Sudbury, Ontario, Canada
Dan Scott has been a systems librarian at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario since 2006. He contributes to the Evergreen integrated library system and maintains packages for the Fedora Linux distribution.
Dan's research interests include structured data in library system web pages, full-text search in relational database systems, and integrating open source software and methodology into academic institutions.
You can reach Dan at dan@coffeecode.net.
"When you start up emacs it displays a help screen that, inter alia, tells you how to quit."
E_UNNECESSARY_LATIN && E_LACK_OF_EMPATHY
True, if you just run "emacs" without a target file. But if you use emacs to open up a file (which seems like a likely scenario), no, you don't get that. And if you don't happen to be running in a graphical environment, and don't know how to switch to a new VT, then you can easily feel like you're trapped. I can certainly understand how someone brand new to Linux would get frustrated and feel that rebooting was the only option.