Slashdot Mirror
Automatix Kicks Ubuntu into Gear
With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for beginners, there have been quite a few people who have mentioned a script called "Automatix" for Ubuntu as a means of easing the average joe into a life of Linux. Linux.com's (a Slashdot sister site) Tina Gasperson takes a closer look at Automatix and how it could help soften the blow of a Linux switch, at least in the short term. From the article: "Automatix lives up to its reputation. It's worth any time and small frustration it might take to get through the script. And it's even worth that 'over-the-shoulder' time you might spend with a new Linux user to walk them through it. I don't see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted with Ubuntu after a magic touch from Automatix."
I contest this is a very handy tool for anyone that wants to setup multi-media, web browsing, plugins and more.
I setup most of my system without it and when I finally found it I was trying to setup Java plugin for firefox.... needless to say I kicked myself a few times, realizing that I could have saved myself days of configuring.
I don't trust the guy that wrote it, I've read some of his how-tos on the ubuntu forums, and some of them offer very bad advice. Also note: "If u type liek this i think ur more liek jeffk and u want to hax me!"... and well...thats pretty much how he types.
User beware, Just because it's free or opensource, doesn't mean it's safe.
Has anyone here been to the #ubuntu channel on irc.freenode.net? YOu will find that Automatix is regarded as THE WORST option for ubuntu users. It has huge security holes, overwrites configs, and uses very risky command line options. Instead you should use easyubuntu. http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/
This script installs Free implementations of patented algorithms, proprietary codecs, Sun's Java, P2P file sharing programs, non-free programs like Adobe Acrobate, MS true type fonts (unsure about Tahoma; you need a Windows license to use that one), non-free-illegal-in-US codecs, non-free Nvidia binary blobs, and makes some GUI behaviors mimic a W32 environment.
In short, it takes away the Freedom portion of a GNU/Linux system and makes it Yet Another Windows Competitor.
About the only thing I like from that list is disabling CD-ROM drive locking, turning DMA on, and the ESD sleep fix. I'm not sure about the locking, either. Ctrl-Alt-Del bringing up the task manager seems kinda nice, but I would rather just discover keybinding on my own.
Then again, I'm not this script's target audience.
I have a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows XP system where I had set up menu.lst to have Windows XP as the first/default option. After running Automatix, all the programs were indeed updated, but it also modified the menu.lst file to remove the Windows XP boot option completely! I knew how to fix it, but how many newbies would see that and not know what to do to get Windows XP back? It only takes one experience like that to sour people forever on Linux. Dumb.
Actually, the Click OK part isn't necessary with the Ubuntu (and many other distro's) Live CD. All I need to do is put the CD in and reboot. After 3-4min (slow cd-boot) I'm at the Gnome desktop, my sound works, my (wired) network is working. I can run OpenOffice to write up a document, open up the web-browser, open my webmail account and mail it out. I can play a dozen variations of solitare. I can do this without going through a single program installation process nor a single registration form to fill out (provided you already have a webmail account). This is 90% of what "non-computer" people do with their system. The current generations of cars have plastic covers under the hood nowadays. We leave the administration/maintenance to the professionals. Linux is like that. Users click on icons in menus or the desktop to run programs. You use the keyboard to type a report or e-mail. The internet works like the internet. You put in a CD and it plays. So long as that happens, non-computer people don't know or care if it's windows or linux or OSX.
I can't give you an authoritative answer here (in part because I've been a computer person for a long time, and I run GNU/Linux and FreeBSD systems), but let me say this:
First: Can you do this with Windows? (I mean, really just click ok and be off and running.) OR do you have to know how to do some stuff? (For example, install drivers or software for word processing, games, web browsing, security, and the like.) When they installed my department's new printer, all the windows computers had to get new drivers, whereas the guy running OS X was ready to go through rendezvous and my CUPS drivers were fine.
If you switch to a GNU/Linux system, you'll have to learn some things because it works differently---both in terms of the graphical interfaces that come with a distribution and in terms of the way unix-like OSes work. You probably won't have to learn EVERYTHING all over again (wordprocessors do function broadly the same, firefox is identical), but some things will be different.
Some distributions require a lot of hands on stuff (gentoo and linux from scratch, I'm looking at you), while others are pretty neophyte (I hear this about ubuntu, pclinuxos, and suse).
My biggest piece of advice: find a live cd distro and try that out on your hardware. Play and WORK with it for a while, see if you think it is doable.
I should add that there are some rewards to switching. Your computer will be more stable, you'll have access to a HUGE amount of free (and gratis) software that can easily be installed, and you'll be a bit more computer literate (what can I say, I'm a philosopher, so knowledge counts for something). You'll also be supporting liberty, and, let's face it, everyone knows that having a GNU/Linux sticker on your car/bike/bookbag/laptop is guaranteed to get you laid.*
Hope this helps.
*Guarantee not valid anywhere. Your mileage may vary.
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
So ready for beginners includes such niceties as failing without warning and running it three times in succession as a leap of faith to getting things finished? Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu, but I'm a techie.
I know for sure that the software I produce can't have gotcha like that and still be considered 'ready'
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Like my parents would *ever* download something from a site called "beerorkid.com".
Give me a break, this is professional? This is for the average Joe? CLI installation and unprofessional URLs do not a professional program make.
Perhaps...
As an OOBE automatically launching immediately after install on first boot, before the desktop loads.
Otherwise, it's crap for "new users" or "the average Joe".
