  Maybe..

#2. The easy editor new users need dose not exist yet.  If it 
looks and behaves like edit.com from DOS, then there is no need
to explain it's function.  After all, every popular GUI word 
processor or text editor has the same behavior.

Joe, Pine, Pico, Jed and a few others are nice. On average it 
takes an advanced novice ( good with computers but doesn't know
these editors ) working on his own 30 minutes to figure out how 
to use them.  That's with the Man page available. 

Turning a novice user with a text editor he doesn't understand 
yet loose in '/etc' with root privileges is enough to make tech
support start wetting the bed.