Adam Bower <abower@thebow To: Ricardo Campos ery.co.uk> corez23@linuxmail.org cc: KEV@hartmann.dk, 25/10/01 15:18 main@lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [Alug] Locked directories - Sympathy
/ I did try Mandrake briefly in the past but I had a completely broken release (6.1?) which I had paid about 30quid for, I purchased it because it was supposed to be good for people new to linux but I found it was a complete waste of time/money/effort. I have found that Mandrake is easily the most buggy of distros which is why I couldn't reccommend it to newbies. It might be going in the correct direction for getting newbies involved but every single release seems to have some fairly bad bugs which trip up people who are new to the OS. /
I have to agree with you, I have now seriously tried Suse 6.4 and MDK 8.0 and while Mandrake appears to do a slicker job, anyone struggling with the learning curve (like me) doesn't need to be dumped with inexplicable bugs. My next step is Suse 7.2 by the way.
/
At the moment in other browser windows, I am looking at Slackware and
Debian on Cheeplinux.com . If you want something done properly, do it yourself. (stop sniggering you lot- at least I'll LEARN how to do it properly)
Either would be a good choice, SuSE is also quite good but can be a bit weird in its mentality (well yasts mentallity anyway). I would say go for Debian but then I am completely biased and a deb head so I would say that :-) /
I already have the disks for Deb (potato)but I haven't psyched myself up for that one yet. I need a confidence gain first. When I'm ready I'll lug (pun, sorry) my kit down to a meeting and hopefully see how it should be done. Anyway, that's the future.
/
(you're right, I don't have any patience)
My reasoning for Deb or Slackware is that the more you're hand is held
along the way, the less able you are to fix it when it goes wrong.
Very true, what I find alarming about Mandrake is it seems to be going the way of Windows, it seems to make broad generalisations that work for 50% of the people but cause the other 50% to have some kind non-specific sporadic software failure with it with no clues as to the cause of the problem. / Once again I agree, when I'm ready and feeling brave I'll step up to a 'real' distro and take the pain.
/
(read- I'm afraid of making myself look a pratt!)!!!!!!!!!!! :<))
I already have! :) But then I have no shame, and besides, that's the
only way I learn. It makes the experts look good too! ;) Luckily there have been some people on-list who have given me some excellent pointers- not just RTFM, but "this is how to find the manual, and this is how to read it". So... thanks y'all for your patience!!!
No-one on this list should ever feel a pratt or be afraid of asking questions, dumb questions are welcomed and encouraged and if anyone flames a newbie on here for asking a silly question they will be pounced on by me and feel the wrath of my Lart stick. /
OK Adam, I've got to ask, what's a Lart stick? a google search only slightly informative ;<) Thanks for the reassurances by the way, I'm sure all us 'newbies' feel a little safer in our nests.
Cheers
Kev
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 KEV@hartmann.dk wrote:
No-one on this list should ever feel a pratt or be afraid of asking questions, dumb questions are welcomed and encouraged and if anyone flames a newbie on here for asking a silly question they will be pounced on by me and feel the wrath of my Lart stick. /
OK Adam, I've got to ask, what's a Lart stick? a google search only slightly informative ;<) Thanks for the reassurances by the way, I'm sure all us 'newbies' feel a little safer in our nests.
I lart stick is a "luser automatice re-adjustment tool" carried by sys-admins the world over. A luser is a computer user who can't be told and won't listen (read manager) and will always be at the level of useless but refuses to be told that they are that dumb. i.e. they reckon that they know what they are on about.
The lart stick itself (sometimes referred to as clue by four) is a large stick sometimes with nails stuck in it. baseball bats, metal pipes, cricket bats, swords etc. make great lart sticks. When you have to re-adjust your lusers you apply said stick with great vigor about their person until they understand or stop breathing.
HTH :) Adam
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Adam Bower wrote:
I lart stick is a "luser automatice re-adjustment tool" carried by
I've just had it pointed out that I have now indeed completely lost the plot. That should read "luser attitude readjustment tool" never mind, the correct authoritys have been informed that I am now completely mad.
/me hits self with lart many times
Adam
On 25-Oct-01 KEV@hartmann.dk wrote:
<snip/>
Either would be a good choice, SuSE is also quite good but can be a bit weird in its mentality (well yasts mentallity anyway). I would say go for Debian but then I am completely biased and a deb head so I would say that :-)
The best way to tame yast is to take out its SuSe Config scripts when they start to annoy
eg
/sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix.bak
where I trimmed it wings for its messing with my postfix mail server settings
but these SuSEconfig files are very rarely a problem in-fact I think SuSE has a distinct advantage over say debian in that you have your keyboard mappings setup for you and that is just a glaringly obvious example. These days it backs up any files before modifying them which is MUCH better than the old yast.
