[SWLUG] Newbie alert!

[steve at nexusuk.org]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Steve Anderson wrote:

> I found Gentoo was a very good experience for me, but in a different way. It 
> made the slighty ropey (at the time) Debian installer feel like the most user 
> friendly, helpful and intuitive walk through the park ever. So when people 
> were saying "Oooh, use Knoppix to install Debian without the hard parts" I 
> was left thinking "Hard parts?"

I think I'm in a similar position, having used Linux from before the time 
of the modern GUI configurators for everything - modern distributions are 
just so easy (although most of the time I still hack configs by hand 
rather than using the GUI tools).

Having said that, being forced to use Windows on my desktop at work after 
really not touching Windows for 5 years has really brought a point home to 
me - people who say "I can't use Linux because it's too hard - wake me up 
when it's as easy to use as Windows" really don't know what they're 
talking about - Linux seems far more intuitive and is missing most of the 
features in Windows that seem to be designed _specifically_ to annoy the 
user.

> I've learnt most about Linux by just using it. Fiddling about with

I think using Linux _with other people around to answer questions_ is the 
key to learning it.  To some extent you can fiddle with it and Google when 
you hit a problem, but every so often you'll hit a problem you just can't 
resolve on your own and hours and hours of googling with no useful results 
just serves to demoralise.  In those cases, having a group of experts on 
hand to ask questions of is a life saver and that's where the IRC channel, 
etc. is so useful - you can get immediate answers to your questions.

> tarballs, configuring and compiling them yourself - and for that, LFS is 
> undoubtedly the way to go - but for the most part you can learn equally valid 
> skills and techniques the moment you deviate from a 'default' setting.

I've not really played with LFS, but it sounds like being thrown in at the 
deep end if you're a newbie - I'd probably suggest getting a standard 
easy to use distribution (so you have a stable platform to experiment with 
from the start) and maybe avoid using the GUI tools where possible so you 
get your hands dirty with the real config files and tools.

-- 

  - Steve    XMPP/Jabber: steve at nexusuk.org    Web: http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence