Re: Choosing a distribution (was: Just a simple query)
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Anthony Campbell <ac@acampbell.org.uk> wrote:
> A distribution that does everything with the GUI certainly makes things
> easier for beginners, but I think that unless you take the plunge and
> become comfortable with the command line you are likely to progress
> only slowly.
Yes, however, if you are curious in addition to willing, the GUI front
end can be educational. Change something in GUI which impacts the
firewall, authentication, etc., and then look at the file system to
see what files it changes and with what content. This was me with
Redhat in '96 and it built knowledge I could take to Slackware, etc.
> I'm very thankful that I came to Linux from DOS. Even at that time I
> dislike Windows (version 3.0!) so Linux was less of a culture shock than
> it would otherwise have been.
Myself as well, having come from University SYS V Unix systems, to Sun
OS, to Linux. In the 80's I could practise my vi commands for up,
down, left and right by playing larn (like rogue, or nethack).
Today's user more likely practises such commands in WOW or a FPS and
knows a,w,s,d instead of h,j,k,l.
But more significantly, the older generation of Unix users were
introduced to stuff gradually. It was like going through school, but
we were introduced to each piece as it came into maturity. We were
not on the web, we probably didn't have email except to other users on
the same Unix system. We
started with vt100-ish terminals, not any sort of Windows. We did have
lots of time to experiment with shell scripting, regular expressions,
awk, tricks in vi (it was called fred when I first used it) etc. This
was our elementary school period we built up the basics of living and
working from the command line. Even when XFree86 came along, it was a
bit of research to find how to configure your particular video card,
monitor, mouse, etc. with the windowing system.
For someone starting today, there is a mountain of information to
learn all at once. They have to sort out what is worth learning. I
don't know how they would go about it. Of course to me it makes sense
to learn it the same order it was developed, but really, a bunch of it
can be forgotten (e.g. uucp).
It can be a toss up sometimes. For the most part, you don't need to set up
an xorg.conf file anymore. However, in the times my situation isn't
supported in
X as well as I'd like, I'm able to set up an xorg.conf and tweak it,
falling back on
my experiences with XFree86.
I think it is getting to the point where more and more, only the
developers (or people
able to read and understand the code) will have inside knowledge on changing
low level config. It is like that now for projects like Horde Webmail
or Mailman.
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