On Sat, 2010-12-25 at 19:02 +0000, [email protected] wrote: > Whereas Banshee, which Ubuntu is shipping out of the box with in > 11.04, can do it by default, me thinks.
Arrgh! This makes the problem worse! Technically it's wonderful but .... This is the scenario: You have seen the advertising, or maybe you are being told by a friend that Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread. Naturally you are VERY suspicious. You know Windows, and you know that it is the only reliable system (Oh, there's the Mac, but that's a bit of a niche market isn't it?). But you do go on the website and take a look around Ubuntu. You do a site-search for iTunes and what you see is daunting! Right at the top is an article about Virtual Box .... maybe you've been put off already. A bit further down is something about Rhythmbox, but it only describes a music player and says nothing about whether or not you can use your iPod - which is what you really want to know. Right at the bottom of the searches you do see that Rhythmbox can work with iPods. Did you get that far? If you do a search for iPod you do get some far more helpful results, but I think something on the front page taking you straight to something like https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/switching/C/applications-equivalents.html would solve a lot of problems. That page maybe needs a bit of an update, but it's really helpful and needs to be very prominent. This scenario gets far far worse if you use your favourite search engine to try something like 'iTunes Ubuntu' on the web. You end up looking at masses of bewildering mostly out-of-date stuff including a lot of commandline instructions. You won't ever look at Ubuntu again. Just what you'd always thought - Linux is strictly for Geeks!!! Let me give a further illustration. My sister is very new to Ubuntu. Her ..... (this is complicated) Alex is my sister's partner's daughter, so I'll just call her Alex. Alex is highly computer literate - on Windows. She and her partner bought my sister a webcam for Christmas. She wouldn't buy a Microsoft one that was offered because she assumed it needed Windows. She got a Connexant one because Google told her it would be compatible. She phoned me - I wasn't at my computer at the time - how could she test it? I said use the Software Centre to get Cheese - that will test it. If I'd looked at the 'Software Centre' (which I've never used) I wouldn't have told her that. She ended up looking for drivers for the Connexant using Google and found a bewildering array of stuff about Linux commandline instructions. She has never used the commandline in Windows so this was a foreign language to her. She left a message on my answering machine, and when I phoned back she had gone home, and I got my sister, who knew nothing about what Alex had tried. I made things worse by not being at my keyboard again. I quickly talked my sister through firing up the terminal and doing 'sudo apt-get install cheese' and then 'cheese'. As you would expect, the webcam worked out of the box. But of course when Alex came back and my sister told her what she had done Alex said 'I'd never have been able to do that!' The thing is, Cheese fails to come up as an installable in the Software Centre (on 10.04) when you search for cheese (why?). We need to do something about that and maybe lots of other things! I know this seems trivial - to Alex and my sister it was not! Maybe some kind of webcam app needs to be pre-installed on Ubuntu by default ... Searching the Ubuntu website for 'webcam' gives all the instructions ... the very first page tells you to test using Cheese. It tells you the obvious way to get Cheese .... commandline!!! Now how good is that for the newbie coming from Windows? Another time, I had to get my sister's Canon camera working. F-Spot is fine - but you need to install gphoto2 .... How would a newbie get that far? I don't know the answer to questions like that. I hope you've had the patience to work this through to the end, but I think all of us need to be getting into the shoes of the average Windows user. Danté, you accused me of being geeky the other day - and you were right! I'm trying hard to leave my geekiness behind and I'm fast finding that much of the online documentation is very geeky. Regards, Barry -- What do you see when you use your Computer? Same old thing? ...There IS a Better Way! Ubuntu! _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
