Banjooie
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Ahem.

I won't pretend I can tell a story like Erik, because I'm no good at epic things like riding behind trains on bicycles, and I won't pretend I can tell a story even as well as Agaricus, because I'm nowhere near cool enough to put entire stories behind secret tags. That's right, you're going to have to scroll past this every time you read this thread, and you're going to like it.

Regardless, I need to start several months ago, even though it has very little to do with the story itself--precisely, to the point where I realized it wasn't me going blind but rather that the good ol' CRT monitor (With a sticker saying 'Jesus, protect me from your followers' and a little jesus on a spring on top. ;_; I saved spring-jesus, though.) was gradually growing darker and darker. I got reaaal good at Counterstrike, though. Anyway, what with having money at the time (Which is handy for such chicanery as buying things) I bought myself a nice LCD monitor. It still works great, it's all...crystally. Or something. The point is, it is damn fine, and runs obscenely high resolutions. There is also a failure which I am about to get to. Some of you may figure it out before I'm finished, and you people are fancy.

Now, I'd toyed with this Linux thing. Y'know, torrenting a copy here, shoving it into a folder and forgetting about it there. About a day or two ago, I said to myself, 'Banj,' (Because I always refer to myself via internet persona, and third person), 'Banj, you need to get that Linux off your precious hard drive and onto a CD-ROM.'

And so I did. I burnt Knoppix onto that CD-ROM. And Kubuntu. I then, listening to the appropriate music, lol internet'd. All was good and well, for about ten minutes.

I got noobed by Spyware. Not just noobed, mind you, hardcore. It's one of those ones that make you cry, where every google search you go to goes to theirs, and ad-aware removes it all but it gets put back a second later, and baby jesus is bawling his eyes out, and puppies are kicking themselves because you are too angry to do it to them yourself.

But hey! There is always ONE SAFE BASTION when rolling with Windows. Safe Mode. That's how you can kill that spyware, gosh golly. Safe Mode the crap out of it. I hadn't had to do it in some time, in fact. Not since I got the monitor...

This is the part where the 'two' part of our one-two punch comes in. Rather than delicious, delicious safe mode, I boot into a black screen. With a note from my monitor.

'Out of Range'.

If you have blink tags, feel free to put that into notepad, put the blink tags around them, and then save that as an HTML file. I think only Firefox still supports blink, but it's needed for the full effect.

If you haven't caught on--My monitor, y'see, can handle 1900x1280 or something ridiculous.

It cannot handle 640x480.

Unfortunately, Safe Mode, as you might expect, can ONLY pull 640x480. Cleaning spyware without a working monitor is NOT GOOD TIMES.

Windows, upon booting, was a wreck. A terrible, useless heap. Like, there were now viruses and everything and the whole thing was ruined. Oh no! Whatever shall I do!

And then I remembered something.

I had a Knoppix CD. One that could /run straight off the CD/, and give me delicious OS so that I could pester someone who knew Linux how to install the Kubuntu CD I had.

The Knoppix CD I had burnt just /15 minutes ago/. Now, as dense as I am--when the powers that be come down and hit me in the face with an obvious plot hook, I don't go about flipping the bird, I take it.

And now, I sit on Kubuntu.

Now, for those of you who haven't used Linux, I want to make you a bit of an analogy.

Windows is like a very pretty woman. Maybe that's a lie--she's actually not that pretty, but she's wearing a lot of makeup, and she's got implants. She looks pretty, as long as you don't really take the time to look under the hood for very long. Just do your thing, and try not to notice what she actually looks like.

Linux may very well be a pretty woman. You can't tell; she's wearing a burka.

NiroZ
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Banjooie wrote:
Linux may very well be a pretty woman. You can't tell; she's wearing a burka.

Indeed, she is very hard to configure also.

Also, may I ask what happened to the good 'ol reformat?

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 10-05-2006 09:41 AM]

b0rsuk
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NiroZ wrote:

Banjooie wrote:
Linux may very well be a pretty woman. You can't tell; she's wearing a burka.

Indeed, she is very hard to configure also.

Also, may I ask what happened to the good 'ol reformat?

\begin{joke} and I still haven't figured out how to refragment my hard disk in linux !\end{joke}

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AlefBet
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b0rsuk wrote:
\begin{joke} and I still haven't figured out how to refragment my hard disk in linux !\end{joke}

I had this problem, too, and it just doesn't work. I can't find hardly any support for creating fragmented hard drives under Linux. There are a few workarounds that I've heard mentioned, but they're not very reliable.

