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.'"

Comments

Re:.so hell

[Xner]

I simply use "apt" or "yum" and let them sort it out. The only times they failed me was with a Fedora test release, but I knew the risk I was taking.

OMG

[Donoho]

'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type;

It's as if he's looked into my very soul... or tapped into my webcam.

Please....

[Cocoronixx]

$command -h
$command --help
man $command
info $command
http://www.google.com/search?q=$command

use brain;

Re:Please....

[fajaboard]

The problem is that n00bs don't know what "command" to even look up.

$how do i read a file from my floppy? "mount?" who woulda thought.

The problem is knowing where to look sometimes. I am still learning useful commands.

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why god created apt-get.

It's been years since I had to worry about dependancies.

2 reasons:

Apt-get from debian has been ported to Fedora/Redhat. I use Fedora. (laptop)

I use Debian. (desktop)

That's it.

What to patch?

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Wham bam thank you mam!

Want mplayer, but Fedora doesn't have the ability to play DVD's or Mp3's?

Head on down to Dag's RPM repositories, follow his directions and go:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install mplayer libdvdcss xmms

done and DONER!!!!

Apt-get IS the killer application for linux.

Update everything, patch everything. Not just core system like in Windows!

No MORE DEPENDANCY HELL.

It's realy quite nice. Install debian, upgrade to unstable. I've been running it for 2 years, no sweat and completely up to date.

Education.

[Raven42rac]

Any halfway decent teacher/guide will include an overview of the "man" command. So if you don't know the arguments/what a command does, just type "man command", that will teach you fairly quickly what a command does.

Re:Education.

[TrailerTrash]

I have a hard time with man - yes, it's full-on documentation, but 19 times out of 20, I don't need the 15 highly obscure switches for a command, I just need the command in its simplest form.

What man is missing is an example section, e.g., "To find all files with mary in the title, use ls -R *mary*" or whatever; "to find all files modified in the last 10 days do..."

I will say right out that perhaps such a facility exists, but I am unaware. I am a GUI user of Linux (SuSE 9.1 X86_64) and my command line skills have rusted since I lived in VMS 20 years ago...

poetic justice

[Anonymous Coward]

someone without a clue writes a crappy essay

someone else w/o a clue links it on slashdot

lemmings knock the site offline

Goto tldp.org

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux documentation project is great. Lots of howtos, but also great guides.

I always recommend for a newbie to read:
Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide
Bash Guide for Beginners
The Linux System Administrators' Guide (for "power users")
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (for "power users")

And maybe the network administrator guide.

All these are cool because they are generally distro agnostic. Anybody can benifit from their knowledge.

AND remember GOOGLE!!!!

The command line IS your friend. It's another form of user interface, and combined with a gui like X makes Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems) have the most flexible and powerfull user interface aviable.

At times it may not be freindly to newbies, but once you have a decent idea what is going on, it's definately worth it.

Those guides will give you the nessicary tools to understand and become comfortable with your Linux installation. No more fighting thru layers of obsofacation and a deep bridge becuase the knowledge of MS insiders/advanced administrators vs Windows users. In linux users can be as knowlegable as the best programmer or developer.

But you don't have to any more due to people like Gnome/KDE/Fedora/Redhat/Suse/Mandrake etc etc. Now it's just a matter of what you want and what you feel most comfortable about.

Mirrored

[paulproteus]

Here, all you freeloaders ;-). I'll take it down later today.

I just spoke with him on the phone, too; cool guy. I don't think he was expecting anyone to actually call him :-).

All I learned

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,

Recently I've been introduced to an operating system known as Linux.

Lured by its low cost, I replaced Windows 98 on my computer with Linux. Unfortunately the more I use it the more I fear that this "Linux" may be an insidious way for the Dark One to gain a stronger foothold here on Earth. I know this may be a shocking claim, but I have evidence to back it up!

To begin with, Linux is based off of an older, obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork. This OS -- and its Linux offspring -- extensively use what are unsettingly called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a computer running Linux then you probably have these "demons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! Furthermore in order to start or stop these "demons" a user must execute a command called "finger". By "fingering" a "demon" one excercises an unholy power, much the same way that the Lord of Flies controls his black minions.

