..esp, the nicely timed tweak.. well, if you ain't Man-enough, sonny.. can't grok grep n'stuff - better stay with the nice toys, hmm?

I have to agree with your method. It's (exactly?) same one used on me - from the first day when I wandered in to look at our New! fancy smoke-acrylic encased 'tiny' PDP-8s, and foolishly asked.. WTF is THAT ?? Hey.. can I play too?

"Why.. suuuure, sonny. Here. This be a BCD-encoded paper tape; why'ncha get the TTY to print out the data?" {sigh} Anyway, my teechur was the guy who helped BART (SF's Bay Area Rapid Transit) get their computer system designed & working. He would *never* 'just give me The %^#@& ANSWER, Don!'

Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle.. Cackle..

Anyway, your guy not perzackly a good test case for the better than average, somewhat curious one (who wants more than some cookbooked system with a list of procedures typed out - to get mail yada yada). I mean, if this guy fancied self a "Enterprise (Oh Gawd - shades of Infotainment World !) Systems Support" candidate? And thought ... 'gosh, all I gotta do is memorize some more menus' ?? maybe yer describin the heat-death of minds, catalyzed by Billy: endless often seemingly random switches stuffed into equally endless chains o' menus :( {sigh}

(Yeah.. I watched several hours of KCSM (PBS) late-nite "M$ Classes" - all them MBA majors tryin to get an extra Credit so's to find work after school's out at College of San Mateo.. The guy was tryin rilly hard.. to emulate Billy's whiny voice too - to a T. This was pure ROTE instruction: find the menu with the cutesy MSloth-Name. Scary to watch the indoctrination process.)

[English-impaired rant]
But back to \ufffd1: Some of us (I be one) like to fucking *Read well-formed sentences* which give first, an outline er bare-bones coat-tree : upon which we can hang first the underwear, then the pants, coats, hats and Penguin feathers. Y'know? READ as in *book*-type things? er written by say, Mike Huber (?) and not Mickey Rat. (Not intentionally compressed jargon - to show how cutesy-small ya can make the file, as if all ya got is 64K memory for the whole OS and MAN and WordStar too)

MAN is a pretty piss-poor substitute. (WTF can print out them all - then in What Order - alphabetical? Hah!) And who wants to stare even more at this &^$&(% illuminated (bad for eyes) Screen ya can't take to the john or outside, or bookmark with notes or... ??? Not Me.

Anyway, it's just logic and I can grok it. I just despise the low-valuation attached to creating Any literate documentation - not so much fun for the volunteers as coding? - but *NOW* this stuff isn't just for programmers and sysadmins: WTF i$ Red Hat et al [NOT] Thinking Of?

They want to be *paid* as in profit-making, and they just blew a Golden opportunity to piggy-back on Billy's Billions for propaganda.. press releases: Install-a-Thon(g); Comparisons, Pix of Star Office DOING something. GUI acing out the puerile Ex Pee smarmy Deskcrap Face.. Yada yada.

They Fucking Failed. Period. (Do they employ Any technical actual Writers at all?)

I Hate This: it prolongs the defeatist lazy mindset - that M$ has the entire world by shorthair and Nothing Can Be Done.. Oh Sob. Oh Crewel Knitting World.

In the end - doesn't matter that I'll get my box working. What matters IMhO - is how accidentally.. that will occur, and how lengthy is the search to see the rationale behind the storing of various .ini bits and where they point; grokking the Why is how one creates an internal map - as much as the What and How. THIS we all have to do by random association, today. Unix, CP/M - grok One and the next is just as logical. *Most People\ufffd* have not grokked even One. (And no one Can grok the moving $up-grade target that Rulez, except vaguely, temporarily and Always with Great Irritation)

And that's apparently ~Why it is, that All the Distros Blew It on the Beast-XP Launch Opportunity. It's the Vision Thing. There isn't one.
[/English-ignored rant]


Ashton
Yeah, if I were your acolyte - I'd get the map much sooner, no doubt. (But see: I've done this before, and over lots of years - and there've been lots of good hints rightchere on zIWE). Rest case.

US needs a $Billion Grant: How to write for a techno-besotted lazy pampered mass o' PHB-wannabe sheep, with short attention span. Ya plays 'em as they lay (er.. lie. A lot).