Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, I've described what it took me.  Maybe Debian Sarge was
> particularly troublesome.

Yes.

> I challenge you to write a recipe, suitable for a newbie without an
> internet connection, how to get a GNU/Linux system connected to the
> internet, on the assumption that any magic spells supplied by the
> distribution have failed.  Point out where he can find the necessary
> info, and how he could discover that that is where he has to look.

Alfred talked about gNewSense (or whatever it is spelled), an Ubuntu
derivative.  Basically this boils down to clicking the obvious icons or
possibly menu points in the obvious places and specifying the obvious
information.  _IF_ things don't work right away anyway.  The exception
may be WLAN which might not work without non-free components (and
gNewSense does not include them).

If that sounds hopelessly optimistic, just try it.  I certainly have had
my share of having configured Unix systems for networking, even before
Linux existed.  Things really have become quite convenient to a point
where one does not ever need a text editor for getting things to run,
unless things are really utterly unexpectedly broken.

Most popular Linux distributions nowadays are in that ballpark, with the
notable exceptions of Debian proper and Slackware.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum