Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey 499
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
isn't this... (Score:2, Interesting)
And if theyre smart enough to download and install a distro they sure as hell are smart enough to look up some documentation ahead of time.
Fear of fdisk (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, my greatest fear back when I was a n00b in '94 was if I got everything in fdisk right when trying to do a dual-boot install.
It got worse when I realized I mucked up the first time around!
Offtopic: Slashdot should Coralize popular links (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:.so hell (Score:1, Interesting)
Sadly Linux developers have become so enamored by DSO's that I don't think they even know how to do anything else. Static libraries are "old tech" and we can't possibly use them in our New! Shiny! Linux! can we? So instead we get DSO's scattered all over the system, ready to change their API and ABI at a moments notice and break stuff for you. Silly.
Bull (Score:3, Interesting)
If there was ONE THING that fascinated me, then it was the blinking prompt, inviting me to just try -anything-
I LOVED it, when I found out about a new command, such as PEEK/POKE.
People are like, born CURIOUS. If it fears you, you have more issues than a GUI can solve.
Dread.
Re:Please.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, on the latest SuSE release, just browse into /media/floppy. It just works; no mounting required. To someone who has never used any computer, that would be even more intuitive than "A:\".
The same goes for USB thumb drives. The biggest problem I had with this new feature was letting go of my years of conditioning (including needing to "eject" a plug&play device in Windows) that I had to mount or unmount the device at all.
Re:symphony OS (Score:3, Interesting)
The problems with shared libraries boil down to exactly two things:
The first means that if you do get a binary from somewhere, chances are it'll be missing a library it needs. Why? Because rather than add a foo_func2() function, the library author added a parameter to foo_func() and broke backwards compatibility. Because they modified the size of a struct that the app wasn't even using anyway. Because the library has a ludicrously fast release cycle and provides new versions every 5 minutes.
The second means there's no baseline which people can target. Instead people scout around, find a library which looks good and use it, only to discover that said library isn't actually packaged anywhere or breaks backwards compatibility every five minutes so the packages which do exist are always of a too new or too old version.
The problems are worsened considerably by the "not my problem" attitude which means free software authors typically say "I provide the source! It's your distributions job to make it easy to install!" which is a totally bogus attitude, and one that not having distributions MacOS and Windows don't suffer at all.
SymphonyOS doesn't have this problem because nobody uses it and it has only toy applications. There's no such thing as a distro there.
None of the above problems can be solved with fancy linker/package manager tricks I'm afraid. It requires a developer education push similar to the usability push GNOME started a few years ago. So there's no quick fix, sorry.
Re:Please.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in around 1993, the Internet came to the place I was living at the time, in Northern California. My roommate and I were big BBS users, so we were all over that, and signed up the instant that CRL offered service.
What they offered was a dial-in, UNIX command prompt. You were only allowed to run one command at a time, and they didn't offer PPP or SLIP for years, perhaps never. And they didn't ship a manual of any type. You got a dialup number and a login, and you were left with the prompt:
crl>
So what now? We had no bloody CLUE what to do. So my roommate started typing each letter, by itself, one at a time:
a
b
c
Like that. One of the commands hung; I think it might have been b or c: I'm thinking that it was some sort of early calculator program. Suddenly we didn't have anything. I had a thought, and suggested control-Z, which is the EOF character for DOS. This actually worked, although by pure luck. It WAS waiting on our input, so I had the right idea, but control-Z is not the EOF character for Unix. (control-D is). By luck, control-Z suspends a Unix process. So we got our prompt back without understanding why.
My roommate kept up with the letters of the alphabet, which was completely useless until we got to "w". Suddenly, we got a list of people who were logged in and, most importantly, what commands they were running. We started taking notes and were soon off to the races, at least in a very basic way.
This is NOT how to encourage a newbie to start. Had it been just me, I'd have gone out to buy a book; fortunately, my roommate was both smart and stubborn. And Unix remained intimidating to me for a very long time; I was a complete wizard with the PCs of the time, but Unix was utterly alien and extremely difficult to pick up without other people around.
The single best way to learn Unix is to expose yourself to other Unix people. It is an extraordinarily powerful and deep system, and getting truly great at it will take years. You can accelerate this process enormously by having experienced people around you, so that you don't waste time going down blind alleys. They can also help you unlearn your bad habits from the brain-damaged prompts in DOS and Windows.
I have said for many years that you can very nearly bring about world peace from the Unix command line; it's that powerful.
But ye gods, is it ever intimidating when you're first starting.
Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME! (Score:4, Interesting)
Installing software in a consistent manner _is_ a big deal. Why are there twenty different ways to install the same piece of software depending on what distribution of Linux you're using? Why can't someone say "if you're using Linux, this is how you install software"? You don't think this would be a tremendous help to Linux?
binary compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would you develop an OS infastructure based on source code apps and then push for binary compatability?
Umm, what's he trying to do? (Score:2, Interesting)
Using Linux
-----------
Step #1, everything behind that screen is a file, and can be treated like a file, hell you can even edit a directory. Also, there is ALWAYS more than one way to do a task, usually more than two.
Step #2, learn man, cd, ls, mkdir, (some editor eg. vi/emacs)
Step #3, pipe is your friend. stdin, stdout (stderr later on).
Step #4, commands don't always have to accept data from you, most will accept data from other commands AKA using Step#3.
Step #5, shell scripting. so you don't have to keeping retyping everything over again.
Step #6 job control fj, bj, jobs. So you don't have to open another tty session.
Step #7 process control. ps, pgrep, kill, pkill, ctrl-c, ctrl-z. So you have some way of stopping a runaway program.
Step #8 Rudimentary data processing. grep, sed, awk, tail, more, less & of course cat.
