Errm, first a delicate point. Often users accessing a list like this for the first time don't realize that mail doesn't show up immediately, certainly not for several minutes, and maybe not for some hours. In the old days, it took as long as the camel bearing the news took! So some tend to post "test" messages. Please don't!
It really is a netiquette faux pas; it gets on the regulars'
nerves and will likely get you flamed. Especially empty test
posts. If you insist on sending a test post, please entertain the
regulars with a (not too off color) joke, or entertaining story.
Prepare to have your test post graded by one of the regulars (a.k.a.
old-timers).
You may notice that we occasionally get many hundreds of mails a
week here.
That's a lot of mail, and a lot of reading for the people
who read this list, who, after all, are the people who are
going to answer your questions. So it's in your interest to
reduce the amount of reading they have to do. Often, you can
get an answer faster without posting your question at all.
Before you post, you should try:
Some day you will encounter the phrase "RTFM", which stands for "Read the Fine Manual" (except 'F' doesn't really stand for "Fine"). If you ask someone a question and they tell you to RTFM, it's an indication that you haven't done your homework and you should look harder (or for the first time) at the material they indicate.
By the way, when these people use
terminology like "read(2)",
they are referring to the man page in section 2 of the manual
which deals with the "read" command, and you would access this
page by the command "man 2 read," typed at a command line. Yes,
there is a command line. Let's not go through that just now ...
For the command line deficient out there who are running a recent
version of KDE, you can just type man:read in the Konqueror URL bar for a
beautifully html-formatted man page.
By the way, regular posters use a lot of
acronyms. "BTW" means
"by the way", BTW.
You can find useful acronyms on the SxS
in the Bedtime Reading
section
as follows:
http://www.linux-sxs.org/bedtime/acronym.html
http://www.linux-sxs.org/bedtime/hadenuff.html
http://www.linux-sxs.org/bedtime/fulllist.html
and then there's always
http://www.acronymfinder.com
Your question could very well have been
answered in the
past, because you are not alone in the universe! Other people
have used the same software as you. Other people have bought
the same hardware.
Search the SxS, by clicking
the Search link at the top of the page.
No luck?
Try Google,
fill in the
search field with
likely words, hit return and see what comes up.
What? Still no useful answer? You're out of luck, then. Naw ... perhaps
you just need to practice using
search engines. Use words that are likely to get a response, and
repeat the search refining the keywords each time you until you get
just the responses you want. It's a very good
idea to let "Linux" be the first of them! For example:
How should you post? Here is what
the technical experts (and even many of the list members) want to see:
i) data, data, and data, but not your impressions. That is,
no "narrative description" but instead an exact reproduction,
by copy and paste with the mouse, of each and every datum that
you are basing your ideas of what is going on on. Do not trust
yourself to type! Use the mouse. You will miss data of great
significance to others that will mislead (and possibly annoy) them,
such as a space, a capital letter, a digit instead of a
letter, etc., etc.
ii) This is already implied by the above,
but include debug
logs and/or full error messages (repeat, the originals, not
hand copies). Do not "attach" them. Include them in-line
in the text because people need to see them simultaneously
with your commentary, and in the context of your narrative.
Post a reasonable amount of those logs (rows <= 25). It is also
reasonable to post the logs to a publicly available web page if you
really think the entire log needs to be examined. Just provide a link
to the published log file in your mail. Most list members have access
to the Internet and the interested parties will be able to retrieve it.
The Subject: line of a message is what will first attract people to read it, if it's vague or doesn't describe what's contained within, no one will read your mail. They have better things to do with their life.
However, Subject: lines that're too wordy tend to be irritating.
For example:
Good Subject:
"xinetd failure MDK 8.0, error:"cps time argument not
a number"
Good Subject:
"bind 9.0 RH7.3 fails to cache multiple cnames"
Bad Subject:
"Can't dial to Internet!!! Pulling my hair apart,
nothing works! HELP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Bad Subject:
"HELP!!!! Ftp doesn't work for me at all, how come
!?!?!"
Simply put, try to think of what will best help the reader
when he or she encounters your message to the list. Also think about
who you want to answer. Do you want
a psychiatrist? No? Then avoid "HELP !!!!" as a subject
line. If you want an expert in oracle databases, then post
"oracle vX.Y on RH7.2. How assign passwd?".
When following up to a message, many mail readers provide the facility to quote the original message with each line prefixed by > , as in
In article <1232@foo.bar.com>, sharon@foo.bar.com wrote:
>>>> I think that basketweaving's really catching on,
particularly
>>>> in Pennsylvania. Here's a list of every person in PA
that
>>>> currently engages in it publicly: [..]
This example began to quote a horribly long article, but broke
off and indicated the missing text with ellipses "[..]". That's
excellent posting technique! i.e.
Please, please, remember to do that.
This gives the reader of the new message a perfect idea of exactly what points you were addressing. By including the entire previous message, you'll only annoy your readers, assuming you get any! Who knows what your "yes, I agree" is referring to if you quote all 100 lines of the original text! Maybe you are agreeing that hanging is too good for shoplifters. Maybe you are agreeing that it's a good morning.
Now here's another part of good posting technique:
That means, as you read through the text you are replying to
in your editor, you remove the bits you are not interested
in commenting on, then when you come to a bit you want to
comment on, you leave the relevant sentence in place, add an
empty line, and write your comment right below it, then leave
another empty line.
Then you carry on through the rest of the text. You left the quote and your comment nicely framed and easily comprehensible. Even more importantly, you let somebody new come in and comment on your comment while keeping the framing correct.
Why NOT "top post"? Well, here are some answers:
http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html
In this editor's opinion, you have to understand that you are
not writing a business letter to another company's lawyers,
which is about the only real life situation in which you will
affix the entire previous conversation to the end of your reply!
If you think so, then you are mistaking the nature of the medium
you are in - we likely already have access to your previous
message, thanks to the wonders of electronics, but we might not
be bothered to go and look at it or might have forgotten it
and its detail, so we appreciate a little orienting context in
just the right place, but please not the whole flipping thing.
Note to digest readers:
If you happen to be a digest reader, and you want to reply to a post,
it is very important that you not only trim the unrelated text from
your reply, but also change the subject line to indicate which
particular subject within the digest you happen to be responding to.
"ESR's How to ask smart questions"
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
"Netiquette Guidelines RFC1855"
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
These "Posting Rules" (published under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE) have been assembled/rewritten from various on line sources, it does not claim to be complete, see URLs above, just a quick start.
Special thanks to the authors of the usage guidelines for
comp.os.linux.setup, upon which this guideline is based:
Peter T. Breuer
and Michael Heiming (orginial authors) as well as Bill Unruh, Bit
Twister, Sybren Stuvel, and Peter Karlsson.
Netiquette 2005-03#1
Tim Wunder, Bill Davidson, Doug Hunley and Klaus-Peter Shrage also contributed to revising the guideline to make it suitable for a mailing list as opposed to a usenet newsgroup.
Revision 20050310