Outline comment..

I just had a chance to read over the outline so far..

  http://www.weinstein.org/linuxannoyances/outline.html

I like how prescriptive the plan looks. However, it seems to me that
the outline is dangerously close to "Linux for Dummies" instead of
discussing genuinely hard annoyances. 

here are some things I'd like to see...

Chapter 4:

 - detailed coverage of the different reasons that packages are often
   incompatible across linux distributions and releases. (conflicting
   file installation locations, unsatisfied dependencies, incompatible
   installed package catalogs)
    - why do kernel drivers need to be relinked against the 
      exact kernel I have running?
    - why are there gcc/g++ ABI binary incompatibilities?
    - why are there binary and package incompatibilities 
      between Red Hat distributions?
 - detailed description of "dependency hell", where installing a
   package is impossible. This normally happens to me when an
   application depends on a newer version of a shared library toolkit;
   the new version of the toolkit conflicts with the installed version
   (usually because of a filepath collision in /usr/lib/shlibname or
   similar); and many existing applications on my system are dependent
   on the old version of the toolkit. The only way I've found to
   resolve this type of conflict is to start installing everything new
   from source into encap directories using either "encap" or
   "UnixTools" style full-separation.

     http://www.encap.org/
     http://mozart.chat.net/~jeske/Projects/UnixTools/

Chapter 5:

 - how to work with Microsoft documents without breaking them.
   It's usually safe to open documents with openoffice, but
   often they don't display correctly, and even re-saving
   them correctly can lose important formatting from the
   MSWord saved version. What kinds of operations and files
   are generally safe to do on openoffice?

     (running cross-over for msoffice)

 - how do you get Linux mail clients to view Microsoft Outlook
   generated TNEF (winmail.dat) encapsulated RTF? (Evolution,
   Mozilla, mutt/pine)

     I don't have a complete solution, but here are some 
     references:

     http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2002-June/019361.html
     http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/#rtf
     http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/

Chapter 7:
 
 - Cross-Over office for plugins and running msoffice.

Chapter 8:

 - (8.1) Solutions for calendar and group scheduling clients that run
   on Linux.
   - Oracle/Steltor CorporateTime
   - http://perl.about.com/cs/groupcalendars/
 - (8.7) Upgrading X
   - reasons that X needs to be upgraded (driver models, 
     extensions)


-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + [email protected]