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Linux for Non-Geeks
The title explains exactly how Grant's book is laid out. It's for Windows users, Mac users, and new or inexperienced Linux users who are non-geeks (or wannabe-geeks) and who are itching to take the plunge into Linux without having to wade through a multitude of books aimed at power users, online HOWTOs, weblogs and IRC channels. This is one volume with enough worthy information to credit the cost of the $34.95 investment.
The content is based on Redhat's Fedora Core and includes CDs for installation. As such, the author has chosen to go with the default Fedora desktop, GNOME. Choices have to be made: Fedora Core vs. Mandrake vs. SUSE vs. Xandros etc., and GNOME vs. KDE vs. Enlightenment, etc. Grant has chosen stability and ease of use, and he has chosen well. Fedora would have been Redhat 10, had Redhat gone that route. They didn't and we can all lament the changes the company has launched toward focusing on corporate gains or we can move on. Moving on, we can see immediately that Fedora Core is excellent and if Red Hat's idea in Fedora's community focus is to go the Debian route and have lots of experienced eyes taking care of this project, then it will continue to be excellent. Once you get into this book and get your fancy tickled by Fedora and GNOME, go wild. 'Nuff said.
The first two chapters of the book cover the 'penguinista' mindset (why you're even looking at a book on Linux), hardware compatibility and the install process. Easy enough, and Grant does a great job of leading the reader through this process. It's the scary part, after all! Once the deed is done, the reader is introduced to Chapter 3, 'A New Place to Call Home'. Gnome is the desktop of choice and the author goes into detail, easing the reader through a wealth of GUI options. Lots of screenshots and photos give the reader a clear sense of what to expect when they are navigating through the choices. Lots of time is spent on customizing and some may find this trivial but there is nothing more frustrating to the beginner than being told to "click click click" when they aren't comfortable finding the correct windows, buttons and choices. After spending some time on this chapter, the reader will be able to progress through the book with confidence.
Connecting to the Internet is the next chapter, with information presented on hardware, connection options, using the browser, email and IM. The Internet is a must-have so this chapter is well placed. Get 'em going and they'll keep plugging along!
Once the reader is up and running, a side road is taken for those who want to get more familiar with the GUI and who like to tweak everything to look as individual (and tacky) and they can.
After getting on the Web, printing is probably next on the list in importance. Grant dedicates Chapter 6 to explaining how the reader can achieve good printing karma with printer support, printing to PDF, changing settings and handling queues.
Part one of external media is covered next, with an introduction in to floppies (whaaaa?), data and music CD reading/playing/burning, and ISOs (an absolutely necessary part of life for Linux users, especially since we all tend to experiment with different distros when they become available!).
With Chapter 8, we get into the core of every OS user's skill set, no matter how newbie the newbie is, one thing everyone wants to know how to do on their platform of choice: how to install applications (did I say "games"?). Grant gives the reader a very well written chapter on package management, walking the reader gently through four examples, including Skoosh and -- woo-hoo!! -- Frozen Bubble (well, we all need Frozen Bubble!). He even gives the reader a taste of "dependency hell" (don't panic! It's a controlled environment!). There will be a few folks who complain that RPM is Redhat-centric thinking and they'd be right. We are working with Fedora Core after all. Remember the "'Nuff said" above'?. Grant later presents chapters on APT and Synaptic and also on compiling a program from source so the reader has ample chance to get geeky.
A (too short) chapter on the terminal and the command line is wedged in between with practice projects on pyWings and pyChing that brings it all home. Part two of data management comes next, covering USB storage devices and the Windows partition, if there is one. Chapters 13 and 14 deal in depth with music (audio formats, mp3 support, apps like Grip, Rhythmbox and XMMS) and 'getting arty with the GIMP' (including how to scan and use your digital camera).
Then, it's back to business, with several chapters dedicated to workplace productivity and what options are available to Linux users in a 'dark side' dominated world. Grant looks at several office suites including OpenOffice.org (the clear winner) as well as KOffice and some stand-alone apps like AbiWord, Dia, Gcalctool and GPdf. There is also quite a bit of excellent coverage on fonts (a must read!) and finally, language support within Linux.
Now, if everything is working well so far and you can connect to the Internet, print, get your work done and play games. So what's left? Doing it all from your living room, bedroom, even bathroom! In short, going wireless. Grant succinctly explains what it means, what you need and how to do it.
The last few chapters of the book deal with bits and pieces of necessary information that are essential to the reader for further Linux exploration: system settings and system updates, KDE, 'odds and ends' and the requisite troubleshooting section for "uh oh, now what do I do now?" moments. Lots of help and resources round out the book.
A few things could have been expanded on or included: a bit more on firewalls and internet security (we are not entirely immune, after all), handling email attachments is missing (the author promises an update to this on his web site), something on yum and device installation; the slim description of installing a CD-RW drive in the book merely refers the reader to his web site where one can download PDF instructions ...hmmm, that seems a bit skimpy. Installing drives and cards (especially sound cards) would have been a nice chapter on its own, especially since this would most likely require re-compiling the kernel. The reference to this on Grant's web site results in a 'broken' pdf link and no obvious way to alert the author to the damaged file.
At this writing, there are only a few errata but it would be wise to take a peek at Grant's site before delving too deeply into the book.
Overall, I like how Grant chose to lay out his chapters; he's anticipated the needs and expectations of the level of reader he's targeting and placed well-constructed topics in a logical series of chapters. Nicely balanced information for a new Linux user, an on again/off again Linux user or for the switcher (is that trademarked?!). Other distros will be a short leap after reading this one volume. So yes, I lied: Linux for Non-Geeks is for your mom -- and for you, too, come to think of it. (And are those references to Vonnegut scattered about? Erudite crowd, Linux folk, yes?)
You can purchase Linux For Non-Geeks, A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Wouldn't it be nice if it actually got more normal people to start using Linux?
The review talks about using Fedora, but doesn't mention whether it's version 1 or 2. This would be nice to know, especially since there are some major differences between the two.
Somewhat sick and tired of sorting out my mother's PC from virii, trojans, spyware ad infinitum. I wiped her box and installed RH (should have used Debian in retrospect).
Interestingly, once she knew which icons were for email, word processing and browsing, she was off. Her only problem was when her ISP changed dial-up telephone numbers, and the moron on support only had windows experience (or script). He claimed that the service she'd been using fine over the last year didn't actually work with Linux. A quick ssh and change of telephone numbers had her online again(*).
She even found out how to add a new printer on her own, something she never managed to do with windows.
(*): The telephone number changed meant that the previous low rate number became a standard cost per minute, and massively increased her cost of being online. The ISP didn't bother to notify her, and it wasn't until she got a phone bill that was 5x higher than normal that we knew something was afoot.
Yes, this is wonderful. As a person who considers themself a geek, but does not know very much about Linux, I think this book could be marvelous for me. I've been wanting to switch for a while now (sadly, I'm still on XP Home). The thing that's kept me back is that I don't know how to use Linux well, and don't know what questions to ask to get better at it. I have a box running RedHat 7-or-so, but I screwed it up by changing something I apparently shouldn't have (I can't find my programs as root anymore :-P). This lack of Linux know-how has been my main reason for sticking to windows, and now hopefully, I'll be able to change that. If more people could write books like this, the world would be a pretty great place.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
My parents can't move to Linux because they need specialized Windows apps not to be found this side of the divide. Nope, nor Gracenote nor LillyPond make for even decent musical typesetting packages in a professional environment.
Yet they keep messing up their files dragging-and-dropping to wrong places or generally fucking up with the GUI.
So I got them Cygwin and Bash, and taught them to manage their files that way. It works.
reason #2: free as in beer. :)
reason #3: geek friend is evangelizing
With all due respect to the author, who I'm sure wrote a fine book, no one sits down and reads whole manuals. Some people will grab a manual to find a solution to a problem. The rest will ask someone, do a workaround, or do without. 330 pages? That's about the thickness of a John Grisham book. (Though I'm sure this one has more pictures.) IOW, huge.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I just installed my first linux (mandrake 10) this weekend.
:-)
:D
Of course, im a geek. Not a linux geek, mind you, but still a geek.
Im having fun discovering a whole NEW slew of prolems to deal with. Of course, these are slight more managable then the ones i used to deal with
google, slashdot, and random linux gurus online have been wonderful. thanks folks!
I should pick this up.
no
You just summed up one of the major impediments to desktop Linux and to the tightening up of security in general.
You have a choice between the insecure POS, which they know, and the very secure OS which they don't. They don't want to learn anything new. At all.
Today I tried to set my mother up with Trillian, so she could use MSN Messenger and be able to click links (we-read I-have Sygate set up to not allow connections from IE, which MSN is hard coded to use. If any MSN developers are out there, I hate you forever) and go auto away and countless other things she could use.
