Re: Making Linux Easy for Newbies

mike wrote:

Mike wrote:
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


My experience was similar to yours.

I played with a program called Xbasic. It's
kinda like Visual basic in
structure. And it has source code compatible
compiler/interpreters for
both linux and Windows. I thought this was
gonna be the tool that
facilitated my transition from Windows to Linux.
But alas, I never did
get Linux configured well enough to make the
transition. I encountered a roadblock at every
turn, got frustrated and gave up...about a dozen
times. But Xbasic was pretty cool. mike

I have fooled around a little with Visual TCL
(VTCL). It comes in a Windows version also. I
seems to be pretty good. At least it keeps my
old neurons firing a little. There is
documention on the net but I would really like to
have an actual book that I could take to the gym
or read elsewhere.
.

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