(Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk <> wrote:
[...] What it must be like to come up against it in all its modern glory for the first time, without previous basic Unix-type experience, I find it hard to imagine.
It wasn't so bad in 96/97 time, but then the normal way to install was from a CD in the back of a book, not connected to the internet, and trash the machine three times in the first week. After a couple of months, you'd upgraded to a CD of a later one and trashed it rarely.
It's probably got worse, though. I remember being totally lost and confused when I first tried to run KDE and that was when there wasn't much of it.
[Colin's questions]
- Show us the different desktops - KDE, Gnome & others etc., with a
discussion about their differences. Discuss whether its useful to have different desktops installed for different functions. *15) Explain what X windows is. (I think this is what it was called.)
I could go into these in some depth, actually. So far, I have worked on three desktop projects and read more of the standards than I should. Probably this needs to wait until after the more fundamental things, though?
- How to open multiple windows, that reopen where they were opened
before. Is this a problem with my version of Linux, or a KDE issue, or what? Last OS I used that worked properly was OS/2. [I don't think I understand this question.]
I think this is a "session management" question. There are two parts of this:-
1. whatever desktop you are running needs to offer session management KDE and Gnome definitely do, I think GNUstep and XFCE can but might not by default, while most of the smaller ones such as IceWM don't... there is a helper called xsm too, which can let the smaller ones do it.
2. the programs need to answer session management calls. Lots of them do. I think it's in the GNUstep, KDE and Gnome libraries, so they all should. Smaller stand-alone applications (rxvt?) might not.
This is something that even many programmers today don't realise should be done, because they started on systems that don't offer it. I think the last OS I used that did this was Oberon System 3...
...that's the theory, at least. I could cover this in more detail once I have some time to test out what does and doesn't work.
[...]
- How to install fonts. Xandros seems poor here - maybe that's only
Xandros.
The theory is again simple: put the fonts in a directory and call the right font update program. The practice is worse because there are at least four types of fonts used: Postscript bitmaps and vector, TrueType and NFont.