Re: New Suse user..not very impressed so far.

From: Torsten Kaiser (nospamplease_at_pcdweb.de)
Date: 11/29/03 

Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2003 11:02:04 +0100

Hello Garry,

Gearóid Ó Laoi/Garry Lee wrote:

> Installed it a couple of days ago. On a good modern laptop.
>
> Problems.
>
> 1. I still haven't got my diskonkey to work, but I'm still trying stuff on
> the net.

Never heard of this. What is it?

> 2. the use of "root" and "root directory" is confusing.

Just a hint:
"Root" is always meant as a top level in a hierarchy.

- The root directory is the top level of your filestem tree.

- The user root is the top level user in the user level hierarchy.

- The document root is the directory on your harddisk that appears as the
top level in your web server.

> 3. When I press the help programme, as like as not it does not load.

Do you mean the SuSE help menu?

> 4. Programmes may be open on my desktop, and then close and go down to my
> taskbar of their own accord.

Guess you are used to a behaviour of M$-GUI. Unix doesn't need double
clicks, nor grasp control of your pointer when you move something, It's a
question of getting used to a different behaviour of the user interface.

> 5. THe naming of many of the commands in BASH is not very intuitave. Was
> it originally written in another language?

In fact, many of the core commands of Unix were developed in the 1970s,
about a decade before some guy named Bill was contracted to develop an
operating system for a tiny desktop computer with only the very basic
components in it. He obviously knew about Unix and "ported" the idea of it
to the hardware of something like a game console:

- Instead of slashes he used the backslash. This escapes characters in Unix.

- Since networking facilities weren't actually part of his contract, he took
the Unix-Syntax remotemachine:/some/directory for adressing peripheral
devices like a: , c: , lpt1: , com1: in the outer world of his Disk
Operating System.

- He established the facility to load a command shell different form
command.com.

> Also most of the programme
> names are not intuitave. Why call something KDE or so on??

Names in Unix are not marketing-oriented. Only one example.

Before M$ sold their first components of office, there was a complete Office
suite called "Open Access" based on DOS. This application disappeared with
the appearance of Access, a pure monolithic database application requiring
a GUI-application, Billy had "ported" from Apple, limited to record access.

So who gained access to what with Access?

> 6. No Basic supplied.
Look for "bwbasic" in YaST :-))

In the 21st century most people are also interested in modern programming
languages like:

Perl
C/C++
Pascal
Java
PHP
Smalltalk
Fortran
TCL/TK
...

> 7. No database programme apart from address book.

What about a real DBMS?
- MySQL (from YaST)? Quite easy.
- Postgres (fro YaST)? Never used it.
- Oracle (from Oracle)? A bit tricky, but worth it.
 
> I am persisting as I've used computers for 22 years and don't give up
> easily!

Then welcome to the Linux community :-))

Greetings
Torsten Kaiser 

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