howto’s
Every now and again I have a look at the statistics my page has. It appears this month so far I have had 4117 unique hits to my Debian Kernel Recompile Howto. I also have a look at the referrers, while most of the referrers are from google, a few come up from other sites which is all good and well, except for one. The site in particular complains that my howto’s are ageing and no longer relevant. This is far from the truth. While indeed some refer to older kernel packages, or older redhat distributions etc, they all for the good part work and can still be used as valid howto’s!
Admittedly, some DO need updating to reflect the newer package versions etc but the fact of the matter is that none are really there for the typical newbie linux user. All of the howto’s should be reasonably current and functional even if the package versions documented don’t quite match.
I initially started writing the howto’s for myself so when I was recompiling my kernel on my many home machines I had to go to one place to refresh my memory as I had documented the common tasks in the past. It was also there for friends who are also of a technical mind to check it out and remember what needed to be done. I ended up going into a bit more detail than necessary for some external people but again, they were never originally written for the newbie.
In saying that, I think the person who wrote the article that my howto’s were useless should pull their head out of their ass. I add all the myrddin.org content to a cvs server locally on my home network including the howto documents. If you look closely each of the howto documents, they all have a clearly visible cvs Id tag which shows the date of the last update/commit for that document.
Filed under: m.o