Can someone help out a newbie ?

[Will Rose cwr@crash.cts.com]

Matthew David ALDOUS (aldous@mundil.CS.mu.OZ.AU) wrote:
: Hiya, I've got some general installation questions,
: and think if I explain my situation, someone might be
: able to fill me in on what to do.

: I'd love to try to get the networking started, but I hit a dead wall
: when it came to editing the file. I guess I'm a new enough admin 
: that I don't know ed really that well. (Yoikes) - I've grown up
: on vi. Never touched that emacs stuff ;) Throughout the manual
: it refers to just "editing" the file - but for those of use
: who don't know ed that well, eek. So I turned to sam, and when
: I started it, I got a window at the top of the screen, and another
: window down the bottom. Then I look through the manual on how to
: use sam, and I'm stuck. *thud*

Sam really needs the third mouse button; and also a knowledge of
(you guessed it) ed... most of the commands are pretty ed-like.
But once you get used to it, it's quite nice.  I really missed
not having vi during the install, until I got the windowing system
up and sam running; I even edited a few files on another machine,
and moved them across.

(To start with sam, try 'sam foo', where foo is an existing file.
The cunning part is that foo won't display on the main, lower
screen until you select 'foo' from either the middle or (perhaps) the 
right mouse buttons pop-up.  To save a file, it's easiest to
click on the top, command window and enter w, then q.  After that,
all is more or less jake except that you have to remember that the
eskimos have 100 words for snow, and ed has one word for error '?'.)

: Before I go further, is it possible for me to do what I want to
: do? One thing I have noticed that struck me as odd, was that if 
: I do an lc, or anything that goes longer than the screen, the screen
: doesn't scroll down. I have to use the mouse to move it down. Is
: this normal?

Yes, that threw me for a while, but the default screen for user
none is non-scrolling.  Normal users get normal screens - or you
can edit (oops, sorry) the user profile and remove 8.5's -s option.

: Oh, and is it possible to have it boot directly from your harddrive
: instead of loading dos? (It was damn hard finding a DOS machine - 
: all the PC's around here run NetBSD or Linux.)

I've been hacking on this, but have done very little.  It's obviously
the second thing to fix, after the partition table.


Will
cwr@crash.cts.com