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Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
Does he mean goatse.cx? What documentation has he been looking at?!?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This reminds me of a padawan linux user that joined a linux chat i visited frequently about a year ago ... he started asking n00b questions about removing all files from the /tmp directory ... well after not understanding the more advanced users' advice in the form of RTFM, someone got fed up of the dude and told him that the best way to do so was ... obviously ... rm -rf / ...
... the moron did it ... we silently watched the moron send his entire system (and his mounted windows partition) straight to hell ...
...
... and guess what?
I think that next time he RTFM
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
I'm a die-hard MS-DOS veteran.
/?
/usr
I know what "help" is. I read a couple tutorials.
Everytime I needed to know what a command did, i used help [command]; or in this case, command
want to know what else you can do with the DOS internal commands?
cd \DOS
dir
This still works somewhat in win32 (just type "HELP" and you're done).
So, what command do we use in linux to find files?
Where's my home?
where did linux install that program?
what are the basic survival commands?
Even worse, the Linux tree directory is extremely cryptic. (And that's WITHOUT counting the mazelike symlinks). I can't even see where my home is.
ls
What do I get? Access denied (or something similar).
Really, really, there SHOULD be a "help" command, which tells me:
a) The basic linux commands.
b) Where my home directory is.
c) Where are the files that I (somehow) installed. i.e. if I installed a webserver, where's the conf files? And where's the doc root?
In windows, I use Apache and I *KNOW* that apache is installed in C:\Apache2\.
The htdocs are in C:\web (because I *TOLD* the apache *INSTALLER* where to put the htdocs. OK let's suppose you're the average joe slashdotter. In this case, it would be in c:\htdocs.
Now try that in Linux. Now let's go for the installations nightmare. Ever heard of Sablotron, the PHP xslt processor?
I asked my webadmin to install it... i thought, it should be easy.
He got angry at me for making him lose many hours of his job, not being able to install. I was lucky he used a test box instead of the *REAL* web server.
On windows,i just edit the php.ini and add "php_sablot.dll" (or however it's called) to the extensions list.
OK, let's try config.
Where's the config file? In DOS, it was c:\config.sys
and c:\autoexec.bat
that's all you gotta know. A simple text editor will do the job.
Don't like windows vulnerabilities? Well, look back. There's MS-DOS. Open your floppy disk, type "INSTALL", and it will do EVERYTHING for you.
Face it. Linux may have a helluva core security and network layer. But it's still for die-hard experts only.
So far the attempts to make it friendly are just a bunch of GUI frontends (wysiwyg html editors, anyone?) that make things look prettier on the outside while keeping things UGLY on the inside.
But overall, the greatest Linux mistake was not having a _UNIVERSAL_ native executable (or library) format.
Want to make sure your files are the same and haven't been tampered with? Apply some hash to the exes. No need for recompilation on every box.
Conclusion:
Universal EXE + library format = compile once, install ANYWHERE. This was present not only in windows, but in DOS. FROM THE BEGINNING.
OK, OK... maybe i got too far. Let me fix that.
Universal EXE + Library format (per CPU type/instruction set).
Result = Compile once (per CPU type/instruction set), install anywhere.
That's it.
Linux NEEDS TO CHANGE.
Your father is a moron then. Plain and simple. I have whitnessed multitudes of people sit down at a windows machine, and with a little poking, in minutes, they were doing something apparently productive... at least moreso then when they started. This is probably due to refining the interface over a good 15-20 years. It is plain intuitive. And yes, you fire up a brand spaking new OEM Windows XP machine, and there is NO configuration needed. It just works.
DOS on the other hand was meant for people, back when computer skills were required to use a machine. You wouldnt dare sit down at a DOS prompt without reading something first. Even then, if you had a bit of intuition, you would type "help" and you would get something to get you started. Lets see what I get when I do this on my Linux webserver:
guest@MrWebserver:~$ help
-bash: help: command not found
guest@MrWebserver:~$
Who would have thought.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson