Date: Thu, 25 Apr 96 10:15:27 MDT From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> To: sauri@islandia.is (Asgeir Halldorsson) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: How to get maximum results from FreeBSD-questions Message-ID: <199604250815.KAA15090@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19960425015843.006a0dec@islandia.is>; from "Asgeir Halldorsson" at Apr 25, 96 2:58 am
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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
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