She refused to use it because she wouldn't change one of the ways she does things, namely changing her online status (normally it's in a menu at the top, in Trillian it's in a submenu in a menu at the bottom). She could have enjoyed her-brr-online experience much more if she'd stuck at it, but after thirty seconds of not trying-"I don't like this. It isn't the same.".
Damn newbies
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Looking at computers users now, in western coutries, I wonder if the people not using desktop computers (ms windows) will ever do. These ones are probaly relatively old compared to the younger who have been raised in a much more computer supported society.
Brand new average young users have no problem at all to explore enough the desktop computer and software in order to do what he wants. I think the culture now make this easy.
Young users can already figure out how to get things done if you present them an installed and ready to use KDE screen. But there is some lacks (which would be a long offtopic post) that show, compared to windows, that usability isnt good enough yet.
There is a market for the light-geeks who buy the "for dummies" books about everything (how to burn CDs, etc). But to get the majority on a diferant (free) OS you have to make it usable as easily as windows is now. After you can think selling these useless books to everyone who will want to buy them.
And for the ones who will cry about "linux should not try to copy windows!":
Windows is a model of usability that the world currently know and use everyday.
You must integrate many similar aspect of usability if you want people to switch to free os one day.
And of course there is many good things in windows, thats not all bad. But being a closed source os simply make it as evolutive as a very little and simple blue painted plastic piece lost in a desert (a big desert).
I don't believe that vulnerability exists anymore in Firefox 0.9 / Mozilla 1.7. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238684 if you're interested in the details, but basically that patch made unrequested attempts to install an XPI illegal, sort of like how the pop-up blocker works. You have to click a link or something along those lines for the request to be valid.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Sympathetic magic is the belief that like effects like. Stick a pin in the likeness of someone and he'll feel pain, break a stick to protect against snakes, etc.
Ultimately this was applied to words as well. The practice of "spelling" comes out of the belief that a word for something "is" that something, in the same manner that a voodoo doll "is" the person it represents. There is an innate "sympathy" between the noun and the thing it represents. A modern psuedo scientist might call them an "entangle pair" on his website trying to sell you secret mystical books of power (a grammar).
So the idea that I'm trying to convey is that I am not influenced by the book being assigned to "dummies" or that it has the spelling "dummies" on its cover. It has no hold on or power over me. I may purchase it, borrow it from the library, read it, absorb its contents, but that does not in any way make me, or imply that I am, a "dummy" because that is just an arbitrary sound/collection of letters arbitrarily assigned by some marketing geek (in the pejoritive sense of the word) who believes in sympathetic magic.
Plus I have this magic crystal that some gypsy women sold me to protect me from "dummies" books.
I don't suffer the editions that treat me like a dummy gladly, however. Some of their authors apparently don't have a magic crystal.
KFG
Back in the good old days, if a contraption didn't work as advertised, the problem was either bad design or bad instructions. Since the dawn of high tech, people have accepted the silly idea that if they can't make it work, they must be dummies.
At least this book acknowledges the idea that there are intelligent people out there who don't want to roll their own or even use a command line.
My own forays into Linux have been plagued with all sorts of problems. I usually bug my SO (who is a linux evangelist) and frequently there is no easy answer.
I am glad of any attempt to ferret out the most likely questions and concerns and address them as though dealing with an adult.
Denise
Will manage Novell network for money.
Granted, I could possibly be wrong about this, but I thought the XP firewall started after the network interface, thus giving all those lovely worms out on the net a nice window of opportunity to infect the PC while it's booting.
Can someone confirm this?
EULAs are the debble. Here you got fabulously successful companies who by common sense observation SELL software but in legalese they uh loan it to you or something in exchange for you paying for the box it comes in or something. It's nuts. They insist on every possible legal protection and every possible penny in profit, yet NO LAWS apply to the actual product. No warranty, no recourse, no nuthin. It's nuts. I still fail to see why there hasdn't been a massive joe user backlash with a BIG class action suit. forget bundling and browser inclusions and all that jazz, a class action suit over useability for purpose, a warranty. If someone sells a product call it selling, this "license to use but not own" stuff is the ripoff scam going on.
with free software, I got no beefs, I know up front what the cost is-free-and that I might need to tweak, or get hosed with some aspect of it. I don't expect a warranty of any kind, and am pleasantly surprised that the developers keep working and fixing it. To me it's "so what" on any warranty with free software so I don't mind a EULA there. It's worth "free" to me or minimal cost on a data transfer medium. But to charge what entities like MS charge, SERIOUS folding money, get entire companies sucked in, millions of home users, then they have no warranty at all? Nuts. Software been around decades now, time to take the training wheels off and have our legal systen and society treat it like any other product if they insist on treating it like a product when it comes to money.
