From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 25 01:15:56 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id BAA24288 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 25 Apr 1996 01:15:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nixpbe.pdb.sni.de (mail.sni.de [192.109.2.33]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id BAA24253 for ; Thu, 25 Apr 1996 01:15:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from nerv@localhost) by nixpbe.pdb.sni.de (8.6.12/8.6.12) id KAA15090 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 25 Apr 1996 10:15:31 +0200 Message-Id: <199604250815.KAA15090@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> Subject: How to get maximum results from FreeBSD-questions To: sauri@islandia.is (Asgeir Halldorsson) Date: Thu, 25 Apr 96 10:15:27 MDT From: Greg Lehey Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960425015843.006a0dec@islandia.is>; from "Asgeir Halldorsson" at Apr 25, 96 2:58 am X-Mailer: xmail 2.4 (based on ELM 2.2 PL16) Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Recently I've seen a whole lot of questions of the kind "FreeBSD's broke, what am I doing wrong?". In many cases, the submitter provided almost no relevant information, and in at least one case the submitter complained because not *all* his questions were answered. I know we have a FAQ for FreeBSD, but how about a "how to submit a question to FreeBSD-questions", to be broadcast once a week or so? Here some starters: 1. Nobody gets paid for answering a FreeBSD question. They do it of their own free will. You can influence this free will positively by submitting a well-formulated question supplying as much relevant information as possible. You can influence this free will negatively by submitting an incomplete, illegible, or rude question. It's perfectly possible to send a message to FreeBSD-questions and not get an answer. In the rest of this document, we'll look at how to get the most out of your question to FreeBSD-questions. 2. Not everybody who answers FreeBSD questions reads every message, so please specify a subject. "FreeBSD problem" or "Can't get this to work" aren't enough. If your subject isn't specific enough, the people who can answer it may not read it. 3. Please try to format your message so that it is legible. We appreciate that a lot of people don't speak English as their first language, and we try to make allowances for that, but it's really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks. 4. Please don't include unrelated questions in the same message. Firstly, a long message tends to scare people off, and secondly, it's more difficult to get all the people who can answer all the questions to read the message. 5. Please specify as much information as possible. This is a difficult area, and we need to expand on what information you need to submit, but here's a start: - If you get error messages, don't say "I get error messages", say (for example) "I get the error message 'No route to host'". - If your system panics, don't say "My system panicked", say (for example) "my system panicked with the message 'free vnode isn't'". - If you have difficulty installing FreeBSD, please tell us what hardware you have. In particular, it's important to know the IRQs and I/O addresses of the boards installed in your machine. For example, let's assume you know the answer to the following question. You choose which of these two questions you would be more prepared to answer: Message 1: Subject: (none) I just can't get hits damn silly FereBSD system to workd, and Im really good at this tsuff, but I have never seen anythign sho difficult to install, it jst wont work whatever I try so why don't y9ou guys tell me what I doing wrong. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message 2: Subject: Problems installing FreeBSD I've just got the FreeBSD 2.1 CD-ROM from Walnut Creek, and I'm having a lot of difficulty installing it. I have a 66 MHz 486 with 16 MB of memory and an Adaptec 1540A SCSI board, a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball disk and a Toshiba 3501XA CD-ROM drive. The installation works just fine, but when I try to reboot the system, I get the message "Missing Operating System". Comments? Greg