Step #n, writing your own tools. C, Perl, Python etc.
There are worse things than the command line (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that's fear. One wrong move and you're dead.
See Blender [blender.org], the open source animation system. In the manual, the "Hotkeys Reference" extends from page 480 to page 505. There are so many hotkeys that they use combinations like SHIFT-PAGEDOWN and ALT-CTRL-T.
Now we'll hear complaints from Blender fans. OK, Blender fans, you're in mesh edit mode. What does ALT-CTL-RIGHTMOUSEBUTTON do? No looking at the manual. Only if you can answer that do you get to comment.
Re:.so hell (Score:1, Interesting)
route add default gw 192.168.0.X
That's such a simple feature it seems quite odd you think it's amazing.
Article Rebuttal (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's why in no specific order.
0) He claims to have been running Linux since 1993, but does not know that Macromedia offers easy rpms to install its software and the instructions on how to run the script are also dead easy.
1) He rubishes Linux by claiming that it's just gueswork to know whether what works in one distribution will work in the next one. Nonsense, the four big distributions generally provide identical hardware support. (Suse, MDK, Red Hat/Fedora, Debian).
2) Check out the screenshot on that review. It is of Arklinux, which never had the horrible unattractive KDE 2.0 look, because it didn't ship until much later. This guy is out to make look Linux as bad as possible.
3) The whole thing is his opinion at best. Yet every other sentence has the word fact in it, when the review is far from being factual.
4) "Several distributions have had no trouble recognizing the touchpad on my laptop, but I haven't found anywhere to configured its advanced functions - things like being able to tap directly on the pad rather than using a button..."
Why doesn't he tell us which laptop and which distributions? Because I can use my touchpad fully on MDK, Suse, Red hat and Debian.
He then goes on to claim that powermanagement isn't compiled into the kernel by default. What planet is this guy on? All current distributions will display a nice icon with your battery status and most allow you to suspend to disk and resume without any issues. There are some issues, both because Linux is still maturing in this area and because many bioses have a buggy ACPI implementation, but for the most part, it just works. Of course, if you choose to run Gentoo or LFS, it is up to you to make it work.
5) "If I had been able to buy the laptop with Linux pre-configured on it, no doubt everything would be fine."
But you have been able to do so for the past 4 years.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
IBM's laptops were sold with Linux for a while, are known to work with linux and are internally tested to do so. Wait for announcements by year's end.
And as of late:
http://www.hp.com -> See the nx5000
6)Since this is an article directed at new users, can someone tell me how speaking about something that you don't understand helps new users? I quote:
"If the difference between widget style, window behavior, desktop environment, and window manager is still unclear to you - well, that's probably because it's unclear to me, too. I have certain notions of what they each mean, but I could not begin to give a good definition of each."
Well, don't bring it up, damn it. Just say to the user that you will be clicking on things to open programs and that your experience in this sense will be fairly similar to what you now do in Windows.
He continues to do this throughout the article to make Linux seem messy and difficult. There is too much choice in window managers, too many in text editors, too much choice everywhere, and you will be confused. The truth is that most distributions that you would put on a desktop, particularly the one on the screenshot, Arklinux, now default to one desktop, install sane defaults and choose best of breed programs.
7) "Since I am considerably more comfortable with computers than the average Windows user, I think I should prepare you for
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. This is an article about desktop usage. My wife has never ever had to touch a configuration file. Everything that she needed to do whether it was in evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Juk, Bookcase or whatever was always readily available through a GUI menu option.
8) "You see, when I right-click o
For Linux n00bs (Score:3, Interesting)
linux.exe
It would scan your hardware. Completely. Then leave a text file on your desktop explaining what sound, video, chipset, usb, firewire, cd(rw)/dvd(rw), monitor, network, modem and any other hardware you have in your computer system (which is trivial b/c a lot of people just buy pre-packaged systems etc.) and tell you what you'll need in the way of modules you'll need. Possibly even tell you what distro your system is best suited for.
you know, a simple exe with an online database. It will give exact hardware information along with information as to what is it. for example:
Audio Intel 810 (AC '97 - or whatever), where to get drivers.
NEtwork Linksys 10/100 PCI (firmware, or other model info), where to get drivers
Video nVidia GeForce 5800 256MB, chipset info, where to get drivers.
What do you guys think?
Worthwhile for the non geek in the world (meaning 99% of the world)?
-zoloto
Re:Education. (Score:3, Interesting)
Attitudes towards n00bs (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it, and read some of the other comments here. People talk about finding documentation is
- Linux names tend to be more counter-intuitive. What, exactly does apt-get or urpmi mean? I can't tell by looking at it. "About this Macintosh" or "Windows Read Me" on the other hand are extremely descriptive,m as is the omnipresent "help" menu.
- Secondly, there seems to be a prevailing attitude that Linux is by the hardcore, for the hardcore. Too often I've seen simple questions shot down because those responding essentially felt that "every should know this, how can you not?" This attitude is quickly off-putting for new computer users. This is extended to books; there are scores of (arguably) decent intro-to-Windows (or Mac) books on the shelves at Chapters, but very few Linux books of the same type (no, a new computer user doesn't want to read "Hardening Linux for IP-based security hacks" they want to read "Linux for Dummies", sad but true)
Dismiss the new computer users all you want, but understand that the concerns are valid. I have 15+ years of computer experience, almost exclusively on Mac and Windows. But when I use the Linux boxes in my Eng or CIS labs, I barely know the basic commands. Furthering this problem is that in three different labs each uses a different method for something as simple as mounting a floppy.
Yes, there are some dumb computer users out there; but there are also some experienced users who just need to get their foot in the door, and there are several road blcosk to Linux which make that harder.