I was a mac classic guy for years and years from that reason exactly. I bought a machine, it all worked, it was easy to use, never got hosed or owned or anything. If I got a peripheral, I plugged it in and it worked.
I remember sitting around with my roomate back in the day trying to upgrade his modem on a 486 running 3.11. Nightmare, something as simple as that. You would think unscrewing one card and screwing in another and applying the driver from a disk would "just work". Nope. Both of us struggled for days on it off and on, we took it to the local neighborhood ubergeek, HE couldn't do it. A normal big bucks for the time off the shelf at the computar store card modem. Around the same time I got a new one for my mac, plugged it in, selected it from the list of modems, it worked.
Anyway, I switched from macs when apple stopped development on classic and went to a unixy thing that wouldn't run on my hardware, and the combination of the two just got even more expensive, I got priced right out of macs. I had JUST bought a semi new PB1400 and OSX wouldn't run on it, couldn't upgrade past 64 megs RAM and the dang thing USED was expensive. Nuts. I'm screwed then. I'm looking around, had heard of "linux". So I just got some old pc junkers, fixed them up, then got linux discs. It wasn't that hard, I got it up and running and on the intarweb. Seems to work OK, albeit not even close to as easy as classic always was to my way of thinking. It's still not, but "easy enough" now for most normal things I use a computer for. AFTER that initial foray into linux I understood the whole FOSS idea, which I now agree with and support. Windows has never held any sort of fascination for me, I went way too long with no virus du juor or having to set IRQs or needing a firewall or sacraficing chickens or anything to be content with putting up with that kludgy and insecure mess I saw all my friends always struggling with. Irony was they would call my mac a "toy" because it just sat there and worked, as they always were trying to barely keep their machines on the net or keep them from crashing. I thought it was hilarious, but hey, people root for their home team even if they haven't made it to the finals in 50 years or something,mmust be human nature. I think a lot of the "sticking with windows" that has occurred in our society is that humans won't admit they made a mistake when it comes to buying something, especially when the product they buy has no warranty or recall provisions to it. They got stuck with a lemon, and rather than admitting it was a lemon, and entirre lemon fixit it industry grew up around the concept of lemon="good". And this REALLY applies to giant businesses where some powerful VP in charge of buying the expensive stuff gets hosed with 10,000 lemons. he gets to skate on that decision because his buds at the country club, the other VPs, bought the same lemons, so a long time ago they decided to ignore the fact they bought lemons so all of them wouldn't get fired. Well, that and I can't prove it but I bet there's been billions of dollars in kickbacks over the years too that went to the VPs in charge of buying stuff. It exists in every other business, so I doubt it doesn't exist in the expensive paid for software industry.
I like linux, but it has its problems. Where Windows is a fluffy, nerf environment with no locks, Linux is a hard and lockable place with lots of sharp edges.
Here's my windows survival tips
1. Uptime.
Other than obsolete applications my company uses that the vendor won't even consider providing support on, I don't have crashes. My Win2k box stays on all week, only being shut down on the weekends.
Run windows update and just pull out the silly crap that will try to DRM your machine. No Media player 9!
2. Window managers with multiple desktops.
I agree. Do a web search for IMPVWM.exe. I've been using it since Win95 and it's worked on every Windows variant I've tried. It occassionally fights with an application that will *not* let go of the processor, but otherwise nice. If need be email me and I'll send you a copy.
3. Modern Browsers, Konqueror, Mozilla, even Galleon.
Agreed, which is why I run Mozilla/Firefox on Win2k.
4. Modern mail clients.
Can't speak on this one; I've got a webmail server set up. Corporate uses Outlook2k3, which does have a spellchecker. But gawds, the Exchange server is slooooooow!
5. GIMP and friends.
Agreed. I run Gimp on Win2k
6. K3B and Eroaster for burning CDs.
Never used 'em. I have a few freeware burners I use.
7. No DRM to mess with my music. It is very nice to know that ogg won't go away and neither will any of my legitimately gotten music.
Agreed. I don't use Windows Media player and convert my own audio to MP3 or Ogg. (Yay Winamp!)
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.