The Stealth Desktop Part III

uninet writes "In the third installment of the Stealth Desktop series about Slackware Linux, Eduardo Sánchez builds upon the previous steps of Part I and Part II. Continuing where those parts left off, he introduces the subjects of user, font and printer management in Slackware using KDE."

Comments

Command line examples would be useful

[Viol8]

To be fair , slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system but it is among the first choices for a backend server (I use it for such myself). With that in mind I'm not sure how to configure printers via a GUI is all that much use for most slackware users. I personally would be far more interested to see how to do it via the command line so you can configure the things via a dial up at 3 in the morning when things have gone pear shaped at work. Anyway , no doubt other people will have other opinions :)

Re:Command line examples would be useful

[pe1rxq]

I always found that Slackware had the best handholding.... Its just in a different place.
Its not hidding the inner workings in nice GUI interfaces.. It has nicely commented config and startup files and a clear /etc/rc.d directory.

Jeroen

Re:I'm glad someone wrote about Slackware

[polecat_redux]

If you ever feel especially masochistic, check out Linux From Scratch. It's essentially a walkthrough that takes you step-by-step through the process of compiling a fresh toolchain which you then use to compile all of the necessary applications needed to construct a basic Linux system. Once you're done, you will likely find the process rather fulfilling (in addition to all that new knowledge rattling around in your head).

Re:Call This A troll. I Don't Care.

[NightWhistler]

OK, I'll feed this troll...

Slackware is not, and was never meant to be a migration path for Joe Sixpack coming from Windows. We have loads of distros that handle that task a million times better.

What Slackware is great for is people who like a simple, clean UNIX-like OS on their home machine, and don't want to bother with all sorts of distro-specific tools. It's also great if you prefer to compile your software from source, without having to be afraid to mess up you package management DB. Using Linux is much like riding a bike: try it with training wheels first, move on when you're ready.

Finally, if we really want to get grandma's, sisters and Joe Sixpack off of Windows, we should probably start promoting KDE as the "OS". It's what they see anyway, and it shouldn't really matter if it runs on top of Linux, BSD, Solaris, whatever...

OK, done ranting now... feel so much better ;-)

What is needed

[AaronGTurner]

To actually convince people to swap to Linux on the desktop it needs to be easy enough to use. Basically this means familiar enough - i.e. uses similar enough paradigms to Windows for users to get the hang of general use instantly. Whilst things like some management is going to be different, it should take only one article, if that, to get end users up and running with desktop Linux doing basic things such as surfing the web, using email, word processing. If it takes more, then Linux isn't there yet.

Having been using Unix for 15 years it is hard for me to tell if Linux is there yet as I am not a naieve user, but the likes of Lindows and Lycoris seem to be very usable, as do distributions with slightly less of a naieve user focus such as SuSe and Mandrake (and RedHat was going in that direction to before the Enterprise/Fedora split). So things are going in the right direction at least.

What would be interesting is to see a proper survey of users of a variety of levels who have never previously used Linux and see how they react to the latest distros on the desktop.

Usefulness.

[rincebrain]

IMO, these guides are useful for general Linux users who want a guide to various tools on their desktop.

Slackware users, on the other hand, tend to prefer a more terminal/console-centric view, so the usefulness of this guide to anyone using Slackware for, as I've usually seen it, a server of some kind [printer, file, FTP, web], would probably do better to read some other documentation.

Just my $0.25.

Try Ubuntu, GNOME 2.8 powered plug and play Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

It has recently been released and it has caused quite a stir for its ease of use despite being based on Debian. For me its the first GNOME since 1.4 that is better than KDE. I suggest you try it and you will see why Slackware is a minority and why thousands of user are switching to Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Linux
Wikipedia article.