John W. Colby
jwcolby at gmail.com
Tue Feb 3 22:34:46 CST 2015
Jim, >unless your willing to go down to the command prompt network issues can be impossible to fix. I get that, and I understand dropping to the command window for that kind of thing. But that is NOT a simple install or uninstall! That is once in a blue moon gotta go to the command window. Go out to watch YouTube videos of ANYTHING linux and observe what percentage of time the person is clacking away in the command window. It is like I am back in 1982. I'm not giving up! I expect that if you are just doing office stuff then yea, install it and go. The mint installation itself went flawlessly. Actually USING a browser or the office apps works just as you would expect (and as in Windows) in the Gui. And at lleast in Mint, anything already in the distro can just be installed through the gui. But holy crap, come time to actually install anything else... Take MariaDB for example. I want to use that specifically, rather than get started with MySQL and switch later. Unfortunately (for me) it seems that MySQL is native to Ubuntu and Mint is a fork of Ubuntu. So I immediately have to uninstall MySQL. Well... there is no (gui) uninstaller. And the uninstall itself (the actual text that you type in) is specific to the linux distro. And... of course... it is typing in the command console. So it is off to Google to try to discover how to uninstall something. Then... it is the same to install MariaDB. "What version of linux are you using?" If this version then you have to do this, but if that version you have to do that... and of course... typing into the command console. Likewise with getting a VM running. Likewise with getting Wine. If you happen to be lucky and it is already in the distro then it gets easier (to install). Maybe / mostly. Get this, I was in a chat room asking questions about how to do this stuff. The guy actually recommended that I get rid of mint and go to... Now what kind of stupid response is that. Trash my perfectly running install of a version of linux to move to some other (equally frustrating) version of linux in the vain hope that one specific application will be easier to install? And we all know why it is like this. Because Linux is so fragmented that even though it is supposed to "all be the same", it isn't. Nothing is the same, everything is slightly (or not so slightly) different. I was watching a YouTube video the other day where the speaker was showing a graph of the number of users of various versions. There were perhaps 15 or 20 different lines in this graph. And those are just the MAJOR distros. It's a cluster...friggen mess. To be honest it reminds me of school children trading baseball cards. "Ooooh have you seen..."? "No but I'm gonna run right home and grab my usb stick and get that up and play with it..." So I can see how you could get an entire office up in Linux, I got my machine up in Mint in just an hour or so. And spent many MANY subsequent hours trying (unsuccessfully so far) getting MariaDB and VM hosting up and working. Once they are up and working, I fully expect to have a gui that allows me to do my work in those programs. Furthermore I AM going to work in ucontrollers and they are all Linux so I just have no choice but to move through this cluster...friggen mess and learn enough to get a dev environment and cross compiler up. You better believe however that there is a very narrow objective, which is to get specific applications up in SOME (don't give a damn which) version of Linux so I can actually get some work done. If anyone wants to join me in the nightmare, (misery LOVES company) I joined the tech group and am trying to get some response over there for playing with Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. Go get one if you haven't already and let's play. The BeagleBone Black in particular is a way cool widget for automation stuff. I did Atmel controllers a few years ago (no linux fortunately) and it was a ton-o-fun. By the way, I designed and built a debit card vending machine in 96 when I lived in Mexico. It used a Z-80 single board computer and ran a custom real time system with a C compiler to program it. It used a bill acceptor (like in a coke machine) interfaced over RS-488 serial to the controller and we then built a vend widget with a motor, a metal ram, and a bunch of LED / detectors to allow me to control the vend cycle. It kept all of the data in RAM on the SBC and talked (via RS232) to a hand held computer that the operator would hook up to the machine to read out the data about the bills in the machine, how many cards were left etc. I did all of the electronics (really quite simple) as well as wrote the vending machine software. That was the most fun I have ever been paid to have! :) John W. Colby On 2/3/2015 10:31 PM, Jim Lawrence wrote: > You are obviously having the worse experiences with it. > > I tend to be lazy and use the terminal only when all else fails and mostly for speed. I tend to find Windows too dumbed down and unless your willing to go down to the command prompt network issues can be impossible to fix. > > I must relate a story of a client that I helped a couple (three) of years ago. They had all Windows XP boxes but decided to experiment by setting a dozen by upgrading to Linux (in this case Ubuntu), to save money. It took only four hours, on a Saturday afternoon, to install a dozen new system, connect to all the printer, the network, the internet and install all the office software. A young lady there (24-25), who knew basically nothing about computers, helped me with the install. > > I thought that I might be supporting them for years, one way of another, but it was not so. She just picked the ball up and ran with it. I understand the whole office (50 desktops) and all the servers are now running Linux and everything runs flawlessly. So with no computer system training or experience (thank God for Google), this young person did all this without any help from me and she just loves it. The truth is that she was young and didn't have to unlearn any bad habits. > > I have had no problem with Linux but back in the day, I was a certified SCO Unix installer, so it was just like being back home again. This does not mean that I do not like Windows; it is just that the moment we step away from the desktop and move into the world of the internet, its a Linux universe out there. > > Don't give up on Linux...it is hardly smarter than you are and I have found it to be great fun as it has all the latest and greatest technologies, first. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft say, "We love Linux." > > Jim >