[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Martin Wheeler]

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, mauricemail wrote:

>  Mandrake seems to lead us newbies gently by the hand.

So stick with it until you need more than it can provide. (Seriously.)
In the corporate training courses I give, given a free choice of 
distributions to install and use, the results are always the same:

Users invariably choose: Suse for corporate use; Mandrake for personal 
use.

RedHat and Debian don't even make it into the first five.
(And these are IT companies, btw.)


> I want to leave MS behind. But I need to speak to my digital slr

All I did under debian was:

   mkdir </slrpix>
   modprobe usb-storage
   mount -t auto /dev/sda1 </slrpix>

and that was that.  Pix instantly available.
Ask the Mandrake users on list what to do to activate a USB connection to 
your camera.


>  I also
> need to access web sites which complain if IE is not being used to talk to
> them.

These sites should be reported to Free Software Foundation (Europe - UK).
This sort of behaviour is *not* acceptable; particularly if the sites 
provide public information.
You should also complain -- loudly -- to the site maintainers.


> I'm a serious home user. I built my first system in 1978 using a 25 watt
> soldering iron, a Nascom 1

Snap!

> But Unix foxes me. Maybe it's my advanced years? And my ancient brain is
> much slower than it used to be. In any case, now-a-days I want to reliably
> use applications not fathom out how to mess about with the underlying
> structure.

There are at least three of us on this list over 60.
You are not alone!


> Is Mandrake as bad as some of your seem to infer?

Mandrake is NOT 'bad'.
Mandrake is perfectly serviceable for what you want to do.
(In the preferred distribution stakes, religious wars happen, is all.)


> What would you recommend
> an inexperienced linux person to do?

Read the list.
Ask questions.
Attend meetings.
Ask more questions.
Play; fiddle; and break.
(All learning is ludic; and to a great extent, destructive, too.)

:)

HTH
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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