On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 02:23:48PM +1200, Yuri de Groot wrote: > My father (61) finds linux difficult because he has moved from > text-based DOS environment to a GUI KDE Linux environment, > and all this new-fangled point and click stuff bothers him!
then by all means, show him the unix commandline and give him an environment that he is comfortable with. > Some long time unix users will see the irony in this :-) is this the time where i should introduce my grandmother (now 84) again? just yesterday i had a long chat with a group of people about this topic (some of them were theatre-actors and writers collecting material to make a play on linux (in german unfortunately)) one of the things mentioned was how my grandma uses linux on the commandline with emacs, LaTeX and mutt. first i had to explain what a commandline was. none of them had a clue. but being artists some of them had a high level understanding of things, and one understood and explained levels of abstraction, where images and pointing would be the simplest level most closely resembling the way we do things every day. words would be the second level used for stuff that you can't describe easely in images. next level is math. and beyond that are states (0 and 1) i didn't understand the end of it (as i said, a high level of understanding) but i never have heared the commandline being explained and understood in this way :-) anyway, the point i want to make is, that my grandmother had no problems learning the commandline because she had not had much exposure to windows before (this was 1994) and she wanted to learn how to work on the computer as i was doing it. greetings, martin. -- looking for a job doing pike programming, sTeam/caudium/pike/roxen training, sTeam/caudium/roxen and/or unix system administration anywhere in the world. -- pike programmer travelling and working in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (stuts|black.linux-m68k).org is.schon.org Martin B�hr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/
