In fact, there are far too many of those messages of the type "If you unselect updates, they won't get installed" in Windoze, so people stop reading them and just click OK, which makes them useless.

It's obvious that not too many people would want that. The point is, you can use LyX to write a document, but still automatically generate documents on a server without needing Adobe Illustrator on it.

I think that you may be underestimating the resources required to implement this "correct" design, and the system resources required to sotre the implementation.

Or maybe underestimating the sheer diversity of possible exploitations of system power.

One suggested topic - wildcards. If I had to guess I'd guess they follow somebody's definition of regular expressions but most people might need a bit of help (and I might be totally off base and need as much help as they do).

I've had a go this evening making the wiki Terminal app page easier to read and added a bit about wildcards,

http://wiki.maemo.org/Terminal

Cheers
Rich

@j.s - not underestimating at all; expecting the system to be designed better is just what I do

I'm a Linux noob, but I'm very familiar with a DOS prompt from way back in the dark days before Windows (or Linux) to include using Novell Netware as my fileserver which had a "GUI" that consisted of ANSI characters.

Of course you can get in trouble working at that level of an operating system, just like you can get yourself in trouble opening the hood of a car and unplugging different things on your engine. But a global rule that noobs shouldn't use terminal is a bit drastic. Like I said, I'm new to Linux, but in just using GUI methods I've already "messed up" my N810 twice to the point that I had to resort to the terminal to resolve the problem. I guess I could've just reflashed it, but that's not exactly for the faint of heart either. In my career as a network engineer, I've also known plenty of people who don't know what a DOS prompt is, but yet they managed to mess up their Windows installation quite nicely without ever leaving the "safe" GUI.

Anyone who isn't practicing proper backup techniques of any system are simply not being realistic when it comes to operating electronic devices, whether dinking around in terminal, DOS prompt, etc. or not. If a complete noob wants to dink around in terminal, and (on the very rare chance) ends up putting the right combination of commands and options together to delete everything, and doesn't have a current backup of their system, well...I would have to call them....a customer. And they're welcome hire me ($ CHA-CHING $) as a consultant to correct these issues at any time.

-- Chris