Stupid advise
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hkwint Jan 13, 2008 5:12 AM EDT |
Quoting:If you're a noob, go for Ubuntu Apart from not being a big fan of Ubuntu (but I only used the gnome-version), that's a stupid advise. If you're a noob and want to learn something, Gentoo Linux is for you, and therefore, Gentoo Linux is for noobs to. It's how I started using Linux. Spreading and keeping this 'Gentoo is for elitist&ricers only, noobs shouldn't use it" idea is one of the thing Gentoo suffers from, and one of the reasons for the leadership crisis at Gentoo. No matter what distribution I found myself fiddling with these days, if I can't find the right 'GUI-interface' to do it (which are different in almost all distro's) I always know the 'oldschool' method to fix it, and if due to an error the boot drops me to a shell before login I don't panic, but just fix it. Can't say that of the average Ubuntu user I'm afraid. However, if you're a new user and don't want to learn anything, or you are not comfortable with choice, because you are in a hurry to get your work done, than it is probably a better idea not to use Gentoo, and Ubuntu might be a good choice. Especially since Gnome seems to delete features in favour of more 'ease of use by new Linux-users.' |
| techiem2 Jan 13, 2008 5:30 AM EDT |
Yeah... I agree completely. I started learning Linux with Slackware back in '94 or so (hooray for burning dozens of floppies...) and learned quite a bit. I played with that a bit then went to the "pretty" distros for a few years as I learned more about Linux and got more and more annoyed with the "other" OS. I tried gentoo on and off as it developed and switched over to it as soon as it was stable enough to run on the comp I had at the time (the early releases had some issues with it for some reason). I gotta say I probably learned more about system internals and administration during my first gentoo setups than I ever learned using the "pretty, for newbs" distros. |
| gus3 Jan 13, 2008 8:33 AM EDT |
Yay, Slackware! "Use Red Hat, and you'll know Red Hat. Use Slackware, and you'll know Unix." |
| tuxchick Jan 13, 2008 11:28 AM EDT |
It all depends. Most folks do better starting with something that works without needing months of deep study. Start out with the pointy-clicky, then dig in more deeply. It's a lot less frustrating. Mandrake was my own personal Linux turning point. I started out with Red Hat 5.0 or something like that, and it was absolutely wretched for a beginner. My only computer experience was Windows 3.1/DOS 6, and while I was pretty comfortable with DOS and did most of my work in it, because Windows just plain didn't work most of the time, it wasn't very transferable to Linux. DOS gave me the nice DOSSHELL where I could poke around the filesystem with ease, and see everything right in front of me, and run commands; RH 5 had nothing like that. Don't anyone dare tell me 'but there are man pages for everything!' Man pages are all but useless for a noob- you have to know what to look for, and even then very few of them are written in a task-oriented way. Most are as helpful as writing a howto drive manual like "an automobile is a device for inducing controlled explosions". I had a heck of a time even getting RH5 to install because it didn't recognize my IDE controller. The workaround was to remove it and connect my hard drive directly to the motherboard. Well I wasn't going to waste my primo Promise 66 (woo, speeed!) controller just because Red Hat was a retard. Mandrake installed painlessly, and even gave me hardware acceleration for Tux Racer without having to waste weeks figuring out how to make it work. Baby steps are more appropriate for most folks. Training wheels. Fisher Price. Now of course, I code my own kernels from scratch in assembler, and I owe it all to Mandrake. |
| hkwint Jan 13, 2008 12:49 PM EDT |
Quoting:DOS gave me the nice DOSSHELL Accidentaly read that like DOS HELL ;) About the man-pages: Before I ever touched Linux, I had already run OpenBSD (my first non-Windows experience), NetBSD and FreeBSD, and I really have to say their manuals are far better for noobs, basically since they contain examples. I never read the 'explaining' part of the manuals in the beginning, just straightly PgDwn'ed to the examples (do 'man sudo' in Linux, and you will see what I mean; this BSD-manpage's explanaiton is written in BNF, a 'declaration' language I couldn't even find on the net, but the examples made it all up). Even though I had used 3 BSD's, I had a hard time when I started using Linux. It didn't have a useful rc.conf, those darn bastards used long options all over the place which made my fingers hurt, and worse, some of their manuals were in 'info'! Info is probably one of my worst Linux experiences as of yet. BTW programming in assembler is fun! Especially if it works, much faster than BASIC! Copying code from the PC-screen to a graphical calculator by means of retyping the hex-code (on the graphical calculator) because the PC's parallel port doesn't work however, is less fun. |
| Sander_Marechal Jan 13, 2008 1:35 PM EDT |
Quoting:If you're a noob and want to learn something, Gentoo Linux is for you Nah. If you're *really* committed to learn what makes Linux tick, try "Linux from Scratch": http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ |
