[ILUG] Straw Poll of Linux Users

[Andrew Kemmy]

Ian Swainson,

I think your definition of a user as someone who *never* uses
the command line is a bit restrictive... however:

On my home LAN guest users can access Linux apps e.g. Netscape
and StarOffice remotely from XWindows Terminals. (The terminals themselves
have tiny 50 Meg drives, and have no real local apps). So these guests are
using GUI-based apps pretty much 100%. I set this up so that I wouldn't have
to give up the "hot seat" of my main machine (the one with the modem ;) if a
visitor wanted Net access. So there are three or four people here who have
used
Linux GUI's without really realising that they were using Linux until it was
pointed out to them. I think this comes close to your "pure user"
definition.

[WARNING : nit-picky comments follow; ]

1./ If I set up Wine or VMware so that an XWindows user can run M$ apps
remotely from a Linux box, they are "using" Linux, in the sense that Linux
is
allowing, say, a 386sx to run a Matlab simulation remotely that it couldn't
run
natively. However they are not using Linux per se.

2./ Users of Internet Exploder on Wintel are, according to Apache, connected
to Linux Apache servers *about* 50% of the time they are surfing. If you
include
these people in your user definition of people who <use> Linux but have no
technical
knowledge of the system, the numbers become quite Large...

Hope this helps. Apologies if it misses the point completely.

Oh yeah, while I'm posting, there's a CD burner, a few Linux dists (incl.
SuSE 6.2), and some O'Reilly books that may be of use to ILUG.

Andrew Kemmy   kemmya at indigo.ie