The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons It is time to wake up and smell the elephant in the room. Vista is struggling to achieve escape velocity. Microsoft finds itself the butt of an international joke, but does not seem able to get a grip. The issue of choice of platform is once more up for grabs. Of course there is an alternative; a popular computing platform …
After having read a few comments by VI fans, I have something to add - Yes, I'm sure you can get used to anything and learn to use a syntax however convoluted. However, VI is a TERRIBLE choice for system default editor.
We're not talking about "I've been using VI for 20 years and I called my kids VI and VIM" here. We're talking about someone who has never ever used any kind of unix and logs in to the HP/UX 1st time..
Of course it does weed the wheat from chaff by seeing who does not go right back to using windows exclusively after that experience, but realistically anyone who can use VI (or even knows how to get OUT of the damn thing!) can change the system settings to use it if they prefer.
EMACS isn't better by any means, except that you can actually write email with it with a short cheat sheet without too much pain. And since default HP/UX system had a choice of VI and EMACS.. ..No doubt due to people who think it's reasonable to go around blathering things like "if you don't like vi, program your own editor". Insteadthey could dosome bloody administration they're paid for and install a default system editor that MOST people can use and the rest know how to change.
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You swine! You mentioned DOS EDIT. All well and good, but this lead me to think about DOS editors and thus remember EDLIN.
I thought I'd safely forgotten that and I now need to gibber insanely in a corner for a few hours followed by a stiff drink, a long lie down and some electroshock therapy.
There ought to be a law against saying things that could potentially remind people of EDLIN.........
The white one with the very long sleeves and the fetching leather strap accessories please.
Riiiight.. just as Business Professionals are always up to date and always know what they're doing. They never have their own opinions on how things should be run to ensure smooth running months and years in the future, or complain bitterly when forced to use some form of project management or business structure they particularly detest.
You need to differentiate between talking shop (which is a lot of what goes on in thereg), techie home users and what people Actually Do.
Talking shop is important because it highlights things that may not have been noticed by the inexperienced (such as that vi, for all its faults, is basically functional and works over any connection and on anything approximating to Unix) and popularises software that can make your job easier and more pleasant.
Just as Business Professionals like to deal with pleasant, reasonable customers that pay mostly on time, IT professionals like to deal with pleasant, stable software that won't fail/have scalability problems two years later when you've moved on to something else and really don't want to be dragged back to deal with something that enhances your career not one jot.
There is a distinct difference between some of the things I've done, suggested or am capable of doing and what I'd prefer to do because it's more fun. I would also suggest that IT projects are a compromise between IT and business (well, duh!) and that sometimes an inappropriate IT solution is suggested due to politics, cost, existing skillset or the idiotic flavour of the day. Likewise there is sometimes a business impact due to the IT implementation.
Business Professionals? Don't make me laugh. There are as many clowns in that arena as in the IT industry.
":q . Seems simple enough."
:q ... Is that some kind of smiley? Can you think of any other device (except for vi clones) in the whole fucking universe that you switch off by typing ":q"? Thought not. For *normal* people, vi is a black hole that they escape from by power cycling the machine. (OK, I'm over-simplifying, but a total lack of sympathy with 90% of your potential customers *might* be the reason why you can't even give away your product.)
"> I've used things like sed, to which the very notion of cursor keys and insertion
> point are alien.
No you haven't. sed is a stream editor. You don't use it interactively."
"Yes, I have", "Yes, I know", and "Why not? Are you some kind of wimp?".
When I started using *nix, I hated Vi. But now I find myself accidentally hitting vi shortcut keys when I'm in notepad on Windows. Vi is brilliant. What's wrong with you people?!
Also, Verity; Brilliant article. Regrettably I didn't like your stuff when it first appeared (forgive me!) but this really was funny, thank you and apologies!
Yeah, what the hell is up with that? On my PC (obviously by this I mean the PC my employer has seen fit to plonk on my desk) it takes on average about ten seconds to paste a small piece of text into Excel.
That's approximately twenty-eight billion processor cycles.
What's it doing in there - calculating the font hinting to eighteen million decimal places?
You omitted my favourite bit of silliness from any single user unix system though:
tom$ sudo whatever
Password:
tom is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
(looks around nervously - who to???)
I find the article very good, that licence agreement really say that? That is "karma" in a paragraph.
I find linux easier if you have a grounding in DOS, so you understand that command line stuff is. I am sick of graduate techies who go "sorry I don't know DOS" Yet they are on five grand more for knowing nothing but MS spiel of today and not what went before or what is out there in older businesses.
Another article for all the fanboys and trolls to compare the size of the current penis extensions....
You can scream and shout how good mac or Linux or bsd... the end of the day it makes no difference at all... it is all about the implementation, I use MS office, adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver..My windows machine works perfect for these tasks.... it doesn't crash, complain bitch and whine about anything...
Windows is not my os by choice; it’s just what my applications of choice require.... I have spent more money on the apps than the OS...