A SuSe machine is up and running in no time and pretty user friendly. I am now moving over to debian mainly because of "apt get" and its simpler booting scripts and its layout is friendly also SuSE seem to release a distribution every two months and the stable ones seem to occur late in a release cycle (eg 5.2-5.4 and 6.2-6.4, while 6.0 was poor and 7.0 had some serious show stoppers such as my postfix problem unless you downloaded the rpm patches)
I shall keep my main box SuSE as they have done so many nice things to my setup (my changes are all stored so they will be distribution agnostic). From my experience so far I think SuSE is a good choice for new Linux users and its annoying habits are at least manageable, where as recommending Debian to a new user may leave them with the opinion that you can't map the Home and End keys on your bash/terminal environment to take you to the start and end of the line.
This is just an example of the sort of thing a debian first time Linux user may never do but some time working with a SuSe or Mandrake like distribution will give you ideas that this sort of thing can be done.
To summarise some pre-configured settings are useful. My reasoning being that if you don't know that you can to set them, you never will set them. These problems are compounded if the settup is complex.
My biggest problem with Linux in particular and Unix in general is not that its poorly documented as thats not the case, my problem is I often don't know what I want to do so don't know what to read to solve my problems.
Hope everyone follows my argument for some hand holding,
Regards
Owen
Linux Newbie tip
check out the "alias" command as a start to configuring your bash environment.
<snip/>
No-one on this list should ever feel a pratt or be afraid of asking questions, dumb questions are welcomed and encouraged and if anyone flames a newbie on here for asking a silly question they will be pounced on by me and feel the wrath of my Lart stick.
I just wanted to second this, although your lart stick business seems a little harsh to this bleeding hart liberal.
<snip/>
Date: 25-Oct-01 Time: 20:30:07
I was going to reply to the whole mail but after I read the reply it was so boring I decided to only answer one bit!
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 oms101@freeuk.com wrote:
annoying habits are at least manageable, where as recommending Debian to a new user may leave them with the opinion that you can't map the Home and End keys on your bash/terminal environment to take you to the start and end of the line.
Why would you want to map Home and End to take you to the start and end of a line? you would use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E as it will work on Bash on any system? Anyhow a quick bash reference...
Ctrl+A goto beginning of line Ctrl+E goto the end of the line Ctrl+D EOF, logout if there is nothing on the command line Ctrl+R Reverse search through your command history Ctrl+S stops you terminal output Ctrl+Q recontinue terminal output, this is useful to know when you terminal appears stuck Ctrl+W delete previous word Ctrl+H delete previous character Ctrl+K kill to end of line Ctrl+U kill to beginning of line Ctrl+Z stop a job Ctrl+C kill the running program, or the current command line without executing it Ctrl+T transpose the characters behind the cursor Ctrl+F move forward one character at a time Ctrl+B move back one character at a time Ctrl+P kill current line and enter the last one that was typed Ctrl+L redraw the screen Ctrl+J same as return Ctrl+O same as return Ctrl+M same as return Esc+F move forward one word Esc+B move backward one word
Ermm, that is quite a bit longer than what I meant to type, and also be careful with the Ctrl+M or O or J ones as they do something else that I can't remember at the moment and I cant be bothered to look up.
I just wanted to second this, although your lart stick business seems a little harsh to this bleeding hart liberal.
Its what seperates the sys-admins from the programmers ;-)
Adam
On 25-Oct-01 Adam Bower wrote:
I was going to reply to the whole mail but after I read the reply it was so boring I decided to only answer one bit!
Thanks for keeping it interesting and thanks for the bash quick referance that I never knew still I would like to map Home and End even though I now know about these new Ctrl+? Keycombinations, Both Adam and MJR thank you, but I still think that these commands are a little hidden from the end user who may find the number of things in a linux box already overwelming so why sould not the home and end keys on a standard PC keyboard be mapped for a begginer (or even someone with experiance) even if there is anouther more standard way.
Regards
Owen
On Thu, 25 Oct 2001 oms101@freeuk.com wrote:
annoying habits are at least manageable, where as recommending Debian to a new user may leave them with the opinion that you can't map the Home and End keys on your bash/terminal environment to take you to the start and end of the line.
Why would you want to map Home and End to take you to the start and end of a line? you would use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E as it will work on Bash on any system? Anyhow a quick bash reference...