I know the non-Linux people hate hearing this from the Linux people, but you don't actually need fragmented hard drives. Once you get used to defragmented hard drives, you won't even notice you're not using fragmentation anymore.

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Alneyan
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This thread prompts me to ask: where in the nine hells is Jamie? He ought to stand up and do some advocacy, but he seems to have disappeared over the face of Sol III a couple months ago.

Please, don't tell me I'll have to defend both Wales and FreeBSD just to fill in his spot. Say "no" to imitations; you deserve the Right Thing, and that's Jamie!

Banjooie
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NiroZ wrote:
Also, may I ask what happened to the good 'ol reformat?

Why would I want to run Windows without being able to run safe mode?

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[Last edited by Banjooie at 10-05-2006 08:17 PM]

Mattcrampy
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The moral of the story is: hen you buy a fancy-pants new monitor, for cripes sake make sure it runs at 640x480!

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trick
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I thought fancy-pants monitors used evil* scaling and/or black borders to support lower resolutions ? Is that done in all software, then ? =P

~ Gerry

* Evil in the case of non-integer zoom levels, at least .. and when changing the aspect ratio. Grah.

Banjooie
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I hsve no idea. This one does not, I guess.

jamie
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Alneyan wrote:
This thread prompts me to ask: where in the nine hells is Jamie? He ought to stand up and do some advocacy, but he seems to have disappeared over the face of Sol III a couple months ago.

Please, don't tell me I'll have to defend both Wales and FreeBSD just to fill in his spot. Say "no" to imitations; you deserve the Right Thing, and that's Jamie!

*wave*

I'm here! I've been in prison - they did me for some fraud regarding some credit card payment for a French bloke ;-)

Haha, nope, been off ill for, like, forever, and am now just about backish :-) - I now need to lose the weight 3 months odd in bed does to you GIMME SYMPATHY MOD POINTS!!!

But, thanks for the help - Wales and FreeBSD need all the help they can get!

Errr, and yeah, Ob:on:topic:post - errr, yeah, here are the fragmentation stats from the disks on my (FreeBSD unix) server - these disks haven't been rebuilt for over a year:

Oct 29 21:30:02 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (236 frags, 13507 blocks, 0.2% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:03 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (6111 frags, 57471 blocks, 0.8% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:03 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (720 frags, 162579 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:03 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (20 frags, 32122 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:03 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (245537 frags, 1179038 blocks, 1.4% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:03 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (8697 frags, 2406535 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
Oct 29 21:30:55 <console.info> catflap /kernel: (24 frags, 32107 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)


I have a friend who runs windows XP, and he totally rebuilds his pc from scratch every month so as to not be too fragmented :-)

Errr, and yeah, FreeBSD advocacy... errr PC-BSD! and errr. freesbie for the live cd! and err. yeah.

And, paah, you think I came back off my death-bed (joke!) just to rant about FreeBSD ? I want to rant about women, and nature, cute kittens, and little fluffy bunny rabbits!


____________________________
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[Last edited by jamie at 10-31-2006 02:25 AM]

Alneyan
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What, MI5 released you already? Words alone cannot express how disappointed I am.

Well, I think I'll pass on some of those rants, thankyevrymach. Welcome back, I guess. Should I give you a tour of the place, or can you find your way around? We have some wonderful balconies up high, these days.

jamie
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my my, what a nice viewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww *thump*

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Banjooie
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For the record, after a year of not defragging, it took me a grand total of 2 hours to defrag a 20 gig and 60 gig on XP.

That said: This whole Linux thing isn't so bad, but seriously, you guys need to fix the learning curve.

Fafnir
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The sad thing is that there's just as much (if not more) of a learning curve on Windows XP, but people don't notice because they're used to it. While I agree that Linux could use some work, it's not totally black and white. For example, installing a program:

In Windows, you hunt down the program you want on the internet and run its own install program, which may infect your computer with viruses/adware, may be badly designed, and will certainly bother you about things like where you want to install it and whether you agree to the EULA. In Ubuntu, you go into Synaptic (or the "Add/Remove Applications" shell for new users), download the package from the universal repositories in two clicks and it installs itself (literally - no further input required). The install process is homogenous so there's no danger of confusion, there's no real possibility of malware since it would be removed from the repositories PDQ, and you don't need to worry about where to put it because Linux has a uniform file hierarchy. Oh, and 99% of the time there's no EULA because it's all available under the GPL. Winner: Ubuntu!

Also: security out of the box. Enough said.