Even if you could port my apps onto Linux/bsd/mac.... I wouldn’t bother... why.... because it works for me...
Linux/bsd are for those people who have too much time on their hands and do not actually do anything on the computers other than tinker around to get things to work. I was also put off mac's years ago, when the form was more important than function.... that will never change....
Mine is the one that keeps me dry in the rain, and cool in the sun.....
How many will know of Enid Blyton on the western shores of the pond?
Only some of us will have received Enid Blyton books in our Christmas Care packages from our grandparents in the UK. These were replaced by The Second World War and the History of the English-Speaking Peoples as we got older.
The principal advantage of the latter volumes is that one could understand what William F Buckley was saying on Firing Line without keeping a dictionary at the ready.
Has some annoying quirks though. Won't work with my wireless card (how am I meant to google for information when it is my only way of accessing the web at home), whenever I switch the second desktop, 9/10 X blanks out and I have to crash it. Oh and stupidly long startup times as it insists on checking all my disks when I boot up. I'm sure there is a way I can tell it to pack it in but I've never found it.
What the kernel developer clowns in these comments fail to grasp is just how a computer is used by the other 99% of the human race. If it doesn't "just work" then it's rubbish. As for the argument that BSD is easier to use than Linux, you forget that even Linux has no real useability in the first place. Sure it installs over vista with a few clicks but what after that? Need to install an app, but oh first you need to search the repository for some library with one billion dependencies and then what do you mean I can't just drag and drop...
Steve Jobs as God because Macs are about as close as things can get to "just working"
>"May have to cancel and do it again, as Billware will "helpfully" offer to place in wastebasket anyway."
The only way this happens is if your shift key is faulty and doesn't close the contacts fully, or if you are clumsy with the timing when keying and release shift marginally before pressing delete. You've got a broken keyboard or you're just not a good typist - neither of these is Microsoft's fault, but hey, it's easier to blame someone else than own up to making a mistake, isn't it?
Some of those mentioned are accurate yes, but you should have done your home work...
* The registry
gconf, not quite as full of junk as the registry but pretty much just as slow... where is dconf!!!
* Virus checking software
avast, clamav, f-prot... Sure its not required, but we have it... just in case.
* The window that comes up when a program crashes and sends the crash dump to Redmond, to give them a much needed laugh. Linux programs instead lay a small binary turd file in situ. After a while you end up with quite a large collection of these, decorating your directories.
BUG BUDDY!!!!!!! WE WANT YOUR CRASH DUMPS! but at least we're nicer about it, and discuss it in public
* The Windows pause, by which I mean that increasingly prevalent nothing-happening-for-no-reason delay that intrudes between the user poking and the software flinching.
erm... we do have firefox...
ok then....
I wont bash Fixta sorry i mean Vista. Winblows sorry i mean Windows... Has always been Crap Sorry i mean Great to me... I have always Sorry i mean Never had a MS box fall over after running 365 days 24 7. I hate sorry Love vista... Its Such a huge pile of dog shi... Sorry i mean its like fluffy bunny nice to struggle.. Sorry i mean work with... The Fact that a simple thing like my USB Printer making Vista crap... sorry i mean except the requested task is so nice.
Now For the Vista Bashing Don't even bring that shinny bull shit laden excuse for an operating system close to me i will impale you to a wall with a crucifix shut down your lungs piss in your boots eat your dinner and visit your mother for hours of kinky freaky sex. after which i will return to your bloody corps and shove the MS Vista DVD up your ass hole... then i will go and install ubuntu and be happy again.
The thing about vi is, and this may shock members of the "me me me me mine" generation, it was never meant to be easy for a novice to use. It was meant to work within constraints which existed historically (limited memory, primitive cursor addressing, slow comms, much easier and cheaper to make a crib sheet for the user than upgrade the computer). In other words, it was designed for the computer first and foremost, and the user second.
That invariably means there is going to be a learning curve.
But that's OK -- or at least, it always **used to** be OK, in the days when learning was prized more highly than a state of perpetual ignorance. Once you have learned something the hard way, you don't forget it in a hurry.
By the way, do you think it's *just* a coincidence that the old ZX Spectrum cursor keys were arranged in the same left, down, up, right order as the vi movement keys H, J, K and L?
Felt I should add my own tuppence worth:
>Driver incompatibility
I assume you mean between driver and hardware? Well, I've never had a problem, neither on simpler distros such as U-bunny-poo or Foresight- no haver I had a problem with drivers on Gentoo... i remember more problems on XP and whether or not a driver was up-to-date, set to work on XP or if a win2000 version was installed, whether a user put even the right driver on from an install disk.
>recompiling the kernel
If you have to recompile the kernel its because you're a moron and didn't build support for everything you need... then its your own fault. It should be noted that if you don't know how to build your kernel, then get a distro you don't have to build one on... or take your fist out of your arse and use it to tighten the noose.
>office suite
Yep, its everyone else at fault here- lets ignore the fact that only MS Office opens files like this, every other conforms to standards... Standards, you know them? They're pretty much standard across the board- Sorta like why IE gets knocked for not using standards and needing stuff coded a different way.
