My my, what a lovely ideological war ground this turned out to be. I must say I myself am all for teaching people to fish

However, googling is a difficult skill. It's relatively easy to find details about something you are already familiar with, but quite hard when trying to understand something completely new. For example, googling "xterm" produces the xterm wikipedia page, which is practically useless. So, I tried "basic terminal help" and got this as the first hit: http://newsourcemedia.com/blog/basic-terminal-commands/
Much better, eh.

To continue with the analogy, sometimes, when teaching people to fish, you need to start explaining what the sea is. And that trees grow twigs that can be used as fishing rods. Yelling at them "Here's a twig and some fishing line, now go catch some supper" rarely leads into much anything.

Still. I learned this stuff some ten odd years ago, trying to install Debian Woody on an obsolete piece of ¤##%#"%#¤". Of course the X server didn't start, and I had no clue why. Eventually I figured out that I should try editing XFree86.conf... but with what. All the tutorials told me to use emacs, so that's what I did. Except that, of course, I couldn't use it at all (still can't today, I found vim and stuck to it). Couldn't exit it either. Oh well. Long story shot: some 10 fresh installs and about as many days later I had a working system, no questions asked.

So... I'm a bit thin on patience with those whose first instinct is to ask for help when in trouble, instead of taking it as a challenge. Still, to all those of you, who feel like me about this, I advise you: Don't send those people naked into the jungle. At least give them a knife, warn them about the snakes, and suggest skinning something for a garb.

Oh, some one said, that linux is not for the lazy. WRONG. Linux is precisely for those, who are constructively lazy. For those, who want the problem solved for good with one sitting, instead of tackling it over and over again. The opposite of which is self-damagingly lazy people, who never want to bother with anything, for any period of time, regardless of the benefit.
Proper laziness is a virtue, not a sin!