Linux contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

Consider some of these other Linux commands: "sleep", "mount", "unzip", "strip" and "touch". All highly suggestive in a sexual nature. I know that our Lord cannot approve of these, and I urge them to be renamed to something appropriate to the Christian community. Interestingly "CONTROL-G" (the sixth key from the left of the keyboard) does an abort. To write files a "VI" editor is included. All these are to ensnare the unsuspecting christian who could get tempted by typing "VIVIVI" all day long.

Fourth, Linux uses a flavor of DOS known as Bash. Bash is an acronym for "Bourne Again Shell". On the surface this would appear to be supportive of the Lord. However, remember that even Satan can quote the bible for his own purposes! While I believe Linux may be born-again, its obvious by the misspelling of "born" that its not born-again in an Christian church. Will the lies ever cease?

Additionally, one of the main long-haired hippies involved with the GNU Free Software Foundation supports communism, contraception and abortion. He has consistently supported 60's counter-cultural "values", and his web site even advocates government support of contraception. He also wears fake halos, and has quips about his made-up church that relates to his free software. I find such blasphemy to be extremely unsettling.

One must also remember that the creator of Linux, a college student named Linux Torvaldis, comes from Finland. I'm sure all the followers of Christ are aware of the heritical nature of the Finnish: from necrophilia to human sacrifice, Finnish culture is awash in sin. I find little reason to believe anything good and holy could arise from this evil land.

Finally, let us remember that there is an alternative to using the Satan-powered Linux. I think history has shown us that Microsoft is quite holy. I'm told that its founder, William Gates is a strong supporter of our Lord and I encourage my fellow Christians to buy only his products to help keep the Devil at bay.

I wish I had more time to expound upon my findings. Unfortunately a family of Jews has moved in across the street and I must go speak to them of Jesus Christ before they are condemned to eternal hellfire.

Please investigate this as you see fit and I'm sure you'll reach the same conclusions that I have.

Re:From TFA

[fafaforza]

I'd agree with the documentation part. From experience, most help comes from stringing together incomprehensible usenet posts and articles found on google.

The documentation for the most part is poorly written, and poorly laid out. A lot of times I find docs diving straight into each command or option with its own set of triggers, etc, without first giving a broad overview. I do not have specific examples; just an overall feel from a few years of using Linux and FreeBSD.

Can't really lay blame on anyone, though. People developing software for open source systems would rather create it than write documentation aimed at the greenest of Linux users, or support the software on forums and newsgroups.

Re:From TFA

[UnderScan]

HEY MODS! PARENT IS A TROLL!
There is nothing in the article about being homo.

The real article.

Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
Derek Croxton, 09 September 2004

Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux OdysseyTwo Years Before the Prompt:
A Linux Odyssey

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. Linux has never quite escaped its reputation as an OS for geeks who like those command prompts. I made the plunge into Linux at the start of 1993 under the assumption that things had improved enough that I could get around Linux without the command prompt at all, or at least with minimal exposure to it.

What I want to report on here is some of the "gotchas" of being a new Linux user. I've tried at least half a dozen different distributions, and along the way I've been hit with just about every problem an inexperienced user could face. Partly this is because I push Linux to do so many things for me - web server, video player, email server, database backend, programming environment - including many that I had not previously tried on Windows. In spite of my title, however, I'm not going to try to make this article into a ripping yarn along the lines of Richard Henry Dana's book Two Years Before the Mast. I'm also not writing a critique of Linux distributions, although I hope some developers out there might read this and get some ideas. My main purpose is to prepare new users for likely sticking points, as well as to reassure them about things that will not be as hard as they had feared. I went into my Linux experience with very little idea of what I was getting into; that makes it an adventure, but it's probably not the best way to go about things. Sometimes it helps to read that such-and-such a process is difficult. At least then you can work your way through it slowly, without the persistent fear that there is some easy, one-command feature that you could be using if only you knew what it was.

All of the distributions I have used are of the more user-friendly type. The reason I have gone through so many is that I keep discovering different things in them. What works on one might not work on another, but hopefully I can learn enough from one distribution that I can tweak another to my satisfaction. It is, in fact, the very diversity of various distributions that makes using Linux such a challenge. Ask a friend and he may suggest a solution to your problem that doesn't exist on your distribution. Naturally, anything can be configured, but it may be more trouble to get it to that point than to find a different solution. Therefore, I will not go into the details of each distribution, but rather give my overall experience, highlighting where distributions differ.

