I wonder how many of you who would be considered intermediate or advanced would
hang out on the newbie list to help out the newbies.  The reason I ask is I
don't use Linux because I love Unix, or because I have tons of spare time and
love a challange.  I don't use it because I am exceptionally talented or
intelligent. (past postings prove this)  I don't use it because I have any
special affection for the open source movement.

I use it because it works well for most things.  Since installing Mandrake 8, 20
days, 11 hours, 18 minutes ago, or so uptime tells me, I haven't had to reboot
this computer.  I can't get uptime like that with any Microsoft product or any
Apple product.  I have achieved uptime like that with BeOS, but nobody wants to
use an OS that is no longer being actively supported.  You are probably
wondering what the heck my point is.  Here it comes.

There are millions of people just like me.  People who have been using Microsoft
and Apple products for years but are finally tired of the constant crashes and
reboots.  Many of these people are willing to take the time to learn something
new, but they will need your help.  A couple of months ago I decided that Be
Inc. just wasn't going to update BeOS anytime soon.  Win2k was driving me
bonkers so I decided to try Linux again.  I downloaded Mandrake 7.2, seems to be
one of the most popular distros on linuxnewbie.org, and had at it.  The install
went well but I couldn't get my soundcard to work.  I posted my problem here and
Zibby (I bet Zibby would hang out on the advanced list) was kind enough to help
me out, IIRC he even sent me his config file so I could do an A/B comparison. 
Doesn't sound like much does it?  But if he hadn't helped me I probably would
have done an fdisk on the partition and gone back to Win2k.  At that point I had
been messing with that sound card for a few hours, reading howtos....etc.  I
just needed a place to start looking.  Would I have been any great loss to the
community?  No probably not, but like I said there are millions of people out
there just like me.  The 50% of them who are smarter just might be a loss. 

Brevity is genius, hence the length of my post.  Sorry to babble so long.

SG, O.S.D.

Jamie Ostrowski wrote:
> 
>     With Linux distros becoming increasingly popular, and with newcomers
> becoming more and more common on the tclug list, has anyone considered the
> possibility of having a few different tclug lists, based on the experience
> levels of the readers? Maybe a more basic list for newebies to help each
> other out with the more simple day to day questions like:
> 
<snip>
-- 

Yadda, yadda, yadda