[Glastonbury] New to it

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 11:19:44AM -0000, mauricemail wrote:
> You must forgive me. I'd got an obviously erroneous impression that
> Glastonbury Linux Types were remote unapproachable egg heads and what is the
> expression used now-a-days, technies? An expression, one feels, often used
> with derision by those who find difficulty in summing 2 with 2.
> 
<slightly off topic here>
It's an interesting one - at various times, I've been tightly or loosely
associated with three or four "specialist" groups or watched others in
action.  Group dynamics vary - but a lot of factors are common.

An uncle is a hot air balloonist.  I got to man a retrieve vehicle for a
couple of days and go to the UK national championships a few years ago.
There were balloonists there of all levels of experience: from hobbyists
who flew 10-15 hours a year to professional passenger-carrying pilots or
who flew special shapes for advertisers.  There was the usual mix of
enthusiasts - Linux flamewars are very similar to the rows then over
Thunder/Colt/Raven/Cameron baskets, for example. There were people who
really knew it all - and more who were learning by absorption / bluffing
or inflating what they knew or did.

Much the same goes for amateur radio clubs - there's always somebody who
is an enthusiast for "X" equipment and won't hear words against it.
There's somebody who's been around for 40 years and seen it all before,
there's the tinkerer who "tweaks", the expert professional builder who can 
build anything from scratch and the quiet person who turns out to be one
of the most knowledgeable of the lot. There's often a club bore/club
idiot/extremely eager newcomer.  Most of us progress/regress through
various roles at various stages somewhere :)

It's probably the same with the youngsters who modify their cars and 
"cruise" to show off their blue neons/high suspensions etc. There's
almost certainly a hierarchy there somewhere - though, as an outsider, I
couldn't tell where it starts.

Thus with the LUGoG - with the added complication that much of what we
do is online/virtual. There is an initial need to get in with the crowd 
and learn some of the jargon but there shoulldn't be a need to feel excluded
/ to exclude others. It's also very difficult to know whose big red
button you'll hit when you send out an innocent remark or something that
is, of course _so_ obvious to you. It's also not easy to judge who to
ask or what level of cluefulness to expect back - that comes with
listening/reviewing the list archives/just hanging around.

> 
> Ian Dickinson mentioned the Migration Handbook. I have it now in pdf. And I
> guess it will be useful for home users too. I also have a couple of Linux
> text books, one heavy the other light. However, my objective is to use
> applications not spend half the rest of my life tweaking the OS and having
> to learn 2000 command line variations on the way:-)
> 
Write down on a piece of paper what you want to do - what sorts of apps
you want to run.  Work out for yourself how much time you are prepared
to spend learning to use them. Work out how much data you've got and how
much time you'd be prepared to spend to rebuild your system the hard way
if it all fell over. Give a guesstimate as to how much time you want to
spend looking for new applications/routine system adminstration/boring
stuff. Think of any security related issues.

[E.g. Want MS Word compatibility - not writing heavyweight 
documents with Word macros in every day - OpenOffice.

Just want it to work - don't need training.

Small number of word docs. - use Word mostly for reading stuff off the
Net.

Don't want to spend more than 1/2 day restoring the system.

Don't want to spend more than a day a month of my time hunting round for 
stuff and keeping the system up together. Do want internet banking -
need to check out how to secure my passwords etc.]

Plan accordingly: select your Linux accordingly: plan who you can ask to
help with stuff you can't do/haven't got time/inclination to learn.
You may become the expert on one of the apps. you use: other people may
then rely on you - but at least you'll be better aware of your own needs
and wishes and better informed as to the factors you're choosing.

> Martin Wheeler said "how can we hap" and suggested I might bring my PC to a
> meeting. Thank you for the offer. However, I don't want to disentangle the
> birds nest and screw the case back on at the present time. There must be an
> easier way?

>From experience (though many would argue) - PC's in their case may
sometimes get a better airflow / more uniform cooling and are less
likely to have stuff dropped on them causing damage.

PC's out of their cases are a magnet for loose screws / conductive
shavings / coffee. I've dropped a full cup of coffee over the top of
a server case at work and managed to wipe out only one floppy drive -
though the drives and case smelt of coffee for months after. Had the
side panels been open it would have cost far more.
> 
> So I have the 10.1 Mandrake distro successfully installed. Now here begineth
> the real head-aches!
> 
> We have a broadband router/modem. Has four network connections plus one usb.
> One of us connects using an Ethernet cable, I use the usb. I also have an
> Ethernet card and for Linux thought it better to connect that to the router
> too. M$ has always performed perfectly through the usb (honest). Mandrake
> didn't connect. After lots of tweaking it did and then after a period of
> time (5 to 15 minutes) disconnects all by itself. Will often work again if I
> re-boot. The Ethernet connection is being used. Any thoughts on what may be
> causing this problem would be welcomed.
> 
Use only one connection per PC. If you have Ethernet, then use it as it
can sometimes be more reliable than USB plug and play. If you have two
interfaces configured to the same device both using DHCP, you are likely to 
drive yourself half daft as they work alternately, both together or not
at all :) All this IMHO.

> And hurrah. The connection was maintained just long enough to download the
> Firefox browser. I used Ark without knowing why. Happily Firefox  installed
> itself without a problem and launched automatically at the end of the set-up
> process. By that time, of course, the internet connection had gone down.
> Re-booted to see if the connection would re-establish and couldn't find
> Firefox. I've found a Firefox folder but cannot discover an executable file.
> Any assistance would be welcomed.
> 
Keep going: keep learning: keep smiling - it will get easier.

Andy