Networking Nightmare II: Adding Linux

This guy has got to be kidding. ... Windows NINETY-EIGHT?

Who's still suffering with that?

I wonder where he's looking for help, anyway. The horrors of connecting different Windows versions to a Samba share are well-known. If you're going all the way back pre-NT you have to use unencrypted passwords, and there are other fiddles that I am too weary to relate now. Suffice it to say he's one heck of a terrible looker-upper to not find this stuff. There are books, the Samba documentation is good, though verbose, there are zillions of Web articles....

I thought he did rather well, for a noob. Most people i know wouldn't even go on line to find out.

Sorry TA, I don't see it that way. He's not a noob, he's a tech journalist who has been "interested in computers since the CP/M days." I'm tired of so-called tech journalists who don't know anything, and don't know how to find out anything. Lordamercy, you'd think a journalist would know how to do basic research.

Quoting:Lordamercy, you'd think a journalist would know how to do basic research.

It has become a lost art hasn't it?

Quoting:"interested in computers since the CP/M days."

That puts a completely different slant on it.

Again, people, it's Windows 98. It's like a cry for help.

Microsoft hasn't supported Windows '98 in ages. Put that thing on a network with outside access (which he has apparently done) and you have a security breach waiting to happen Win98 has more holes than Swiss cheese.

There is plenty of good documentation out there. If he had asked in the Ubuntu forum he would have been directed to it. To claim that all Linux documentation is "abymsal" is nonsense. I can point him to any number of distros that do a great job with docs and a great job with technical support fora.

Is he using Win 98 as a standard desktop client? A totally insecure fileserver. Does he have a fetish for the FAT 32 filesystem?

I'll second Caitlyn on the docs, especially because Ubuntu in particular has spawned more than a dozen actual how-to books for both novice and would-be expert. If the guy was serious, he could drop a few bucks on one of Mark Sobell, Keir Thomas or Rickford Grant's books.

He followed up today with an equally dim 'adding Mac to the network' piece. What a missed opportunity to showcase how important open standards are, and how both MS and Apple screw around with them to the detriment of their customers.

**blink blink** Hmm, I feel a blog piece coming on....

Along these same lines, I'll have to take a look at the state of Ubuntu's free documentation. I remember being less than impressed in the 6.06 era, but perhaps things have improved.

Quoting:how important open standards are, and how both MS and Apple screw around with them to the detriment of their customers.

**blink blink** Hmm, I feel a blog piece coming on....

My breath is now suitably bated