From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <6e35c0620703071819u2615004crb5e58397b10e34b3@mail.gmail.com> Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 18:19:41 -0800 From: "Jack Johnson" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] interesting potential targets for plan 9 and/or inferno In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <45EF5CB6.4040902@gmail.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1a889164-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 3/7/07, geoff@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote: > > How can you get under the hood if you can't figure out how to pop it up? > > Umm, read the documentation? Hahaha, I remember having this problem when I was first introduced to Plan 9, trying to figure out how to read the wiki in acme without being able to read the wiki in acme. I probably still have those first survival printouts of how to configure the network so I could get to the online documentation without rebooting between experiments. But as others have noted, that was my failing, or my blinders, not seeing or knowing how to (best) access the internal documentation immediately after installation. I remember in college I stumbled around VMS thanks to the help system. It was self-teaching, in that you could start with HELP and it would give you suggestions, and you could explore the whole command documentation tree from that starting point. Heck, I learned how to FTP from the VMS help system. My first introduction to UNIX, that was my first question, "How do I find out what commands I can use?" "You can use 'man', just type 'man commandname' and it will tell you what it does. Like this." "What if I don't know the names of any of the commands?" "Oh." Inferno's wm/man is great in this respect, in that it's very newbie-friendly, and the very first thing it does is explain itself. Of course, lookman is handy, too (especially in acme), but maybe either a simple wm/man-like port or just changing the default Glenda window layout to better jumpstart the newbie down the internal documentation path might help. What are the first four things you wanted to do back when you did your first installation? Mine were something like: 1 - explore (8 1/2 then / rio now, private namespaces, etc.) 2 - try to do something I was used to doing (checking email, which involved) 3 - configure the network 4 - read the online documentation (where's the browser?) -J