[Novalug] Linux For Beginners

Ken Kauffman kkauffman@headfog.com
Sun Nov 30 10:13:22 EST 2008


Even though I'm just turning 40 in 2009, I have worked punch cards,
Assembler, ADA, Fortran (mainframe), COBOL (mainframe), BASIC, JAVA,
PASCAL (which I loved), PERL, SQL, C and C++.  I think that when
people talk about 'learning Linux', they are really meaning the
command line based techstuff(tm) and compiling.  Oh -- I have not
desire to delve back into the depths of code *as before*.

Did the original poster mention learning Linux? or were they really
interesting in 'using Linux'?  Or were they meaning "learn to use
Linux" and said 'learn Linux'?

Even a home user has a true 'requirement' and I seem to have lost it
(aka. deleted o.p.) in the process.

On a side note, if there is anyone with Netezza and financial business
intelligence experience, please contact me off list.

Ken

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 09:59, Dennis Durham <dwdurham@verizon.net> wrote:
> I have read through all these "Linux for Beginners" posts and decided
> to use this one for my launch point for my two cents. I am a beginner
> at Linux although I have been in the computer trade since the early
> 70s. My early training was Assembler, Cobol, Fortran, and PL/1 for IBM
> mainframes (using punched cards).
>
> Most of these posts, and this one in particular, use the word "learn"
> repeatedly and imply that the primary reason for the existence of
> Linux is to learn it. I emphatically am NOT knocking learning, but I
> want to interject to this discussion that, speaking as one Linux
> newbie, my motivation for joining the Linux community was and is not
> learning per say, but a desire to distance myself from the perceived
> abuses of Microsoft without giving up the benefits of having a
> computer for common household activities such as correspondence, photo
> processing, and tax preparation.
>
> As someone who has tasted Assembler and gone on to GUIs, I have no
> more interest in going back to raw code than I have in going back to
> the womb. I want to emphasize that I am NOT knocking those who like
> working in code or denigrating wombs for that matter. :-)
>
> What I am trying to suggest here is that there exists a number of
> recruits to the Linux camp who are not here solely for the learning
> opportunity but because they want the computer to do something for
> them and they have been repelled by "WinDoze". That if the effort to
> get the computer to do something exceeds the effort to do it by hand,
> only "the faithful" will do it by computer. That if there was a
> version of Linux that was as user friendly as Windows, the number of
> Linux users would surpass the number of Windows users.
>
> So here is my point: Would you even want that? My impression is that
> many Linux users I have met unconsciously view themselves as members
> of a priesthood. That while they welcome newbies into the fold, the
> idea of Linux becoming the majority OS would be as terrible as urban
> sprawl is to a farmer, and for similar reasons; destruction of ones
> familiar community. To stretch the metaphor, some of  these posts read
> to me more like a discussion of which monastery is best rather than a
> discussion of how to bring the religion to the people toiling in the
> fields. Are we (if I may include myself) too comfortable complaining
> about Microsoft to risk some of our doctrinal purity in order to
> embrace a majority of users? Because if we do attract a majority, it
> WILL change the community.
>
> Dennis
> (Or should I have said "WHEN we attract a majority?" because I think
> that it will happen.)
>
> On Nov 29, 2008, at 10:13 PM, Jean Figarella wrote:
>
>> Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 19:28 -0500, Jean Figarella wrote:
>>>
>>>> Basically, while the other distributions are very good and perhaps
>>>> more
>>>> "modern", ( I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and CentOS at home) I can
>>>> tell
>>>> you that for learning hands down Linux then Slackware, Gentoo and
>>>> Arch
>>>> are better tools.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I don't really understand the thinking that one can't learn while
>>> using
>>> an "easy" distro.  Just because you're not *forced* to learn doesn't
>>> mean you won't learn it "just because."  And really, if you don't
>>> want
>>> to learn it "just because" then...well, do you really want to learn?
>>>
>>>
>> I didn't say you won't/can't learn with the "easy" distros.  What I
>> was
>> trying to say that in my case, and that of many others the learning
>> process and understanding was accelerated when trying one of the more
>> "difficult" or geeky distros. One of the reasons for this is that
>> there
>> is no GUI configuration tools. Since I've used RHEL and CentOS at work
>> (yes I am a sysadmin) very few times I've have had to compile software
>> from scratch (configure and make). The junior guys that we have simply
>> don't know how to do this, and also don't even know how to compile a
>> kernel to simply conform it to your specific hardware. To them if the
>> software is not in yum or apt repo, then there is no software. If you
>> ask them: "Hey how do you add a route or a default gateway manually?"
>> Many times their response is: "I don't know."
>>
>> You can certainly learn from Ubuntu and Fedora, heck I learned some
>> stuff with windows 95. I don't have anything against these distros,
>> and
>> by the way I do think they are wonderful distros.
>>
>> --Jean
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