[techtalk] request for ideas

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 11:06:40AM -0400 or thereabouts, Julia Frizzell wrote:
> At 12:44 PM -0700 10/11/99, Vinnie Surmonde wrote:
> 
> >Plus, the idea that GUI == easier is...hmm..not exactly wrong..a GUI can
> >be easier under many circumstances, but a GUI is not necessarily easier
> >under all circumstances.
> 
> To be honest, I think GUI might actually *confuse* newbies to Linux. 
> I know it's confusing me. I'm thinking of tossing everything out and 
> starting over, this time installing everything that I want and 
> nothing that I don't.

You don't need to do that, I don't think. You can do what's been 
suggested in another thread and use control-alt-F1 to get yourself
to a virtual terminal which is not running X, if you just want
to do that. :)

On the other hand, going through the list of packages and deciding
'yes', 'no', is a good way to find what's there, and most Linux
installations these days will tell you "You need B if you're going
to install A". 

> I'm a relatively experienced computer user -- I do tech support for a 
[snip]
> But Linux *scares* me. (why, I've no idea.) I've asked questions 
> here, and gotten answers that I didn't know what to do with. You make 
> it all sound so *simple* -- just add this line to your xxx file, blah 
> blah blah.

Ooh, I hate it when I get answers that are apparently simple to the
answerer, but which make no sense to me. My big break-through with
computers was pinning down friends and repeatedly asking them to
explain their explanations and the words they used in them, and the
concepts attached to them. Keep asking. Honestly. I know I don't
mind when someone asks, "Can you say that again, but this time explain 
what it means?" because I do it all the time.

Someone came up with a list of "if they ask these kind of questions,
they shouldn't use Linux", but I must disagree with that. You 
should hear my questions :) 

I think part of it may be that the questions here are from people
having problems, which means something is set up wrongly (or just
'differently') somewhere, so the answers are referring to changing
files quite a bit. I changed loads of entries in config files when
I first installed Linux, and now I barely touch them. 

But is part of it also 'not knowing commands'? I can relate to
this from using Gnome. I got Gnome because I could at last use X.
And while I'm happy with the command-line, I know very little about 
the programs that are available for X. And finding them is the devil 
of a job.

Eventually (and this may help others, I hope!) I resorted to a command
I know and rely on: 'top', which shows you the processes running on
the machine. I started a terminal, set top running, (it's not a once-
only thing, it changes its display as different programs start, stop,
go to sleep and so on) waited for things to settle down, and then just 
started loads of things from the Gnome menus one after the other and 
watched to see what programs suddenly showed up on the top output :)
What shows up in the right-hand field is the program that's running,
and the arguments its running with. Now, something like netscape is
a pain, because when you type netscape, it goes away and starts something
else, and both the type you type and the second thing show up on top,
but it helps narrow it down!

This gave me an idea of the programs, and then I could go find them
in either (deep breath, here) the manual, info, gnome's help system,
or the /usr/doc directory (which is, I find, more use than any of
the other things at all). 'cd' into it, and list the contents, and
then each of those is a directory with information in it. They're
not all wonderful, but quite a few have short FAQs or trouble-shooting
lists in there.

But not knowing what's there that will help achieve a particular
aim is a pain in the neck. I can sympathise on that one :)

> people have told me to read various HOWTOs -- so I did. And was even 
> more confused than before! HOWTOs, at least the ones I've read, all 
> assume a level of comfort with the system that I don't have yet. Or a 
> level of experience I'm nowhere near.

I think this is very common. I tend to find that if I am struggling
with something, and I periodically look back at a HOWTO, I understand
a line or section more every so often. Like, a week later, not five
minutes later. HOWTOs are, I think, great for people who know 'what 
they want to do' and just aren't sure they're covering everything in 
the route there. But unless everything you're told to do in a HOWTO works 
first time, you're stuck, in my experience. They're more for achieving
an end than introducing a program or explaining a concept.

I'm watching all the people who said they followed things through with
a HOWTO and feeling mildly envious, actually :)

> But back to the GUI question -- I think having a GUI interface lulls 
> a newbie into thinking "oh, this is just like Windows/MacOS" and it's 
> really not. While there may be graphics on the screen, Linux (at 

Yes. I am not familiar with Windows or MacOS, but I do question how
useful straight 'translations' are. Saying "Use 'ls' for 'dir'" isn't
really enough: it doesn't tell you about the wondrous options that
make 'ls' so useful when you start combining them at the commandline
(Okay, 'list all the files, but sort them by what kind of file they
are as well as alphabetically, and then put the results in colour so
all the mp3s show up together and all the directories show up together'
(*) isn't necessarily -useful-, but the principle applies :))
because things like 'cd' mean different things to unix and Windows,
I think it's potentially even more confusing. 

Similarly, whilst a friend of mine was awed at the way Gnumeric
imitates things from (erm...) Excel (?), as soon as it came to
moving windows around or expecting to download something and just
click it to install it, things were a just a -little- bit different...

> since I like computers and like to play with them, I'll probably be 
> poking around more in Linux once it's all set up the way I want it to 
> be.

I think, from my recent experience with X alone, it's not that I
don't know what I want doing. I just don't know what commands are
there to do it already. Does that sound familiar?

Someone else mentioned lists of packages for particular jobs, since
none of the program names were familiar or obvious. (The joke in
pine's name - pine is not elm - only makes sense if you know that
elm is for reading email, for example.) Is that the problem you're 
having? Trying to find things that are probably there already but 
without knowing how to track them down?

Telsa

* For those who wondered what on earth the ls options I mentioned
were: -X is grouping by the extension, alphabetically, and --color
is the colour one. So 'ls -X --color'. Which is quite, quite vile :)

************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org