On Wednesday 17 September 2003 21:27, Joshua Banks wrote: > LOL...... > > Do I need to be a computer programmer now to figure out what files I can > update safely and which ones I should ignore, keep, > throw-out...ect.ect..????
You don't need to be a programmer at all - that's much harder. What you do need is to be comfortable with config files; there's no other way to survive with Gentoo at the moment and possibly not in the future either. Textual config files are the heart of GNU software and most *NIX software. Redhat, Mandrake, etc just provide graphical tools that edit the config files. If you don't know what a config file is about, first check out the man page for it. If there's no man page, check out the man page for the application that uses the config file. If you don't know what application the config file is from, use one of the tools to find out. If you don't know the tools, ask somebody else - I always use find and grep of /var/db/pkg to find what package a file belongs to. Information is power, right? Gentoo (presently) goes along with and doesn't hide any of the information. It only helps to streamline it. That is why so many "power users" gravitate to it. If your going to survive in this sort of linux environment (ie with very little hand-holding) you going to have to learn how to read man pages and then to just give it a try... Jason -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
