MOTD
I happened to be looking at my irc window (which is rare these
days) and noticed someone join the Debian channel and right off the
bat say
"help", I smiled at first, and waited for them to
ask their question but none came. About 5 minutes later the same
person again simply said
"help", but the channel has 600 or
so users and as you can imagine moves quite quickly. I asked them
to be a bit more specific and it turns out not only was he new to
Debian, he was new to linux and to irc.
He had managed to install Debian but got dumped at the command
prompt with no X server or GUI and his network card was not
recognized/configured so he could not install any software, even if
he new how to install software.
Not a good situation for a newbie and as he put it:
"help, I am
at my ropes end".
I logged in with my user name and then I got this next screen
and the last part says
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY,
to the extent permitted by applicable law.
it has my username@domainname:~$
and its waiting for me to enter ?
Oh boy, I thought. This is for a newbie the worst position to be
in, somehow he missed installing the `Desktop System' task or his
video card was not configured, either way, he has no GUI, and he
has no access to the internet. Neither of which can be blamed on
Debian, it try's very hard to get these things working during the
install but it cannot support every bit of hardware floating
around.(actually it could, if only hardware the vendors supplied
either specs of drivers, installers could do wonders.)
What he was seeing is the
MOTD which on Debian is:
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Not to helpful if your a complete newbie really but understandably
something Debian needs its users to see. There was a recent
thread on the debian-devel mailing list about this issue but it
didn't seem to go anywhere. I think Debian has to realize that
sometimes its new users will be stuck looking at this odd black
thing we call the console and wondering what in God's name they
have to do to get out of it. I like the idea of a little script a
new user can invoke that points them to some of the documentation
that Debian has a wealth of, and even to a FAQ would be nice.
As for my friend, last I saw him, he was rebooting into windows to
try and find the manufactures of his video and network cards. I
hope he makes it...