From: Wynne, Conor (Conor.Wynne at domain compaq.com)
Date: Thu 23 Aug 2001 - 10:13:56 IST
Donnacha is right - comme d'hab - but I disagree in one respect.
Yes we are all Communists or socialists intent on destruction of the evil
capitalists around the world. You only have to watch the daily news (RTE1,
SKY to name but two) to see our rallies and marches up and down O'connell
street in defiance!
Belfast accent : Linus says NO! We shout....
RANT RANT - back to reality.
There is a learning curve, but when you get to grips with things, everything
starts to fall into place. Its actually a good idea to buy a pack. I know
its free - and thats the communism in it - but the manuals tend to be very
good. Especially SUSE - which personlly I don't like. I'm a Redhat/Mandrake
man.
For sheer ease of use and simple configuration, use mandrake 8. But I would
recomend that if you are running GUI tools, check out what the command line
is thats running in the background.
example, the find command.
When you run find from the GUI to search / for core, what it actually runs
is the following command.
find / -name core -print
If you wan't to understand linux, then check the command line that is
actually being issued in the background.
one way, and correct me if my memory fails this morning,
ps -ef|grep find
Try this for every GUI app and you won't know yourself after a while. You
will soon see that unlike windows, nearly all the x apps are just interfaces
that run a command line.
Try and use console mode as much as possible, as you will forget the
commands otherwise. Also, edit the configuration files by hand rather than
using GUIS. You will learn much faster.
www.linuxdocs.org is a good resource. Also use the man pages.
Don't be afraid to ask any newbie question you like. We will help you! Ilug
rocks, but don't mail people directly - we are reply to all addicts, its a
drug.
My 2 euros.
CW
---------------------------
Hi Silvan,
First off, who have you asked for help? You'll usually get a better response
writing to mailing lists than to individuals. etc, etc..
I'd say, buy Mandrake 8.0 or Red Hat 7.1 and install that on your computer
at
home. Both come with manuals and are fairly simple to setup if you know
anything about your computer at all.
Oh, what's your motivation for using Linux? If it's "to get away from the
evil empire" you'll be disapointed as it's a lot of work, the GUI isn't as
nice (subjective, KDE2.2 is sweet!), games and especially 3D are a lot
harder
to get working. Working with MS Office documents is harder and more prone to
error.
That said, try Linux or one of the free BSDs.. once you get over your
culture
shock you'll be very happy :)
One more thing, don't expect something for nothing. You can download Linux
for free but you won't get any official support from the vendor. If you ask
questions of people (on mailing lists, email) and it's obvious that you
haven't attempted to do any research of your own you'll be ignored and
you'll
go away feeling that the Linux community is a pack of elitist left commy
b*stards... hehe.
Donncha.
PS. CCed to the ILUG in case anyone there wants to respond.
On Thu 23 Aug 2001 03:18, you wrote:
> hi,
> i'm wondering wether someone can finally help me to get, install and give
> advice on how to run a linux operating system... that i'm new to the game
> doesn't matter as i'm a fast learner by nature... i'm just not able to get
> any answers from anyone so far...
> just give me a hint to go where...
> don't i think right that we all have to try and get away from mickeysoft
> stuff... and it's downright irritating to think that nobody of the linux
> world wants to help so far... do you best, please...
> i'm just desperate at this point in time...
> oh yes i'm not wanting to replace just word or office or likeminded...
> i want a real alternative...
> i'm also a rebell by nature...
> Silvan
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