Linux distributions have put a lot of effort into making the install process as easy as possible, and this is definitely a good thing - if you can't get it installed, you aren't going to use it. I distinctly recall installing a version of Linux 6 years ago and trying to get XWindows (X11R6, for purists) running so I could escape the command line. I went through a lengthy setup process, but when it started asking questions like the horizontal and vertical refresh rates of my monitor, I knew I was in trouble. Nowadays, installation is often as simple as you make it: if you accept all the defaults, your only decision will be a password for the root user. I have had very little difficulty with any of my installs: keyboard, monitor, mouse, sound card, network card, and other essentials are usually automatically detected and configured without my having to do a thing. I did have one case of a disappearing monitor display and one of a non-functioning keyboard, and it

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[Cereal Box]

The only problem is that you've posted a solution to the problem of maintaining packages on Debian/Fedora, not on Linux in general. Not every distribution has the ability to use apt or yum or whatever or even a package system. Or it may have a package system, but no one has made a decent number of packages for the distribution because it's not as popular as Debian or Fedora.

Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:

1. apt is available,
2. A consistent filesystem hierarchy is followed from distribution to distribution, and
3. A large number of packages are available (and, more importantly, compatible) due to point 2.

Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard).

I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?

Re:Lost in Linuxland

[pedestrian crossing]

But once you're set up, you're set up for good. You can't afford to "waste a whole day", but it's not like you are going to have to "waste a whole day" every day, just once. It is called "learning".

oh right

[macshit]

Actually, my greatest fear is Clippy.

...shudder...

While you're waiting for it to be unslashdotted

[hey!]

Let me clue you in on the sly reference in the title.

It refers to Richard Henry's Dana's autobiographical Two Years Before the Mast, what is hands down not only among the best maritime adventures ever written, but is one of my favorite books of any kind.

Dana was a Harvard sophmore in the 1830s who came down with scarlet fever. As a result, his eyesight was suffering. The common prescription for this in those days was to take a sea voyage. Dana, despite being a young person of privilege, didn't take the normal route of travelling to Europe as a tourist. He signed on as a common seaman, a grueling, uncomfortable and by today's standards incredibly dangerous job. He joined a vessel that rounded the Horn in July (through the teeth of the Austral winter) bound for the wild and nearly uncharted region of California. The common seamen slept in the foc'sl, the part of the vessel at the bow; thus "Before the Mast". Two Years Before the Mast became historically important when gold was found at Sutter's Mill, setting of the great gold rush. At the time, it was practically the only book available that had any information about California.

His account is exciting and riveting, and probably unique. Many talented writers have written of the sea, and have gone on sea voyages, but I can't think of anyone else of Dana's literary powers who actually lived as common sailor, did their dangerous job, and slept and ate with them. Dana, who later became a lawyer and great advocate of seaman's rights, comes across as a ready lad, brave, good hearted and adventurous. A fine role model, I think, for people who buck the trend and go with Linux.

ahh yes

[geeveees]

I still remember my first experience on a Redhat box. Being my usual 14 year old arrogant self I figured that I didn't have to read any manuals. Hey I figured out DOS by myself, right?

So I type in "X". "Hey wtf this stupid shit is broken, all I see is a grey background and some fucking weird cross? huh? linux sucks".

Oh boy :)

Where has this guy been?

[krunk7]

Linux isn't perfect, there are still plenty of valid critiques, but "dependency hell" just isn't one of them. I can honestly say I haven't had a single dependency problem for at least 2 years (probably more, but I'm too lazy and it's too early to think too hard about it). Every major distribution has dependency checking today.

Now, perhaps the author has inadvertantly drawn attention to the heart of Linux's adoption woes: documentation. Why doesn't this author know about apt-get? Why doesn't he know about urpmi? Why isn't he aware of the vast amount of documentation normally available in /usr/share/docs/ ?

The common answers people receive for this are:

• google idiot!
• Sheahhh! Everyone just knows all the docs are in /usr/share/docs!
• RTFM!!

But to even adept computer users (not uber geeks, just adept) the location of "the manual" isn't obvious, they don't know about */docs and, lets face it, man pages are written FGBG (for geeks, by geeks).

