Re: Making Linux Easy for Newbies
- From: Mike <root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:26:44 -0500
On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:11:39 -0800, scotaron wrote:
Hi folks I have dabbled with various linux distros for a few years
Impressed with some of Them Mandrake,Suse mostly. But whatever version
i use they all seem to be made as difficult as possible for new users
trying to move to Linux from Windows.
<snip>
Hello All,
My one and only qualification for commenting on this thread is that I am a
complete noobie to Linux. I'm an electronics kinda guy not a programmer or
sysadmin, but Many years ago, I did service Sun systems and had few
Unix classes.
Anyway, I had volunteered to build a scoreboard for a youth basketball
league that we are starting up at my church. Church indicates VERY low
budget, so I figgered It'd be cheaper and easier if I could get a Linux
box running and write a little control program to send the data (time,
scores, fouls, that kind of stuff) to the LARGE remote display that I
built. Boy was I wrong! I spent way too much time finding a distro that
looked suitable then finding a usable compiler with an IDE.
I tried Ubuntu, but it was a little flakey when working with the network
interface and I had enter a password for everything I wanted to do. Wow,
that's wierd, no root or admin login, forget that nonsense. Ok, let's try
something else. Ahh, this Mephis works pretty good, I think I better stick
with this.
I used synaptic to see what kind of programming languages were available.
The first one I found was something called python. It installed very
easily, but, Hmm no icon on the desktop, no entry in K menu. I wonder how
I'm supposed to run this thing? Oh well, I don't have time to mess with
it that much since I don't know the language anyway. I couldn't find
anything else in synaptic, so I downloaded Euphoria for Linux from their
site, at least I know this language enough to get my program written if I
can get it installed. Ew! They had a script that was supposed to install
it automatically, but no real instructions on how to install manually. Too
bad, cause the script just generated some error messages and didn't
install anything. Well, I kept looking and found something called Hbasic.
At this point I don't remember what porblems I had trying to get that
working, I think I got lost trying to compile it, but anyway I finally
gave up on that as well. Now this is getting silly, Am I really that
stupid? Ok, back to synaptic. After a what seemed like a couple hours of
scolling through the thousands of packages listed, I spotted something
called Gambas. It said it featured the BASIC language and an IDE. Just
what I need. A miracle! It installed flawlessly and even put an entry in K
menu under the development submenu. I'm finally working on my little
control program.
Well, sometime in middle of all that, In order to actually get the thing
done, I gave up and decided to use an "embedded PC" board that I
had. I wrote the control program using Turbo Pascal under DOS and all
is well. I had some time left so I used the free version of Visual Basic
that I had downloaded from from M$ a few months earlier and got another
version of the control program working, so they have choice of how to
control the display.
I'm still going to finish the Linux version just for grins, but what a
circus to get this far. Now to fight the font mess in Linux so I
can use my LED display font. I figued I could just copy the font to the
fonts directory and away I go. Oh no, not a chance. There are fonts in
atleast 4 different directories and a lot those are the same ones. When I
finally figured out which set of fonts Gambas was using I was able to use
my font in my program, but alas, it doesn't display properly. Funny tho,
it displays just fine in Open Office Word. Btw, the only way I could
figure out to make Gambas see the font was to reboot the system. I'm sure
there's some other way, but it's much quicker and considering the help
system, easier to just reboot. I'm used to that anyway.
The filemanager, K something, refuses to open directories in the same window
now, Grrr, and no, "Open folders in seperate windows" is not checked.
Oh yeah, what's with this partition editor, it gives all these cool things
to do with partitions and then grays out the one I want to use even if the
partition isn't mounted. I could go on and on about all the little things
which make it frustrating for us noobies, but I believe I made my point.
The bottom line line is, No Linux is not so easy to use for noobies unless
we want to use it as it is installed out of the box. Until it's refined
enough for Joe 6 pack to use, It'll never have the support from hardware
manufacturers that is becoming more and more important every day as
peripherals get more and more complex. I don't think I want to even try to
get my ATI all in Wonder TV working.
I guess I'm just getting too old to go back to the old days and try to
remember a boatload of new arcane commands, but it sure is fun to play
with if I don't HAVE to get something done.
Mike
.
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