On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 16:49 +0100, Ned Slider wrote:
John wrote:
Alan,
I knew of the Dell article, as I have all of those saved for reference. [1] I was just wondering if you knew of any that were for someone knew to Linux. You know the Microsoft type tutorials that have screenshot with them. That's the question I get asked a lot of times from around my home area.
In turn when these users that are new to Linux they get discouraged when they can't visualy see pictures or have to edit some text file. They just use to doing things the M$ Way. CentOS could have a much broader user base (Huge), the biggest user base around if simple things like this could be done. i realize though it take volunteers to do this on the wiki.
Hi John,
Apologies for not being Alan ;)
Got someones attention! That's great!
As an occasional Wiki author, I thought I'd offer you my personal insight on this topic. I try to write articles/documentation that is broad reaching hence why it tends to be command line based - not everyone has a GUI installed, so any guide that relies on GUI methods instantly fails to reach a section of the community. I firmly believe well written command line based documentation can and should be easy to follow, even for the novice user.
Correct in ways; CentOS is more touted to a server based community. Yea the GUI method instanly Fails the experianced part of the community. My problem lies in this: People these days cant not afford or justify the cost of Windows. Those are the ones that CentOS makes the biggest impression on. Much less Microsoft Office. Who has a couple hundred dollars for that?
Also, IMHO GUI-based tools are not always a good thing. I remember struggling with the horrible up2date GUI interface in my Red Hat Linux days. It was only a GUI frontend to RPM (??) but it was buggy as hell. It didn't take me long to figure out it was far easier to manually download updates by ftp and apply them with 'rpm -Fvh *.rpm'. Things evolve and now we can simply do 'yum update'.
The Apache GUI tool is broken it never works. The samba one don't always work. A text user interface intimidates a Windows user. That's like a new user installing CentOS to a machine that only has 128MBs of RAM. After complete install. what happens? It gets booted into runlevel 3 and they just said the heck with this. Yumex has involded just as well as Synaptic and just as good but the windows user knows nothing of it. Applications | Add Remove Software is about the limit for the new user.
"Why add an additional layer of complexity where it isn't needed?" Apart from new users Windows system admins are even terrified of a command line.
Whilst I sympathise with your observation, and I'm sure we all know users like that, CentOS isn't Windows and I wouldn't want it to be. I would rather we try to educate users to the Linux way of doing things rather than turn Linux into a Windows clone. I guess I feel the same about documentation to an extent.
The catch here is feeding the new user little by little. Ease them into it and they will never know it I am not saying turn CentOS into a Windows Clone. Yes, I agree educating the user to the linux way of doing things
Idea: A separate Wiki for the new users. Don't have links on it pointing external sites of how tos. Just have all the basic how tos; Burning the centos cdrom in windows with a open source tool like Infra View, Nero, or Easy CD Creator. Using the network GUI Config Tool for Dial Up Access and DSL or Cable Internet and Local Intranet. How to add a user with the GUI tool. Thing of this sort is like putting the iceing on the cake and keeping them and not letting them stay to another Distro.
Ned
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