| hkwint Jan 13, 2008 1:46 PM EDT |
Honestly, I really considered that back then, but it doesn't have package management - which was a showstopper for me - and it didn't have as much users as Gentoo. Also, I wanted my Linux system up and running within a week or so, including working peripherals; and I was looking for something that was simpler than *BSD. When installing LFS, one needs to do boring repetitive tasks, I saw when scanning the book. OK, documentation is really good;) |
| azerthoth Jan 13, 2008 7:27 PM EDT |
In following the related thread on Gentoo forums there was a nifty little poll about drobbins coming back. An amazing 91% said yes and still while the user base was saying to the devs you have no direction there was still an overtone from the dev posts I read of, yeah thats nice but why should we. way to listen to you user base Gentoo. |
| tuxchick Jan 13, 2008 10:33 PM EDT |
hans, I always read it as DOS HELL too, it's more fun that way. :) And I agree that info pages are horrid nasty things that should be burned alive. Ick ew ew. I wouldn't care about info if the GNU folks distributed equivalent man pages. But nooo. To this day some man pages are poor incomplete crippled things because of their stupid attitudes, but fortunately not as many as there used to be. |
| techiem2 Jan 14, 2008 10:47 AM EDT |
Mandrake was my pretty distro of choice for several years. I probably tried RH once or twice before going Mandrake, but for some reason I've just never liked the feel of it. Mandrake was good stuff. Until I found Gentoo. :) I'd recommend the latest Mandriva to a noob in a heartbeat though. Need to get that distro test box up and running and do an actual Mandriva install to play with ...... |
| hkwint Jan 14, 2008 11:31 AM EDT |
Quoting:An amazing 91% said yes and still while the user base was saying... ...the dev posts I read of, yeah thats nice but why should we. Sad you need devs to fork a distro. |
| gus3 Jan 14, 2008 7:25 PM EDT |
techiem2: There's a recent video interview with Richard Couture on Linux.com, about the history of LinuxCabal. At the end is a really neat discussion with a local Guadalajaran about how she ended up with Mandriva on her laptop, with Mr. Couture's help. |
| azerthoth Jan 15, 2008 1:34 PM EDT |
Looks like someone was paying attention over @ gentoo. Almost 3 months to the day later there were 3 new items on the gentoo frontpage. Not bad for the place where weekly newsletters used to show up .. well almost weekly. Although one of the items on that page is such a transparently blatant lie (as linked http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=98293 ) as to be noteworthy in and of itself.Quoting:Curious why only one release happened in 2007, since previous years had multiple releases? Work began on the release as planned, but vast numbers of security vulnerabilities between September 2007 and December 2007 and reduced manpower left the Release Engineering team constantly overworked, having to rebuild stages and add items to the initial snapshot. When they have a dev team and Fabio does it nearly single handedly and managed to finish 2 betas, release 6 variants of 1 distinct version, and 2 more seperate versions, plus start the beta of the next release AND develop a whole new package and distribution system. Simultaneously working a real job and maintaining packages that can't be found in Gentoo proper at all. I'd have to say that they had more than enough time to pull it off since Gentoo is a rolling release and their official releases are just packaged snapshots. Daniel, you now have a new job to do if/when you return. Bring integrity back to the Gentoo team as well as direction. |
| Scott_Ruecker Jan 15, 2008 2:27 PM EDT |
Quoting:Most folks do better starting with something that works without needing months of deep study. Start out with the pointy-clicky, then dig in more deeply. That would be to an extent, I started out on Fedora Core 1 and then went on to FC-2 and FC-3 in quick succession. After that I used SuSE for a long time but it wasn't until jimf took me under his wing a little ( A whole lot more than a little actually ) and got me to install Debian on my desktop and shared some of his tips and tricks with me that I really started to sink my teeth into the directory and what the terminal can do. Since then I have been teaching myself more about the Linux directory structure and figuring out all the what's, where's and why's of it. Fairly dry reading at first but once I got my feet wet and my bearings straight, very very cool stuff indeed. Now I want to learn more, go figure. :-) |
| hkwint Jan 15, 2008 2:35 PM EDT |
Quoting:Now I want to learn more I can recommend TC's new book (own suggestion, TC didn't --force or --ask me to say so). Not the hard theory you might be (at least I was) thirsty for, but pretty interesting stuff. Sad I don't have a large network to play with, reading the book makes you want to try all those routing, NAT, ipv6 & Firewall stuff. And the cover is nice to look at, and hopefully get women interested in becoming a network administrator (Look at the cover, now you do want to be a real women like that instead of fiddling with your fake nails, don't you?) |
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