In comparison to it's top two competitors, linux is the only OS to date where a user is expected to magically know the location of appropriate documentation, by default have a degree in the documentation jargon of advanced coders, and to be willing to read a small novel on the intricacies of his particular distro's package and system management methods to even use the os to any degree of efficiency.

This is what people mean when they say Linux isn't ready *yet* and to tie it back to the article, these are exactly the sort of apparently groundless complaints that surface as a result of this gaping hole in useability.

Re:hmmm ... what shall i try now?

[jellomizer]

think that next time he RTFM ...

Or he will just give up on Linux and stick to Windows. Because all Linux users are a bunch of Jirks anyways. I see RTFM. that is the most useless sort of help anyone can give. How about at least poining them to the correct spot in the manual. A lot of times the reason nubes have so much problems with the manual is that they don't have the proper understainging of the way things work so while their brains are trying to make sence of all these forgen commands "rm" "Redo Mount", "Revese memory", "release mount" "remove" then you mix a buch of forgen symboles to the mix \ / ? * . They never seen these things before. So the rm -rf / could logicaly mean to someone who has never seen the command "Restore Machiene" with options Remove Files and the / could mean something about temp files. Who knows if you didn't know that / is your root directory heck when I was a newbee when they told me go to my root directory I did a cd /root/.

If you were not able to help him redirect him to a better channel more targeted towards noobies. because doing crap like that only makes them more fustrated and dislike linux.

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[IamTheRealMike]

No MORE DEPENDANCY HELL.

The problem with the apt-get approach is that it's like living in a town with only one supermarket. OK, so it's a really big supermarket but still:

- If you can't find the food you want in there, you're stuck

- If you can but it's stale, damaged or out of stock, you're stuck

- You are totally dependent on the people running the supermarket

- The larger a supermarket is, the harder it becomes to find things in it. Just imagine taking your grandma to a supermarket where the aisles stretched as far as the eye could see!

To stretch the analogy a bit further than it can really go, just imagine if getting tired of this one supermarket you travelled to the next town and bought a lampshade from a shop there. Bring it all the way back, put it in your house and suddenly your TV explodes.

What happened? "Oh, you mixed different repositories". All centralised systems suffer this but Fedora worse than most - you're fine as long as you stick to the core repositories but if you add others (and you do need to do that, if you want a big enough collection to be useful) things will randomly break due to "conflicts". Just imagine trying to explain that to grandma!

Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other problems as well. I've seen a lot of 3rd party packages of software that are totally broken. Often the users don't connect the problems they are seeing with the packages. This happens a lot with complex software like Wine, Mono etc ... I've seen quite a few packages of Wine that won't even start! It's pretty clear that many 3rd party packagers hardly test what they produce at all, especially in the case of "new release, I'll just bump the number in the spec and rebuild". I'd estimate that about 40-50% of the tech support problems I deal with in Wine are due to incorrectly built packages. It's not even hard! Just configure, make, make install but people still cock it up mightily - using badly done wrapper scripts and moving files around from where they're supposed to be are the most common, but bad builds happen too.

Apt-get has other problems. You have to duplicate this huge effort over and over again for each distro. This doesn't happen so you get vendor lockin - the very thing we're trying to all get away from, no? I've met more than one person in my life whos number 1 reason for using Debian was "I can apt get lots of software". It was not due to the merits of the distribution itself, it was not due to have a nice installer, slick default desktop, solid PAM setup etc etc. It was because installing software was not a pain in the ass.

Apt-get works great as long as you are willing to throw infinite manpower at the problem. We don't have infinite manpower, duh. So centralised packaging cannot be a scalable, sustainable way forward for our community outside of certain use cases like servers (where it works well).

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[grumbel]

apt-get isn't a killer app, its a distribution specfic workaround for a problem that should be fixed upstream. Beside that even apt-get is FAR from perfect, since there are the following problems:

* stable is way behind everybody else, if some piece of software doesn't support your hardware, say XFree86, you are in deep throuble, hardly any newbie will stand this much longer then a few days

* unstable on the other side while being more current can do havoc at any point, beside 'apt-get upgrade' isn't all that fun for modem users, hell even 'apt-get update' is already a serious problem for modem users. testing is still more a game of luck, sometimes it work sometimes it doesn't, nothing that I would give in the hands of a newbie.