Ctrl+A goto beginning of line Ctrl+E goto the end of the line Ctrl+D EOF, logout if there is nothing on the command line Ctrl+R Reverse search through your command history Ctrl+S stops you terminal output Ctrl+Q recontinue terminal output, this is useful to know when you terminal appears stuck Ctrl+W delete previous word Ctrl+H delete previous character Ctrl+K kill to end of line Ctrl+U kill to beginning of line Ctrl+Z stop a job Ctrl+C kill the running program, or the current command line without executing it Ctrl+T transpose the characters behind the cursor Ctrl+F move forward one character at a time Ctrl+B move back one character at a time Ctrl+P kill current line and enter the last one that was typed Ctrl+L redraw the screen Ctrl+J same as return Ctrl+O same as return Ctrl+M same as return Esc+F move forward one word Esc+B move backward one word
Ermm, that is quite a bit longer than what I meant to type, and also be careful with the Ctrl+M or O or J ones as they do something else that I can't remember at the moment and I cant be bothered to look up.
I just wanted to second this, although your lart stick business seems a little harsh to this bleeding hart liberal.
Its what seperates the sys-admins from the programmers ;-)
Adam
Adam "a funny thing about regret is, that it's better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done"
Date: 28-Oct-01 Time: 11:44:26
Owen:
[...] I still think that these commands are a little hidden from the end user who may find the number of things in a linux box already overwelming so why sould not the home and end keys on a standard PC keyboard be mapped for a begginer (or even someone with experiance) even if there is anouther more standard way.
Of course! We should ignore the fact that there is already a standard and simple way of accessing these features and provide absolute compatibility with one other operating system's command line! We should map the F-keys to copy one character or a run of characters from the previous shell entry and abandon the shell history too!
Sorry for the sarcasm, but feeping creaturism annoys me. We already have a ferpectly pine way to do this, documented copiously in the manual pages, so why duplicate it? Surely mapping keys which only exist on some keyboards is a user choice, so don't be surprised if you have to make an active choice to do it. It's "Debian GNU/Linux" not (and IMO should not be) "Debian Linux for Windows Users".
It's different, but it's not wrong. Surely any experienced user would skim the manual? ;-)
MJR
Sorry for the sarcasm, but feeping creaturism annoys me. We already have a ferpectly pine way to do this, documented copiously in the manual pages, so why duplicate it? Surely mapping keys which only exist on some keyboards is a user choice, so don't be surprised if you have to make an active choice to do it.
This is exactly why I think Debian is not the way for a Linux begginer maybe I am experienced enough to use it now but this thread illustrates exactly why mandrake and SuSe are better suited to a Linux begginer. I am with you on the issue of feature creep (one of my favourite computer terms). Your comments to me are totally fair and yes I should get around to reading some Debian setup documentation. In my defence I quote
To summarise some pre-configured settings are useful. My reasoning being that if you don't know that you can to set them, you never will set them. These problems are compounded if the setup is complex.
fare enough for people to graduate to debian but begginers? The same problem exists not just with UNIX like environments and with software, but also buying fruit and a hole series of things in this world. If you don't know Okra exists you will never cook with it let alone perfect your cooking.
Regards
Owen
Date: 28-Oct-01 Time: 16:08:14
Owen:
This is exactly why I think Debian is not the way for a Linux begginer
Why do you assume that *all* Linux beginners know Windows 9x? I didn't and people on platforms other than x86 won't either. Debian's perfectly good for a beginner -- copious documentation, fairly simple installation including the documentation, wide range of available prepackaged software. The two things it misses are a little work on the installer to make it more robust and some good easily-selected graphical desktop installations.
The same problem exists not just with UNIX like environments and with software, but also buying fruit and a hole series of things in this world. If you don't know Okra exists you will never cook with it let alone perfect your cooking.
I agree entirely, but we can't start off by assuming that everyone is a master of Greek cookery. It must be more accessible than that and one of the crying shames is that many Linux distributions are in danger of appealing to the Windows power user rather than the new Linux user.
Owen:
but these SuSEconfig files are very rarely a problem in-fact I think SuSE has a distinct advantage over say debian in that you have your keyboard mappings setup for you and that is just a glaringly obvious example. [...]
What are you talking about, man? It asks you first thing in the install what console keymap you have. XF86Setup (which is dead for X4, I know, but I've not seen what replaces it yet) asks you for X.
scripts and its layout is friendly also SuSE seem to release a distribution every two months and the stable ones seem to occur late in a release cycle (e
Debian releases a distribution every day ;-)
annoying habits are at least manageable, where as recommending Debian to a new user may leave them with the opinion that you can't map the Home and End keys on your bash/terminal environment to take you to the start and end of th e line.
Um, yuck. ^A and ^E, like $DEITY intended.
MJR
-
Adam Bower -
KEV＠hartmann.dk -
MJ Ray -
oms101＠freeuk.com