Judith,
I want to present you the title of the most active newbie in the list. As a
matter of fact, I'm unsubcribing because I can't stand hundreds of msgs in
my poor 56k conn, half of them yours. (This is a half-joke: I'm really
unsubscribing, but not due to your msgs.)
As a matter of fact, your attitude is one that should be followed by
other Linux users, newbies and experts alike: not only do you discuss your
own problems, but you also answer other's newbies doubts - when you know
how- and raise interesting questions such as the the future Linux
development as an alternative to Window$.
While I agree mostly with everything you and tazmun wrote, I think two
questions are crucial: attitude and standatization (is that spelled right?
Forgive my English)
Attitude- the attitude of seasoned Linux users towards newbies.
Unfortunately, most either have the RTFM approach- and most newbies doesn't
know WHERE to get the manuals, let alone read them. This attitude reflects
in the way Linux upgrades are planned and released, and even in the way some
people with good hearts answer:
"[newbie] I just installed mandrake 8 and I want to install Acrobat
Reader so I can view the pdf help files. What should I do?"
"[expert] dld the rpm and as root rpm-i it or taz -zxfv the tar.gz then
./INSTALL"
I'm sure someone who just came from Windows, and had not the chance to
read anything about Linux beforehand will think that that "expert" is indeed
a hacker trying to get some virus in to his computer. A typical Window$ user
will know nothing about shells, command line, man pages, info, root,
tarballs or rpms. And altough there are lots of documentation freely
available on the internet, it's just way too difficult to a newbie to know
WHAT and WHERE to read FIRST.
Second is Standartization. The real difficultie for newbie linuxers is
NOT the command line. Anyone who can type and read can use a comand line.It
may be awkward and ugly, but it is usable. The difficultie is the lack of
standartization about configuring a linux system. In which directory the
configuration files goes? In which format they are written? What do they do?
When this app crashes, where can I see the error log/ restore old settings?
None of this are standart across the different components of a Linux system,
and they differ even more across different distros. It is just painful for a
newbie to memorize which file should be a script (in which shell?), a
function, a plain text file (in what format?), where it is and what it does.
I understand that many of these are features actually buried deep within
Linux structure, and they provide a good part of the Linux power and
safeness. But is also what keeps Linux from getting to the masses. This is
specially true for the GUIs or WMs . They're quite difficult to configure
for the average user- look at that guy who can't kill the eyes applet in
KDE. Gnome is still buggy. Mine has stopped logging out for no apparent
reason.Suppose I din'nt know about CTRL-ALT-BKSP?
So that is my call to Linux developers which seek to make Linux a viable
alternative to Window$. Such as Mandrake, KDE and Gnome developers. It's not
about changing Linux so that it's ease to use. It's about providing a LAYER
of ease of use for newbies, a layer where configuration is easy and standart
across ALL linux components - the shell, the path, permissions, security,
windows managers, mounting devices, networking, applications, X Window, ALL.
It shouldn't be a graphical gadget configuring tool: if the configuration is
truly standart, anyone can write a tool that will read and write the
necessary file(s). Advanced users could just ignore this layer. This is the
true reason window$ is popular: you don't have to have a precise knowledge
of the system workings to use it. If Linux can manage this without taking
away its power and features, then, and only then it will be a real
competitor to Microshaft. Probably then it will sue Linux by being
anti-american and anti-capitalist (well I'm not american anyway, and noone
ever asked me if I wanted to be capitalist) or will hire Linus,Alan Cox and
the other Linux developers for a billion dollars a day. But that's another
story...
That said, I would thank all the people who take the time to answer
newbies questions in this and any other places. Tux owns much to you
all.:-^)
--Jeferson L. Zacco aka Wooky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linux registered user #221896
-------------------------------------
Computers are used to solve problems that wouldn't if computers weren't
invented in the first place.