Of course, when something goes wrong, a new user in Windows has a much better chance at fixing it himself right now than a new user in Linux, simply because Linux is still ultimately console-based. I love it for that and I wouldn't want it to change, but the fact remains that hunting down an option dialog in Windows is easier for a new user than hunting down a conf file in Linux! Luckily, Ubuntu has a pretty active, friendly community, so whatever went wrong will be fixed, but it's not exactly an intuitive system. Also, the built-in documentation is almost as bad Windows' built-in documentation. And that's hard.

So, yeah, there's a learning curve in Linux. There's a learning curve in Windows. Each curve sucks in different ways, and we need to keep working on Linux's curve, but at worst we're no worse than Windows.

Disclaimer: I am not an Ubuntu developer. I am a (happy) Ubuntu user. I am a programmer (so my idea of 'user friendly' may not line up with yours!). I do hate Microsoft, or at least the people running Microsoft, but I still dual boot to Windows XP for gaming. No offence intended to Windows advocates. Contents may have settled during shipping. Do not taunt Super Happy Fun Ball.

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NiroZ
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Fafnir wrote:
The sad thing is that there's just as much (if not more) of a learning curve on Windows XP, but people don't notice because they're used to it. While I agree that Linux could use some work, it's not totally black and white. For example, installing a program:

In Windows, you hunt down the program you want on the internet and run its own install program, which may infect your computer with viruses/adware, may be badly designed, and will certainly bother you about things like where you want to install it and whether you agree to the EULA. In Ubuntu, you go into Synaptic (or the "Add/Remove Applications" shell for new users), download the package from the universal repositories in two clicks and it installs itself (literally - no further input required). The install process is homogenous so there's no danger of confusion, there's no real possibility of malware since it would be removed from the repositories PDQ, and you don't need to worry about where to put it because Linux has a uniform file hierarchy. Oh, and 99% of the time there's no EULA because it's all available under the GPL. Winner: Ubuntu!

Also: security out of the box. Enough said.

Of course, when something goes wrong, a new user in Windows has a much better chance at fixing it himself right now than a new user in Linux, simply because Linux is still ultimately console-based. I love it for that and I wouldn't want it to change, but the fact remains that hunting down an option dialog in Windows is easier for a new user than hunting down a conf file in Linux! Luckily, Ubuntu has a pretty active, friendly community, so whatever went wrong will be fixed, but it's not exactly an intuitive system. Also, the built-in documentation is almost as bad Windows' built-in documentation. And that's hard.

So, yeah, there's a learning curve in Linux. There's a learning curve in Windows. Each curve sucks in different ways, and we need to keep working on Linux's curve, but at worst we're no worse than Windows.

Disclaimer: I am not an Ubuntu developer. I am a (happy) Ubuntu user. I am a programmer (so my idea of 'user friendly' may not line up with yours!). I do hate Microsoft, or at least the people running Microsoft, but I still dual boot to Windows XP for gaming. No offence intended to Windows advocates. Contents may have settled during shipping. Do not taunt Super Happy Fun Ball.

Well while what you have pointed out may be perfect valid, you fail to mention to joys of installing Ubuntu. I mean, for winxp, you just stick in the cd, set your partitions, and the rest is mostly hitting next(ok, you have something that need configuring, but that's optional) However, from my experiences with a live CD of Ubuntu, and what I have heard, its not nearly as simple to install.

coppro
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Especially with a non-functional CD drive!

But that's not the point. Booting up the live CD on a working system isn't problematic. So, I don't know. But I'll get back to you on that.

Also, it's kind of funny that I need the CD drive to be working in order to run a diagnostic on said CD drive.

gamer_extreme_101
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If you use the DVD version of Ubuntu, it comes with what's known as an "OEM Install Mode" which essentially replicates a standard Windows installation. The only fun part comes in the creation of partitions, which you may need to read up on before performing closed disk surgery.

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b0rsuk
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NiroZ said:
However, from my experiences with a live CD of Ubuntu, and what I have heard, its not nearly as simple to install.

Care to elaborate ?

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[Last edited by b0rsuk at 11-03-2006 02:35 PM]

Fafnir
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NiroZ wrote:However, from my experiences with a live CD of Ubuntu, and what I have heard, its not nearly as simple to install.

What version did you try? My install was pretty painless, and I was installing Breezy - two versions ago. Here are the issues I encountered:

- Printer not autodetected. Manually added the printer by experimenting in the GUI, after which it worked first time. 2 minutes. (and I have a really old printer!)

