On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 19:21 +0100, Steve wrote:
Hi
I've been dabbling with Linux for just over a year and am now consistently using Linux Mint albeit secondary to Windows.
Do you ever run a newbies meeting, I still consider myself as that?
AFAIK there is no newbies course, no series of talks organised specifically for newbies but on the other hand members are usually prepared to help with any problems you may have so come to one of the meets and ask (or ask here).
You could bring a laptop/netbook to one of the pub meets for some hands on - see the website for details. We sometimes have kit meets which is a good time to bring a desktop or server machine.
Also, how is it possible to know (other than the approved Mint/Ubuntu repositories) which repositories/software is going to be ok, I feel like I may be missing out on stuff and in any case even in the approved repos they have disclaimers.
I guess it depends what you mean by OK.
The writers of free software generally do not offer any kind or warranty and some pieces of free software have more bugs than others. When it comes to answering the question "What would be a good piece of software to do X?" you can search on the Internet, in the descriptions in the package manager that comes with your distribution and ask on this list or, for a specialist area, on a list devoted to it.
Once you have one or more candidates you can again read up on the Internet, seek comments from people etc. or just try it out yourself and see how you get on.
If you are asking the question "How do I know package X is not malicious?" then answer is you can get the source code (as used by your distribution) and check, you can compile from the virgin source from whoever wrote the application yourself, or you can hope than enough other people have access to the source that people who would insert malicious code are deterred.
Isn't Linux basically Linux won't most stuff play nicely together ?
Lots of stuff does play nicely but there can be constraints, for example an application may talk to a daemon and requires a certain minimum version of that daemon. The daemon in turns requires at least a certain version of a library and than in turn requires a minimum of a certain version of the kernel.
In general the easiest way to deal with this is to use the repository for your distribution. It looks to me as if Mint is based on Ubuntu which in turn is based on Debian. Debian's package and dependency management is particularly good and, when you ask it to install an application, will install all the other things it depends on for you.
If you want to stray outside that you'll almost certainly find things are more likely to play well if you compile them from source than if you use a binary package designed for a different distribution.
HTH, Steve.