The Clueless Newbie's Linux Odyssey

overshoot writes "Just what we've always (said we) wanted: people who are fed up with Microsoft and are willing, even eager, to give Linux a real try. Well, she did. And did. And did some more. Not only that, she's a technical writer and she took notes. Not fun reading, but worth reading anyway."

Tsu Dho Nimh

[blair1q]

Say the name out loud until you get it.

Technical writer?

[labratuk]

I'm a lousy typist, and text mode is not an efficient way for me to interface with an operating system.

Let me get this striaght. She's a Technical writer, but a lousy typist.

Her work day must be living hell.

Not fun reading, but worth reading anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

With that wonderful endorsement, how can I *not* read it?!?

nice quote

[mrpuffypants]

Well, you shrieking geeks

that's a nice way to endear yourself to the readers. I'd like to read some of her technical writings...

Now configure sendmail; you know where the sendmail.cf file is, you twit!

Re:Technical writer?

[Theodore Logan]

A technical writer who doesn't know the first thing about computers and can't type? Either it's still the first of April or all those people who whine about how hard it is getting a job in tech these days are damn, cursed, liars!

Re:Technical writer?

[Soko]

Doubt it. This guy Rob Malda [cmdrtaco.net] makes his living posting "news" stories, and his typing seems to be rather lousy, his spelling and grammer are rather poor, too. I don't see him suffering much.

Besdies, from what I've seen, "Technical" and "Writer" don't belong in the same sentence, unless the sentence is "Techncally I'm a Writer, but I'm not terribly creative..."

Soko

Hey...

[1nv4d3r]

Tsu Dho Nimh my ass...John C. Dvorak, is that you?

Re:Tsu Dho Nimh

[Theodore Logan]

Very clever, very clever indeed. I sense a conspiracy! Let's see what we can make of this: there are ten letters in "Tsu Dho Nimb" and Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1951. 2+8+1+9+5+1=26. 2+6=8, and 8 is written 10 in octal. Coincidence? I think not!

Even a moron can see that there's got to be something more than meets the eye to a story that purports to show how Linux is still too complicated for the masses. I wipe my ass on your article, Bill. You're not fooling me!

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

How did you read the article and get first post?

Re:Not a lot of variety

[overshoot]

Let's see 12 distro's tested. Of those 8 are red hat / mandrake and 2 were suse. To give linux / alternative operating systems a try there should be more choices. She never said that linux was her only choice she just thought it best met her requirements. Seems to be that FreeBSD or any other BSD would be a good choice to try at as they meet all the requirements.

Help me here -- she's having trouble with Mandrake's installer and you want her to try the BSDs?

Re:Article has a bad tone

[Kourino]

I'm so discouraged by this I just need to stop and agree ...

I've been sitting in the IRC channel for a popular icculus game recently and every day someone brings up (again) the "we need OpenGL support" topic.

Now, you can't do this in general, but today on LKML I saw what I consider to be a contender for greatest message ever ... damn, did it make me laugh XD

From: Alan Cox
Subject: Re: poweroff problem

On Sad, 2003-04-05 at 07:08, Anant Aneja wrote:
> also i cant give u the complete listing of the cpu
> registers since it occurs at the last stage
> of shutdown and i cant copy it to a file
> and am too lazy to write it down

We are too lazy to help you.
Goodbye

Alan

Busted!

[NoData]

Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.

By your own admition: Saturday night, posting to Slashdot.

You may be a technical guy, but c'mon, you aren't seriously fucking. Anything.

Right

[arvindn]

After a few paragraphs of whining that she couldn't play CDs she finally reveals that it was because the volume was set to zero. I know, this is a newbie and we aren't supposed to flame her and everything, but really, I have to ask if a person who doesn't think of increasing the volume if she can't hear sound should be using any kind of computer at all.

Ummmm

[geekoid]

I think what she wants is a BSD varient. With a nice GUI. Probably by a company named after a piece of fruit.

Re:Tool or toy?

[Nalanthi]

Blow up a mac?? What are you doing in your lab!?!

Re:Article Summary

[wastaz]

Actually, I found that gentoo's compile-it-yourself is best for us geeks that do have hot girlfriends.
#!/bin/bash su -c "emerge program-that-takes-forever-to-compile"
whereis girlfriend
locate bed
mv -r /home/fridge/alcohol/* /home/bedroom/
(oh, I think you can figure the rest out by yourselves)

Suffice to say, gentoo rocks for people that has girlfriends. Lots of spare time that needs to be spent somewhere thats not in front of the computer.

Re:Article Summary - TROLL ALERT

[An Onerous Coward]

Not a perfect analogy. With an organ transplant, you can expect that the person you're explaining it to will have some idea what your heart, lungs, and kidneys are. So all you need to do is tell them, "We're taking out the old heart, and swapping in the new one." With quite a few computer users, they understand screen, keyboard, mouse, and "magic box".

"I'm just going to repartition your hard drive."

"Repermission my what?"

"It's a little disk in your computer that stores all your files. I'm just going to divide it into two sections so that you can install two separate operating systems."

"Couldn't we just use a second disk? I have a blank one in my desk drawer."

"No, that's a different type of disk. You can't fit an operating system on one, except maybe tomsrtbt..."

"Okay, I'll try that one."

"I'll call you when I'm done."