>Firefox that can't auto update
Ah, I see your problem- yeah; thats not a computer, thats a cardboard box, uh-huh- thats why your response times are shit and *nothing* updates for you... Until we get some cool-as Harry Potter style moving pictures that old computer box of yours won't do a thing
>The difficulty of installing apps that aren't in repositories
./configure
make
make install
or add them to the repository? U-bunny-poo is simple at doing this, conary is better. No experience of other package managers that you may like to use at a simpler level. See, in this case, Google is your best friend... Try it today- its not too bad.
>Horrible hibernation support
See, maybe you're doing that wrong too- if you can't get it working you're a bit slow, think about how animals (particularly squirrels) hibernate and use this as a basis- then it all falls into place. Right, ready? Get lots of nuts and stuff them into the machine- we need to fatten it up for winter. Now goto your garden, dig and big hole and leave some nuts around it. Bury the computer- seriously, bury it- we don't need to worry about breathing room.. Now go back in the Spring and yeah- one succesfullh hibernated box.
>A PDF viewer that can't display PDFs correctly,
evince works perfectly for me- maybe you should use
cat <some pdf> and see what that does... maybe you can't read normal chars and this is easier for you
>A major release every 6 months with a new kernel (that breaks apps and drivers compatibility)
Shit! Not updates and upgrades? Fuck me how ever will you cope? But hang on, some confusion here- I thought there was no driver compatibility? Now there is but it breaks? Now my head hurts... So you're the expert here, how does an upgrade break an app? Now I think you're the confused... Its not the machine thats broken, its your head.
Aw crap, sorry Verity- that was a mainly serious response...
I, too, have copied big files over to a unix system to edit them and copy them back, try search/replacing in wordpad (one word on every line of a 100Mb file) ... you can upload it using a 54k modem edit it in vi on unix and send it back (same modem) quicker than NT can edit that. LOL (If you don't know vi, you can learn it during the file transfer ...;-)).
However, now, with cywin, you get decent software on windows, too.
The first time I tried emacs I got mad at it, that was in 2000, I then immediately used pico and since three or four years vi(m), which I found terrible at first as well.
check the classic image:
http://www.bemroses.net/images/curves.jpg
The first time I tried ksh the third command was bash, now I am using (pd)ksh on my mac and linux boxes, I have even installed it into my windows vm as well and it slowly replaces cmd there.
Linux/BSD/Solaris/Windows/.* fanboys, please stop it! I do not think any system is better, you can get all the "useful" tools on <platform of choice> now as well eg: cygwin, wine
I'm no fanboy but the dustbin in the kitchen has the "Certified for Microsoft Windows Vista" sticker. ;-)
I would like to kindly request a solaris, BSD daemon and an Apple avatar, please - those poor apple/sun/bsd fanboys, it's unfair, besides, two penguins and no microsoft flag/Apple apple/Sun sun/BSD daemon?
el biased Reg!
@AC
"It still runs on more than 90% of all desktop computers. Even though every year since 2003 has been heralded as the year of the linux desktop."
You are comparing apples to oranges. If you want any meaningful comparison, you should compare _retail packages sold/downloaded_.
Do you want to bet what is the ratio when there's competition? 10 to 1 for Linux? Or more?
Linux is not available (in general) as OEM, so comparing mandatory objects (You can't buy most of PC-hardware without Windows, that's not a "sold unit", no matter how MS counts it) to those you _must choose to use_ is absurd.
"Linux/bsd are for those people who have too much time on their hands and do not actually do anything on the computers other than tinker around to get things to work."
Says a guy who's job is to deliver two page plain text notes to people in email in .doc-format. Haven't ever seen Linux or BSD and knows nothing about either, but have heard that "his applications" don't work.
Corporate drone who uses whatever tool he's given and thinks it's the best because _he_ uses it and can't see beyond application brand.
Most people see what they can get done, not the brand of the tool to get it done, like you do. You actually sound very much like MS salesman, they always whine that "Photoshop doesn't work". No sh*it?
Jaguar spare parts won't fit into Nissan either, you have to search right parts.
_Then_ when you complain that there isn't any, you begin to sound credible.
"Works differently" isn't an excuse either, it's a different program, but the goal to achieve is the same. If the goal can't be reached, that's something to whine about.
and loves it. Loves Pidgin, loves Firefox with all the trimmings, loves the rest of it.
Offered to put her back on XP but she politely declined.
She's been on Ubuntu since 6.10 and has gone through the ugprades and stuff herself.
She's not a geek, either. Married to one, yes. But not one herself.
is being able to read MS Visio .vsd files natively.
Other than that it does the job, is stable and easy to use. My workstation has run SUSE with KDE for over 8 years, although it used to be a little clumsy back then it's very polished this days. The home PC also runs it and the family haven't had any problems using it.
All this talk of recompiling kernels and struggling with drivers, packages & whatnot must refer to something else called Linux as it doesn't represent anything I've had to deal with.
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