- My nVidia graphics card needed drivers that couldn't be included with the install for (stupid) legal reasons. Resolved quickly by RTFFAQing and installing a package. 5 minutes. My on-board card worked fine, though, so I wasn't booted to the console in the meantime or anything.

- Codecs to play restricted media formats are not included in the install, again for (stupid) legal reasons. Resolved quickly by RTFFAQing and installing a package. 5 minutes.

And that was pretty much it!

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NiroZ
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b0rsuk wrote:

NiroZ said:
However, from my experiences with a live CD of Ubuntu, and what I have heard, its not nearly as simple to install.

Care to elaborate ?

Well, first I tried it on my laptop, and for whatever reason it didn't like it, and refused to load up. Then, I booted it up on my desktop. This too refused to work. Then I decided to give it a try on my Mum's computer, and it decided to work. Oddly enough, my Mum's computer and my desktop have exactly the same hardware.

Now, add in the fact that I tried to get it working on my laptop and desktop multiple times to no effect, and you start to get the idea of why I was not exactly impressed.

coppro
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NiroZ wrote:
Well, first I tried it on my laptop, and for whatever reason it didn't like it, and refused to load up. Then, I booted it up on my desktop. This too refused to work. Then I decided to give it a try on my Mum's computer, and it decided to work. Oddly enough, my Mum's computer and my desktop have exactly the same hardware.

Now, add in the fact that I tried to get it working on my laptop and desktop multiple times to no effect, and you start to get the idea of why I was not exactly impressed.

Did you tell the BIOS to boot from the CD, or just assume it would?

NiroZ
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coppro wrote:
Did you tell the BIOS to boot from the CD, or just assume it would?

How would I have got it to work on mum's computer otherwise?

Oh, and please don't turn this into a 'Help the user convert to Linux'.

jamie
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A not-too-technical friend of mine recently told me he did a freebsd install, and found it easier than windows xp.

Your mileage may vary.

Freebsd has a similar install thing, find the package (there are over 14,000) and click, or if you don't use the gui for it [like real men] just cd into it, and "make install"

it will too automatically find the package, configure and install it, automatically. no faffing with websites, and download boxes...

And as the list is always updated, it will automatically point out, and if required, fix/update ports.

I have over 1,000 installed on here - and in one operation, I can update ALL the ports in one go.

(windows users, think "add/remove programs" on ALL installed programs, linked into 'windows update')

and err. I agree with the earlier point that it's not so much that freebsd or unix are harder (in a lot of cases) -- it's just that most people have the 'windows mindset'

I know for a fact there ARE things in unix that could be made easier for the newbie, but their portrayal as 'newbie unfriendly' isn't really fair.


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Alneyan
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We, of Debian, have more packages than the puny FreeBSD folks! We're up to 17000 or so, I think, on plenty of architectures you will never use! Of course, Debian loves splitting packages, so the number is somewhat inflated, and my claim completely bogus. But hey, who lets facts get in the way of opinions?

That aside, I'm in agreement with Jamie, odd as it might be. I've found Unix to be a marvel for my laziness, and a good deal easier whenever explanations are involved; the few times where I've tried to explain a GUI from afar were amazingly frustrating for both sides. That reminds me of my university "explanation" for Wifi, basically a whole case of "on my computer, I click there, then here, then there, and voilà! It works. If not, you suck".

My laziness enjoys Unix because automating some tasks is simply a lot easier. It took me the whole of ten minutes to get a "yell Shot to take a screenshot in five seconds, renaming it to "yyyy-mm-dd-shot.jpg" and upload the bloody thing to my FTP", using well-known building blocks. I used to do that the hard way around, which is faster every time, but soon grows old and is less than optimal. On a Windows box, I have no idea how to do the "type a command and take a screenshot" thing; on Debian, the necessary program is comfy inside the package system.

Incidentally, Windows Vista managed to throw me offtrack; even shutting down the bloody thing was not a trivial task for me. Different mindsets, I guess (I'm pretty much a Windows 98 sort of guy, as far as Windows go).

Banjooie
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I think my primary issue with Linux has been that you seriously do need a guy to tell you how to get started with the basics. There simply is not a guide that gives you everything you need to start.

b0rsuk
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Banjooie wrote:
I think my primary issue with Linux has been that you seriously do need a guy to tell you how to get started with the basics. There simply is not a guide that gives you everything you need to start.

http://doc.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html

See especially section 2: Linux Basics.

