new tricks for old dogs?

[Rodger]

Hi there,

 

I have been using windows for the last 12 years (Mechanical Engineering) and that

[FDV]

Hey man!

A fellow noob here. Here are some observations.

 

Save yourself the heartache and dual-boot Windows and Linux for a while. Preferably a long time. Why? Well, you might REALLY want to "just get X done" without having to spend an hour trying to figure out how to do it. I just started dual-booting about a year ago. Being able to just get something done in Windows and then going back to Linux can help preserve your patience.

 

Get used to the convention (and not the necessity) of typing things into the console. You will see a lot of sites that offer how-tos. You read with interest but you wonder "how am I going to remember to type ghlf kfhgelkew hrfejwklhgk rjkewhkth uovhfweuv jhfrjke every time I want to install something?" Well, the good news is, you don't always need to use the console for every single thing in the OS. So why does every site make it look like you do? It's easier on bandwidth for them to host a line of text than it is to host multiple screenshots of doing something in the GUI (whichever GUI you use).

 

Those guides you get to on Google? They are written by people with black belts. Rhetorical question: can you and I reasonably expect them to address how to fix things when strange things happen? No. The simple fact is that their expertise is brought to bear on telling us where to get started and how. When I got started, I tried to install MP3 support for a media player (Amarok). I went to a website and pasted text into the console. For about 5 seconds it was going great! Then I saw hundreds of errors scrolling by, too fast to keep up with. I puzzled out that I was missing some libraries (more on that in a second). It took me FOR. FREAKIN. EVER. to find out what the problem was, never mind fix it. Another example: somehow in my newness I associated .deb files with a text editor. Instead of double-clicking to install, it opened the file as text. Not a big deal in Windows. In Linux? Oh my. There is no registry -- no central location -- to fix things like this.

 

Dependencies. Sometimes, you can't just install a piece of software in Linux. You have to install other programs first. Since we were Windows guys, I'll correlate it like that: think of it like not having a required DLL. Trying to find out why you need to install three other libraries just to run, say, Opera will be an hour's time wasted on Google (why as in "what do these libraries do?) Just accept that as black magic when you're new.

 

When you install something in Windows, you can open a ZIP file, double click an EXE, and it installs and even puts an icon in a menubar for you. This does not occur in Linux. Again, this is something many guides don't tell you because they focus on more beginner things, not things that Windows guys are used to and the headaches we get when it's radically different. Simply, some programs come as RPM, some as DEB, some as yet something else. Are all sort of equivalent to EXE files conceptually. Some programs will install an icon in your GUI's menu bar. Some simply won't. Better yet? Some guides will direct you to open the console and type the program name to start it instead of fixing this "no-icon" situation.

 

Many will suggest that you start out with a noob friendly distribution of Linux like Fedora or Kubuntu (or Ubuntu). My advice? Take that advice. Linux is too foreign even to a former Windows user. You need something to make it easy as you learn, and some distros make things easier than others. I use Kubuntu. Whatever you learn in one distro will not necessarily translate exactly to another, so if you have your heart set on DSL, you might have a steeper learning curve.

 

I could go on and probably might log in and later edit this post if I think of more things, but I wanted to get a reply to you as a fellow new guy to Linux. These are only a few things to consider and above all, be patient what with all of the guides out there that sometimes seem to end their coverage right where you are trying to begin. o_O

[znx]

If someone knows where I am at here or what I am seeking, please advise.

 

So yeah, I understand what you are looking for, unfortunately I'm not really sure that something like that exists. The main reason for this is that Linux has multiple different methods and multiple different utilities.

 

Maybe see if you have a local LUG (a Linux User Group) or try looking through the various O'Reilly books.

 

But remember we don't mind having tonnes of questions asked! ;)