My short linux tour

[alshataan]

I have always heard a lot about how great linux is and so I finally decided to give it a try. First off, I could only get 1 distro(Ubuntu) to work. They all installed fine but only that one would see my wireless PCMCIA card. Actually, openSuse saw it, but wouldnt connect.

Anyway, I bought a huge book and dove in and I am not at all impressed. I still dont know how to install a program after downloading it unless its in my add/remove programs list already. Also, I cant get anything to work. Example: I just want to write a simple C program, compile, link, etc. but I just get errors! Yes, even the darned hello world! wont work. I looked at my big book and followed every instruction. That's not to mention the fact that using vi or emacs is rediculous. Example2: lets say(this is from the book) i want to put a fictional file and header where my compiler can see it: "user@user-laptop$ gcc -I../include _L../lib -o program program.c -lstuff " <<<<Are you kidding me???

This seems a complete step backward in computing. And hearing about how much Windows sucks confuses me since if i want to download and install...i click download and install....voila! done. I dont have constant errors of no such file when i try to use a simple #include for a danged Hello world program.

So I say all this to say: Am I missing something? I didnt mean all of this as a slam on Linux. But I just dont see one thing that is better or easier other than security if I'm wanting to run a server or something. Even then at this point I would use Windows based on this experience(which has been going on for a few
weeks now). Hardware difficult to get to work, old/outdated ways typing things in a shell to do simple stuff Windows does right with a click, insane jumping through hoops to get a program installed.

If anyone has anything advice or can give some reasons as to why I should keep trudging through this nightmare, please do so. Because I would really like to use Linux if it really is a decent OS. I love the idea of opensource and free software. I have a lot of Windows experience and started back in the days of DOS, so command lines arent unfamiliar to me.


Thanks

[saikee]

alshataan ,

If you ever stick with Linux some day you will laugh at your first post here.

You haven't use the terminal mode long enough to know how much it is more powerful than a Dos prompt.

[bs_texas]

I was very frustrated with Linux when I first looked in to it.

I persevered and now I'm not quite as frustrated sometimes. ;)

And Linux isn't for everyone.

Some people tend to want Linux to be more Windows like... and that seems to be happening actually. ...which can be good when you need to be productive.

[bwkaz]

"user@user-laptop$ gcc -I../include _L../lib -o program program.c -lstuff " <<<<Are you kidding me??? Have you ever LOOKED at the ridiculous command lines that MSVC++ runs when you compile a project? Believe me, they're way longer than this -- often too long to actually fit in the Windows command line, so it has to use a response file instead.

What you posted is simple compared to what VC++ runs when you try to compile "hello world with a library" through it. ;)

Now, you may argue that you don't need to see those details, and perhaps you'd be right (at least until something goes wrong; then you'll be glad to see the detail that you now think of as extraneous, because it tells you exactly what the compiler is actually doing...). But that's why Stuart Feldman made "make". (That's also why a ton of other people have collaborated on various IDEs, like kdevelop and others that I can't remember at the moment. I suppose even emacs could be considered a sort of IDE.)

[je_fro]

Windows "power users" always have the hardest time switching.
I'll bet butnut doesn't come with a complete toolchain either...

[alshataan]

I'll stick with it. Thanks for replies. I dont give up easily. It's just my first impression was not great.

Besides, Im a nerd with no girlfriend....so I have lots of time to dig through forums and books:)

I would also like to add to my previous post that I have some positive things that I like about Linux so far as well. I didnt mean to give an impression that it as all bad.

[gamblor01]

One important note I would like to make is that there are MANY different ways to "install" something in Linux. It can be confusing for first-time users. Here are just some examples I can think of:

- a script installs everything for you (but the underlying commands typically require some of the other things I will mention below).

- the system contains a special package manager. Some examples of this are rpm, apt, and emerge. Maybe you type "rpm -U foo.rpm" to upgrade the RPM foo (note that the -U option will perform an install if no previous version exists), or maybe you type "apt-get foo"

- the "install" may actually be compiling something. This is typically found in cases like tarballs (foo.tar). These files might also be zipped as well (using either gzip or bzip2). Usually you need to untar (and unzip if necessary) these files, and then enter the source directory that is copied down and compile that source code for your architecture, which typically involves some variation of these 3 commands:

# ./compile
# make
# make install

- Sometimes an "installation" is as simple as copying files to particular location. This is obviously not different at all from Windows. Sometimes installations have a setup.exe and modify the registry, unpack and lay down files, change hidden files, change settings, etc. But sometimes (particularly with older software or free stuff that isn't worried about copy protection) it's as simple as copying a folder to your drive and launching the executable contained within.

Hope this helps some.

[ehawk]

Add/remove programs features the most commonly used applications. I would suggest you click under system or administration and then open the application called synaptic. It is a graphical front-end for the uber-awesome apt-get package management system ubuntu has thanks to its debian heritage. If you enable the universe repository, you will have easy installation access and search capabilities for over 18,000 packages, covering just about anything I have ever wanted in an OS.

I would also suggest looking at online resources for an introduction to ubuntu linux instead of your big book. Baby steps...don't plunge headlong into a unix manual. The forums and documentation from the ubuntu community are really welcoming. For starters, maybe this link (from ubuntu.com) will be helpful:

https://help.ubuntu.com/

Hope this helps.

I don't know about the details of your programming problem, but I have had little trouble compiling and executing C++ and Fortran-77 programs in linux.

There are other text editors you may find more user friendly at first, such as xemacs or kate.

I think ubuntu is a really great linux distribution, and many of my friends agree. In the past, lack of some out-of-the-box multimedia support has been criticized. In general, this is due to the "free" (as in speech) spirit permeating the distribution. The latest release, 7.04, has addressed these concerns by prompting you to install codecs that are not installed by default when they are encountered.

[saikee]

People may not like Ubuntu (possibly because it is popular and hasn't earned it place by maturity as Red Hat, Slackware or Debian did) but the amount of work that has gone into it is making it the most mordern, flexible and useful Linux at the moment. Certainly many issues have been addressed, solutions made available and it is a great distro to work with and to compete in the modern world.

I am using it as my main Linux. It has proved to me as the best all rounder amount the over 100 I tried. I didn't like its sudo approach at the begining but have come round to accept it to be a good security feature. It has the flexibility to drop "sudo" and works just like a standard Linux if I want it to.

[clw54]

It took me three tries to stick with Linux, and I've been using it almost exclusively for several years now. I do have an XP machine because I like the MS flight simulator.

First I tried Red Hat and gave up after a couple months.

A year or two later I tried SuSE and gave up after a couple months.

Then I tried Mandrake and stuck with it. By that time it user friendly enough and I knew where the resources were on the Internet.

So it's okay to walk away from it if it's overwhelming, but hopefully you'll give it another try if you do. You do have to be patient with it because it often takes time to get something up and running. We've all spent a weekend getting something to work--a new distro, sound, a wireless card, whatever. That's part of the experience, but you learn more by things not working at first than when they work out of the box.

It's a great operating system. If it weren't there wouldn't be so many forums and websites about it. :)

[ladoga]

I do have an XP machine because I like the MS flight simulator.

Check this out:
http://www.targetware.net/

Ps. Im just a casual player, so this is not an advertisement and the flight sim in question is in open beta since 2003(?) and probably for years to come.

[Chess007]

I learned about linux from my best friend. He learned about it because he met a guy that has a networking business. My first experience with linux was frustrating. I had an old version of red hat that I installed on an old hd. (Didn't trust myself to do a dual boot, so I just installed it to an old hd). I couldn't figure out how to install programs. (I didn't have a book or anything, I just installed it.) It seemed to run very slow. I went on the net with it, but didn't see the point. So, I stopped using it. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why it ran so slow. One day I realised: "I'm using an old crappy hd." That was probably the reason for the speed issue.

My windows comp got a virus and I was mad/annoied. because it was a virus, (and I hadn't made recent backups) I knew i'd have to format it. (I wasn't going to make backups from a hd that had a virus, only to have it come back later because I loaded a backup disk.) I still wanted to do things online. The frustrating thing was that I didn't trust the comp with the virus - it could have a trojan a keylogger etc. Then I thought of knoppix. The OS ran from the disk drive (not the hd) so I had no security worries. It went online fine and I used gaim to IM.

That swung the pendulum back towards the linux direction. I experminted with Suse, mandrake, and many other linuxes. Heard a lot of hype on the net about Ubuntu. I tried it, there was so much help documentation I could really get things done! I liked it a lot. Once I learned to use apt I saw the beauty in the simplicity. Choice is a great thing about linux.

Another computer that i run linux on was a pain. I tried installing lots of different linuxes on it. I kept getting gui issues. (I suspect its because this comp has some crappy integrated video chip.) Finally though, blag installed. Its a good distro.

Another linux strong point is default installed programs. That is to say, the quality of the default installed programs. (The default installed programs may be different for the different nixes, krita wasn't installed by default but apt getting it was simple.) The Gimp and krita do a much better job of graphics editing than MS Paint., saving and converting to multiple formats etc. Open Office is a great text editor with many other functions. Including the abillity to make pdf's (which I had never been able to do for free on Win.) As a writer this is great, I can make my own ebooks. :) Compare that to Microsoft Office which costs 300 something dollars. Oh and they do you the favor of changing formats every couple of years so that your old Word documents won't work anymore... lovely.

Another great thing about linux is freedom. Most programs are open source. Whats that mean? That means lots of people have seen the source code and know exactly what the program is doing. (You could even change a program if you want.) Why is that important? Because I want to know exactly whats going on on my system. You don't know that on Windows. Whats happening during windows update? Are you being tracked through some sort of music player?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal

Had someone tried to do that with an open source program, it would have been found out. Had the sysinternals guy not found out about it, who knows how long clueless users would have been spied on. As a side note, Dell reported a very high increase in BSOD (blue screen of death) errors that coincides with Sonys use of the rootkit. Which begs the question, if there was something nafarious going on on your Windows box, how would you find out? Or even, would you ever find out? ...

Which brings up the topic of security. Microsoft philosophy: security through obscurity.

"In cryptography and computer security, security through obscurity (sometimes security by obscurity) is a controversial principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy (of design, implementation, etc.) to provide security. A system relying on security through obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that the flaws are not known, and that attackers are unlikely to find them."

Once they are notified about a security problem (by a security researcher) they can take months to actually fix it. Considering the ammount of Windows worms, viruses, trojans, etc you be the judge as to their security record. The linux philosophy is that the code is open. So that security problems are fixed quickly through updates.

Some other Microsoft security gems:

An email client that automatically runs the program code of email attachments.

Who in hell thought that was a good idea??

Have lots of services on by default.

Having a browser that automatically downloads and runs code from any website. (Hello activex.) Internet Explorer got so bad that lots of security experts recommend running Firefox all the time and only running IE for Windows Updates.

To this, invaribly some MS fanboy chimes in that "Of course Windows has more security problems. It has a bigger userbase so its a bigger target." Explain then why Apache (an open source program which a good part of the net runs on) doesn't have as many critical security problems as Windows. Explain why microsoft's Internet Information Services (their server program)
routinely has many more security problems than Apache.

Comming back to the freedom point, linux helps you save money. There are lots of programs that are free that work better than their Windows counterparts. (I do my part to spread open source. I can't code but I do try
and get people into linux. Not trying to promote people who don't give back to the community.)

There are some things you can do with linux that are impossible to do with Windows. You can run a computer without a hard drive. Either from a live cd, or from loading a live cd into ram. That second option producing a blindingly fast Damn Small Linux on a machine that had 512 ram.

As soon as you want to do something that Windows does, that gets frustrating because theres the thought: "Ok I want aol instant messenger. Wait it doesn't run on linux." I mean the first thing you think of are Windows programs that do what you want to do (as if those are the only programs in the world.) So, you need a list that shows the Windows program name and the linux equivalent. Then its usually as simple as apt-geting the program you want.

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software

I've found that linux does most things much more efficiently than Windows. For example, IM clients. On Windows theres icq, aolim, yahoo messenger, msn messenger, etc. On linux, run gaim. Thats 1 program that does the job of all those Windows programs. (Of course theres a program called trillian that does that for Win but I didn't know that at the time.)

VLC plays just about everything i've thrown at it. Its one program. Compare that to Windows. To play quicktime files I need quicktime. To play real audio files, I need Real Player. To play Windows Media Video files, I need Windows Media Player. (Or most users think.. real alternative, quicktime alternative, windows media player classic, usually play everything, but most users don't know about those. Streaming can also be a problem. VLC is avaliable for Windows but how many people know that?)

"...insane jumping through hoops to get a program installed."

sudo apt-get install (whatever the hell you want) lol

Apt-get is much easier to use than the way Windows installs things. It has a gui (Synaptic) which is fine, but there are things that are easier to do with a terminal than with a gui. For example, if I want to install 10 programs, the process in synaptic would be, select all the programs, (by scrolling through a list) and then installing them.

The same process at the terminal:

sudo apt-get install programname1 programname2

etc.

It asks for your password. You enter the password, then press enter. Your system then downloads and installs all 10 programs. Somtimes you get prompted during the process and need to press enter. But usually it just says the file size and pressing enter once gets it done.

Imagine how long - and how much user interaction - it would take to install 10 programs in Windows. Ie. Welcome to the install wizard. <click next> Here's the programs TOS. <click next> Do you want normal, or custom install? <select one and click next> etc.

Linux runs well on hardware that win 2000 or above would have a heart attack on. How much processing power does Vista take for its gui vs how much linux takes for XFCE?

I feel good running linux. I know the code has been seen by lots of people. I have freedom. I have control. For example: If I don't like the gui, I can download another one. (Impossible with Windows.) I know what my machine is doing. My machine runs efficiently.

My advice: Give yourself time and don't give up. Most everything that you'll find yourself wanting to do, theres a step by step guide to for Ubuntu. For everything else, theres

http://www.google.com/linux

and helpful forums. :)

Here's a random tip. Don't uses spaces in file names. use the _ character instead. The command line doesn't like spaces in file names.