NiroZ said:
Well, first I tried it on my laptop, and for whatever reason it didn't like it, and refused to load up. Then, I booted it up on my desktop. This too refused to work. Then I decided to give it a try on my Mum's computer, and it decided to work. Oddly enough, my Mum's computer and my desktop have exactly the same hardware.

Now, add in the fact that I tried to get it working on my laptop and desktop multiple times to no effect, and you start to get the idea of why I was not exactly impressed.

My experience has been completely opposite. Aside from one guy who obviously doesn't care, everyone I introduced to Ubuntu was able to figure it on his own. Two of people from my work had their laptops configured (including wifi) during install with no additional tweaking. And I've seen 4 ubuntu laptops in my class today (100%). The teacher had some other flavor of Linux on his laptop, while two guys outside used windows xp, and some other unspecified kind of linux.
---------
I totally agree it's mindset issue. People who stick to windows talk about icons, tabs, etc. They don't see the difference between a program and GUI. No wonder they later have problems grasping linux concepts, and are genuinely scared of commandline.

This is exactly what bothers me about Ubuntu community. I can't stand it anymore. It's totally full of people who switched from windows. They not only don't understand the commandline, they fear/despise it. If you see someone saying 'I have to use commandline ? In 2006 ??' you know you're on Ubuntu Forums. They can't be reasoned with.
Using commandline is not just a matter of preference. Once something goes wrong, typical ubuntu user describes it more less this way: "I click on the icon and nothing happens". Why bother running the program from console so you can get all the debug output possible ? It's painful to help them, because in most cases you have to squeeze information out of them.
I go back to Debian as soon as Etch is out. I miss linux users who not only can help when you ask them, but also explain cause of the problem and how the solution works. Can't be done if you rely on GUI.

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[Last edited by b0rsuk at 11-05-2006 03:35 PM]

Mattcrampy
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What is the point of the GUI if you're going to run off to the commandline at any opportunity? Surely that means that the GUI requires improvement?

(Personally, I think it'd be neat to get piping into the GUI. It's doable.)

I find the attitude of blaming the users because they're scared of screwing up their computer by using an esoteric and almost obsolete user inteface not especially admirable. Linux ain't ever going to be a mainstream choice for consumers if the developers have that sort of attitude.

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Stefan
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Mattcrampy wrote:
What is the point of the GUI if you're going to run off to the commandline at any opportunity?

To get more consoles?

I use the command prompt/commandline/console/whateveryouwanttocallit for a lot of stuff, most notably for all file management tasks. I just feel it's faster and more convenient. There's not really anything wrong with the GUI (although I dislike Gnome for it's "the user is stupid - let's hide the advanced settings" philosophy (similar to Windows and, from what I've seen and heard, OS X)).

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jamie
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Alneyan wrote:
We, of Debian, have more packages than the puny FreeBSD folks! We're up to 17000 or so, I think, on plenty of architectures you will never use! Of course, Debian loves splitting packages, so the number is somewhat inflated, and my claim completely bogus. But hey, who lets facts get in the way of opinions?

Is that portage, the thing based off FreeBSD ports ?

That aside, I'm in agreement with Jamie, odd as it might be.

*faints*

As an aside, I do nearly everthing in an xterm - On a typical day, I'll probably have 20 or so xterms open - logged into 4 or 5 different machines, with about 9 visible on screen at the same time.

The only 'gui' thing i run regularly is firefox.


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eytanz
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Stefan wrote:

Mattcrampy wrote:
What is the point of the GUI if you're going to run off to the commandline at any opportunity?

To get more consoles?

I use the command prompt/commandline/console/whateveryouwanttocallit for a lot of stuff, most notably for all file management tasks. I just feel it's faster and more convenient. There's not really anything wrong with the GUI (although I dislike Gnome for it's "the user is stupid - let's hide the advanced settings" philosophy (similar to Windows and, from what I've seen and heard, OS X)).

I don't think it's unreasonable for people who use their computers only as a platform to perform some basic tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, games) to be able to do so with the simplest interface possible. That doesn't make you stupid, any more than not knowing how to tune one's car engine makes one a stupid driver.

It's also not unreasonable to design your OS for a different demographic, which is the case with most Linux builds as far as I can tell (I don't have direct experience with them, mind you).

It does seem pretty unreasonable to me to design an interface that's supposed to make it easy for casual users to use it, and then require that they don't use it, which seems to be Matt's point. It's nice to have access to the advanced options is you want them, but, unless you're only targetting advanced users, you should keep them out of the way of normal use.

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[Last edited by eytanz at 11-06-2006 12:17 PM]