Forum Moderators: bakedjake
I sold off part of my toy collection and built a box rather than deal with a dual boot on my old Windows machine. After a little research on compatible components, and learning a great deal more about what the hardware specs actually mean, I had a nice little box. (Soyo KT400 Dragon Lite w/ Athlon XP 2400, 1GB RAM, Radeon 128MB videocard.)
Then came the installation, which wasn't until two weeks after I built the machine. The wait led to a big lesson out of all this: Don't depend on site reviews for ordering. First, poke around on newsgroups to see if customers have made complaints. Then buy. So simple and obvious that it's a bit embarassing I didn't do that beforehand. Took forever to get the discs from a place that turned out to have horrible reviews. I finally gave up on them, and CheapBytes quickly sent their version of RedHat 9 and a copy of Knoppix. The RH install was a breeze, all hardware was recognized and appears to work so far.
I played around with it for about a week, just surfing, playing games, opening up programs and seeing what was there. But that grew a little old. There's only so many times one can play Chromium before wanting something more challenging and useful. I came across this handy tutorial on using bash [linuxcommand.org]. Although I don't have the skills yet to use it effectively, it appears mighty powerful.
After a little experience with bash, I decided it was time to attempt to install some new software. A video file/DVD player seemed like a nice choice, as one was not included with RH 9. xine appeared popular so I downloaded the rpms and installed. That sounds easy, except I had no idea how to use rpm. ["No idea how to use rpm? You some kind of simpleton, boy?" I know, I know, it's simple. I got it to work eventually. Consider it a bit like a caveman learning how to create fire. Seems easy to us now, but had a steep learning curve for him.] With xine now installed, time to try it out! Except, it did nothing. It came up with a very pretty GUI, but nothing worked. So, off to try mplayer. Hey, it sees the DVD drive, the DVD, and the buttons work! But those pesky encryption folks won't let me watch Blade, so it's only a partial success. And viewing mpg files worked, but seemed a bit buggy. xine has some decryption available, but since it didn't work at all, not much point in going there. I tinkered with it until 3:30AM this morning, and finally gave up and went to sleep. My first attempt at installing software didn't go so well, but I'll take a fresh crack at it tonight.
I expect to have a lot more experiences like the above, but it should get easier. Regardless of the problems and halting progress I've had, I love the system. It's nice to leave the box on overnight and be able to work without a morning restart. The whole experience just "feels" right. Almost like it was made for me because I can make it into exactly what I need. I intend on sticking with it and participating in this forum a lot more. Not sure that Linux it yet ready for everyone's desktop, but it's ready for mine. Thanks, everyone, for all the great posts that got me interested in the *nix environment.
If anyone is thinking of making the switch, be prepared to set a little time aside. But, it appears worth it, and I'd recommend it regardless of my setbacks so far.
Brak
(BTW, I promise to read the HOWTOs & FAQs before posting so I don't ask SAQs (Stupid A-- Questions)
My only real gripe is that RH make it seem complicated.
Quote from the manual they supply "...using the secondary (normally the right) mouse button..."
If they want me to 'right click' my manually operated on-screen pointing device why not just say 'right click'?
The whole manual is in a tiny font too.
The OS is excellent the manual is rubbish - which is a shame becase I found the whole Linux thing a lot less trouble than I expected... well so far I have :)
I'll second brakthepoet's last point - if you're considering do give it a go.
zooloo
Thanks for the second!
I didn't bother buying the manual. Redhat publishes the installation manual and several other manuals online, so I used that for the install. It was very easy to read the html version.
What have you found the most useful so far, zooloo? The multiple workspaces have been great for me. So nice to keep different work separate. I think that will have the biggest productivity impact right now.
Brak
"...using the secondary (normally the right) mouse button..."If they want me to 'right click' my manually operated on-screen pointing device why not just say 'right click'?
Do you really want to know? OK. Start with "a linux geek wrote that sentence". There's a file called XF86Config that controlls all sorts of things about how the graphics subsystem works, including how input from the keyboard and mouse is processed. There, you can re-arrange button order without anything higher up finding out about it. If you wanted to, you could make the scroll wheel rolling up into a left click, rolling down into a right click, the left button into middle click, etc, etc. Programs have no way to know that this has happened. So, technically, they are responding to the 'secondary button', not the 'right button'.
Despite that, it's probably a safe assumption that anyone who re-mapped the buttons of their mouse that way knows what they did, and therefore doesn't need to be told that they had better use whichever button they re-assigned to secondary rather than the right button. So it's still bad writing for the less-knowlegable user without adding value for the more knowledgable. But that's why it (probably) happened.
<added>This functionality isn't as useless as it sounds. For a while I was using a fancy-shmancy four-button-plus-scrollwheel trackball while I tried to resucitate my beloved antique TrackMan Marble. With a total of seven possible button inputs and no clear standard ordering of the buttons beyond 5, I had to re-map some of them to make the device behave sanely. I still didn't *need* the extra four, but at least the scroll wheel scrolled and the extraneous buttons didn't.</added>
I know nothing about Linux and Red Hat didn't help. Now I've installed it was far easier than I expected.
Bear in mind all I want is a word processor, email, Internet - and it does that with no tweaking from me.
Tweaking will happen but I don't need to. My switch to Linux was delayed because I thought it too hard, too big a jump.
Red hat 9 isn't that much of a problem if you just want the basics.
These Open Source people aren't being fair to themselves - you've got a better product than you let on... mmmm are you keeping it secret for a reason? :))
zooloo