A lot of us will use it, and it may get even more popular, but calling it a tool for new users and the average Joe is stretching it a bit.
Yeah. May I suggest, though, that you try some of the recent warez distributions of Windows XP available over Bittorrent. They're starting to resemble Linux distributions in that they bundle lots of commonly used apps right into the installer. One I've tried gives you a set of checkboxes for applications (Nero, Firefox, Acrobat, etc) and then installs everything you selected without needing to go through wizards. Very nice. Since everything is free to warezers and there are no issues associated with bundling, the pirates are now providing a better user experience than Microsoft!
But will you bitch when you can't save your documents from Windows? Or should it resize the Windows partition by default and make your system dual boot? Or perhaps a LiveCD would be more your speed.
I suppose that my point is that if you are so lazy and stupid that you can't go to the trouble of understanding just a little bit about your machine, stay with Windows. My mom could stick the ubuntu disc in and follow a printed-out install guide fairly easily. If you can't, you're the kind of person that drives 20,000 miles without changing oil in your car and can't understand why that might be bad.
Now I know someone is gonna say "This is why people won't switch to linux, you geeks are always wanting people to understand things!". The long and short of it is yes, I do. I get tired of people who are proud of their inability or unwillingness to comprehend even the smallest of things. I don't think everyone should have to be a kernel hacker. But I do think that people ought to have half a clue about the things they do, no matter if it's with computers, cooking, driving, whatever.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Robert Heinlein
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
According to the article, it installs, among other fine jewels, Flash (just in case you *like* gratuitous blinky flashy animations), "several file sharing programs" (no doubt along the lines of KaZaA and its ilk, just in case your computer was previously performing too responsively for your tastes), RealPlayer (my vote for Most Heinous User Interface Design Ever, and that's in addition to its undisputed status as nagware of the most persistent kind), and, umm, "more". At the rate the list was going so far as it was stated, I can only assume that "more" is largely composed of utterly superfluous dross.
It does also install a couple of potentially useful things, such as Java. Also, Opera, which comes in handy if you create any web pages and want to test them out in multiple browsers, since Opera uses a different rendering engine than anything else and so is always good to include in such test batteries.
Then there's "an ftp client". I'm quite sure that Ubuntu comes with several of those right out of the box, so maybe they just had to pad the list out a bit. I'd be curious to know which ftp client it installs, and whether it's decently usable.
Eh. All that borderline-malware is a pretty heavy price to pay just to get Java and Opera, when you could just get those things on their own and have done.
The idea of automatically installing a bunch of stuff is a good idea, but I don't much care for their list of stuff.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
But the idea of a popularity database is a pretty cool idea.
And the data may already be available, too, thanks to the 'popularity-contest' package:
Seems like it should be a relatively simple process to mine this data for popular apps that are not installed by default. It would be interesting to see what the results would be. There are some obvious forces that may skew the results, since it might bother people to have it installed by default.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
How come everyone here is a "n00b", and yet they've installed Ubuntu a ton of times, tried out Fedora on a couple of higher end comps ... to act as servers..., etc. When do you become a non-n00b?
Sounds like they did you a favor to delete your more ranty stuff before the thread got slashdotted. You'd look like even more of a jerk.
I don't use Ubuntu -- I used debian-via-knoppix for about 18 months, and have recently switched to Xandros OCE and I'm reasonably happy with it.
From reading over the thread, it looks as though you had the expectation that the people who gave you the software for free were obliged to provide you with the answers to all of your demands for support sight unseen. This is the place where the problems in the thread came from.
Mind you, I know what it's like to ask a simple-sounding question and get a brief and obscure answer -- or a very ugly answer (like "back up your homedirs, format your hd, and do a fresh install with stable or testing" that I got on irc last month). It's frustrating. Part of where it comes from is not yet knowing enough to be able to ask the question which, when answered, will give you the information you need to fix the problem you've got. That's you, and that's me. I'm learning pieces as we go, and the learning curve isn't a lot of fun, but the nice thing about *nix stuff is that the things that you learn stay true (if not, always, relevant), as opposed to proprietary stuff, where the paradigms can change much more drastically and things you once knew have to be unlearned with annoying frequency.
However, when you're asking for free help, you need to remember that there isn't anybody there that has a stake in you fixing your problem. Not everybody who could answer your question chooses to hang around in those forums, and not everybody who does is going to give you the answer you want in the form you want to hear it. If you're not paying for their time, it is unreasonable to expect them to show a good customer service attitude. You're not a customer.
Now, some things you might have learned from this situation:
1) It's a smart idea to know where your Windows install CD is, especially when you're going to try something major with your system.
2) It's a smart idea to have a Knoppix CD on hand when you try something major with your system.
3) Having more than one physical HD in a system makes it a little non-standard, and standard answers might need a little tweaking to work right. The person who wrote the manual may not have taken the details of your situation into account, so this is something to research prior to trying to set things up on it.
4) The Thumper Principle works really, really well when asking for free help from strangers who have no reason to like you or do anything nice for you: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. That's hard to do when you're really frustrated. In the words of Eric to Corey, "Life's hard, little brother. Get a helmet." Or, if you prefer "Life is pain, princess. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something." That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger, and you're not dead yet. Being nice to people is just generally a better idea when you have nothing to offer them that they need in return.
Not sure which, if any, of those lessons you have or will learned, but those jump out to me. I hope you've worked through the problem somehow by now.