* apt-get doesn't fix dependency hell, it just works around it so that dependencies get automatically detected, apt-get however DOES NOT resolve conflicts in a user expected way, if library foo and library bar are incompatible, apt-get will remove everything that depends on the other when I want to install one of them.

* apt-get can't install different versions of -dev packages in most cases since the includes conflict

* apt-get is a one-way thing, it doesn't provide a roll-back. Simple example would be Gnome2, once it got released I took a look at it and it sucked, lots of features removed and stuff didn't work, was there a way to get Gnome1.4 back? No, I was stuck with Gnome2 thanks to apt-get. Sure, I could manually track each and every dependecy and install it in a seperate prefix, but thats nothing that a newbie wants to do.

* apt-get depends extremly on the quality of the repository from which it grabs stuff, unofficial packages often cause throuble and if the maintainers of the repo to something ugly like removing a programm that you depend on, bad luck for you, there is no easy workaround, then to not use apt-get and do everything manually.

A solution to the dependcy hell would be one that is not distrospecific and allows me to download and install any Linux stuff I want from the net, not just the one that some Debian maintainers thought would be worth packaging. It should also allow to install any number of different versions of the same programm without relying on extra work of the maintainer to handle the situation.

Sadly many of the problems are caused by the FHS layout, which is now standardized and thus basically unfixable for a long long time.

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[jusdisgi]

Look, if you're ranting in this vein, it's because you haven't yet become comfortable with Linux in general (to subvert your term) to the point where you understand the bigger picture. I could whine all day about the various and sundry differences between Windows versions too...but most folks would find it silly, because we've all got a decade or more of Windows in general experience, so the fact that "Dialup Networking" might be found in 3 different places over the years seems quite trivial. And it is. But what you don't recognize is that to someone who has a good working understanding of and familiarity with Linux in general the differences between the Mandrake package manager and the Fedora one are pretty much that same level of trivial. And if you aren't scared of the command line, apt-get, emerge, yum, and urpmi all end up seeming roughly equivalent, and it isn't much trouble to use any one of them. To someone who has been running Linux for a few years, picking up a new distro isn't any real challenge. (Well, unless it's Linux from Scratch or something ;-)

My point is that once again, people are viewing Linux through Windows-trained eyes. Computer systems have differences, even within families that are similar. Since pretty much anyone who works with computers at all has years of Windows experience these days, people know how to work around the annoyances, and compensate for the differences. When someone gets thrown into the world of Linux, they tend to try out 6 different distros in 6 months...is it really a surprise that minor differences would seem much more serious when you have so little experience with the family of systems in general?

Re:.so hell NOT NO MORE FOR ME!

[madfgurtbn]

My point is that once again, people are viewing Linux through Windows-trained eyes.

If the goal is to have an OS/distro that will compete with Windows and OSX, then the OS/distro will have to accommodate the millions (or Billions, even) who will view Linux through Windows-trained eyes.

I spent months following wickedly obscure and time consuming instructions for compiling apps for Mandrake before I discovered the magic of the MCC gui for URPMI, then another couple months finding reliable mirrors.

Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when the same app releases an update for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times. I have seriously broken my Mandrake install trying to install software via means other than URPMI, so I have pretty much quit trying.

Don't tell me to RTFM either, because I have R'd several FM's but they don't help much because of the two dozen different ways the authors and the distros deal with installing software. Although I'm a clueless newbie among the slashdot Gnu/Linux elite, the rest of the world thinks I'm some sort of computer genius. I've been fiddling and reading and making and breaking Linux installs for almost four years now and I still get frustrated with the process.

Meanwhile, my main reason for becoming interested in Linux has evaporated--Windows no longer sucks. In fact, WindowsXP is a pretty darned good OS--better than I could have imagined when suffering with the infernal abomination of WindowsME.

I guess I just get tired of the slashdot mindset that appears every time there is a thread that suggests that maybe just maybe there could be some improvements in the area of user-friendliness of Linux distros. It usually starts with, "Just open a terminal window and..."

The more Unix-y and less Windows-ish or Macintoshy the solution, the longer it will be before any distro makes serious inroads among average users.

I'm willing to spend my hobby time fiddling with and learning about my OS because I have enjoy it, but most people are afraid to click anything they haven't been approved to click.