h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've recently installed Slackware 10.2 as my main desktop o/s. While I am not a *nix virgin (I have some previous experience with using a shell account on a *nix server) it is my first real attempt at installing and using a Linux distribution as my main desktop. If I can be of any assistance with you proposed article let me know (I was thinking of doing something similar myself).

Ta. Will do.

I'm not only a Penguin virgin...but a non-techie. My big problem so far has been not knowing what questions to ask. For the techie, it's perhaps difficult to remember what ordinary mortals do or don't know.

What I'd like to write (because I haven't found anything similar online ) is something based on the following assumptions:

Readers will be wanting to put a desktop onto an ordinary, vanilla PC, for home use.
They'll probably not know much about what's inside the PC. Some of them will have old machines (Me!), some newer.
They'll want to do all the usual things, like:
- Work with MS Office-like documents and spreadsheets
- Browse the web, having connected by a modem (cable, broadband or 56K)
- Email
- Play CDs and mp3s, rip CDs, play streamed audio.
- Ditto movies
- Burn CDs/ DVDs
- Get photos from their camera/ scanner and manipulate them.
- Manage their iPod (this seems to be more difficult than you'd think!)

That's all! See...to most of the world, a PC is a glorified entertainment/ home shopping centre. Since I'm a Human Factors profesional (A3213127) I'd like to do it from the ordinary user's viewpoint: 'How to get a Linux and running so that I can do all the things I normally do in Windows'.


Meantime...I'm havering between Fedora and Ubuntu. Any reason for going with one or the other?

Here is how I made my choice, perhaps the things I looked at will help you in your choice. I am a , I have been playing with computers since 1981 so my view is perhaps different from yours.

1: I wanted a very basic install. Reason: By manually configuring things you lean how an o/s works so that when things go tits up you have an idea how to fix them, additionally I am not stuck with a load of preinstalled software I don't need.

2: I wanted a package management system (this is a way of tracking installed software) that looked after dependencies (i.e. other programs that need to be installed for the program you are installing to run (Ubuntu has this)).

This led me to Debian but alas the custom Debian script for configuring the "X server" (which is how Linux handles graphics) tripped up over my hardware setup. So I went for Slackware which if I use the 'Gslapt' program for package management takes care of dependencies.

Before I tried to install either Debian or Slackware I installed both Ubuntu (Debian based) and Vector-Linux (Slackware based), both of these are fully configured ready to use from the box desktop systems ideal for SoHo use, both installed with very great ease. This gave me a chance to try both a slack and deb flavoured systems.

Ubuntu: nice but I'm not an fan of the Gnome desktop (or KDE) this of note to you if you use an older PC both are resource intensive. You may be better of using a more light weight GUI such as 'Fluxbox' or 'IceWM', additionally Ubuntu does not come with the tools to compile source code (although a build tools package is in the repository).

Give what you said about an older machine and the type of software you want to run may I suggest you take a look at Vector Linux SoHo edition, it is marginally less polished than Ubuntu but will probably run quicker on older hardware.

http://www.vectorlinux.com/
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=4966

Remember, at the end of the day the right distribution is the one you feel comfortable with.

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Before intalling any linux make sure you know the basics of using the "vi" text editor because if things go wrong in the eary stages this is what you will be stuck using. At the very least make sure you know what the [Esc] and [i] keys do in Vi.

http://www.gtkpod.org/
"gtkpod is a platform independent Graphical User Interface for Apple's iPod"

Damn you for giving me yet another confusing choice!

Let me tell you about the Bonobo theory of hi-fi purchase. Before purchasing a new hi-fi, people get all agitated about frequency response, signal/noise ratio, dB per channel, etc and often get conned into buying something better than they need. Truth be told, most of us have tin ears anyway and the hi-fi will be placed in a non-acoustically perfect environment, where the speakers will double as a coffee table.

So...applying this principle:

a) Will a GNOME-based desktop run drastically slower than Win98 on my crappy old machine?

b) If so...I'm told I can use a lighter window manager, no matter what distro. In which case...will it make a difference to look and feel...where do I get it from...and how do I plug it in?

But as for line editors...fuggedaboutit! For the non , Linux will only supplant Micro$oft if we punters don't have to worry our pretty little heads about such stuff.

a: depends, whats the spec of your machine (processor speed & memory)

b: depends on the distribution, Ubuntu or Kubuntu only come with either Gnome or KDE respectively this is unusual most distributions give you a choice (and have more in the distributions software repositories). Take a look at http://xwinman.org/ they have a pretty good run down of the main contenders. If it came down to a choice of Gnome or KDE I would probably go for KDE.

Vi: Vi is not a line editor, it is a console based text editor and may be of use if things go wrong early on (i.e before you got the more user friendly pico or nano editors installed) and knowing what [esc], [i], [x] and [d][d] do can be very useful

ed is a line editor and if your system really (super big time) screws up and cannot complete its boot sequence it should boot into single user mode an ed is just about the only editor that will work, print out instructions on how to use ed, put them somewhere safe and pray (very hard) that you will never need ever them

nb: I use fluxbox as a window manager