We have 4 computers in the house for my wife, my child, and me. One computer belongs to my 18 month old son. Yeah, it is the computer that is 5 years old... Instead of spending lots of money on a fancy setup to keep the kid away from the computer find a cheap old machine and turn him lose. He can learn how computers work and if he screws it up no big deal. My son really isn't very interested in the other computers in the house when he knows he can go and play his computer. He learned early on via good old fashioned discipline that he doesn't touch the computers that don't belong to him. He is currently satisfied with using his own computer. That may change, but it seems to be working for now. Good luck...
I had the chance to be associated with a CS research group as a freshman. Everyone there used LaTeX so I just kind of picked it up with help from those guys. Sure it took me A LOT longer to write those first few papers, but now it is my preferred way to do things. Four years later I can say that learning LaTeX was one of the best things that I have ever done. Sure it is great for math, but I use it for almost anything. Why you ask? Well, using div2ps I can generate postscript...using pdflatex I can generate pdf...and using latex2html I can generate html. It is very handy to have one base format that nicely generates ps, pdf, and html. And it automates easily with a Makefile.
That said LaTeX isn't without its faults. The good does outweigh the bad though. It is great to have automagic numbering of your figures, sections, citations, equations, etc. Doing things like that with other office suites is possible, but generally doesn't work well. In fact, I know one professor who uses MS Word exclusively for everything but writing papers because LaTeX is just so much easier when it comes to labelling and referencing figures, equations, citations, etc. There is nothing that can touch the ease of use provided by LaTeX in that arena. When you have to submit papers in a required style it is very easy to apply a style file instead of worrying about violating the style requirements using another office suite. Need an index or table of contents? Very easy in LaTeX. That is considered an advanced user's problem in other office suites. The one problem that I had with LaTeX at the start was that it doesn't place my figures exactly where I would like them. This is true. I have since learned to not care so much. The figures appear close enough to where I want them. Others may complain about white space. I see that as a moot point. There are many ways to control your white space and make things look just right. You just have to invest the time to learn the commands. I did my resume in LaTeX. White space is super important so that it looks good and allows me to cram as many things on it as possible. No problem in LaTeX. It would have been a nightmare in MS Word (that may be b/c I don't use MS Word, but I still think it would have been a nightmare for someone who knows Word).
The learning curve can be quite steep though. I would recommend... A Guide to LATEX: Document Preparation for Beginners and Advanced Users (3rd Edition) by Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly (ISBN: 0201398257). This probably isn't a great book for beginners, but it is decent for beginners and is the reference book that I still use (I would probably only consider myself an intermediate user if that helps you gauge the level of the book). Between google, CTAN, and this book I haven't had much trouble at all making LaTeX do what I needed it to do.
Re:the dark side of gentoo...
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
> I am not sure. I ended up sticking with it after > trying it out precisely because I find it's a very > low maintenance distro for me. 'emerge -U world' > every night before I go to bed is about all I need > to keep the system 1) current, and 2) working.
I am not so sure that I totally buy this argument. Maybe my experience was due to the fact that I was using the unstable portage branch to get bleeding edge software and maybe it was b/c I didn't spend enough time reading the docs for all of the Gentoo admin tools, but I found that it was always as easy as emerge blah to get new software going or as easy as emerge -U world to keep things updated. Stuff didn't always build as advertised. Ebuilds didn't always work flawlessly. I guess I shouldn't have tried to figure out why things failed, etc. It ended up taking more time than just grabbing a new binary package when the updates came out.
> You know, I'm re-reading your post again, your > gripes about how you never got the hang of the > Gentoo admin tools, and I'm wondering... You DID > read the many docs that Gentoo ships with, did you?
Well, I guess I didn't keep reading them as they were updated. Emerge seems to be a moving target with features being added and removed (and the docs weren't always updated immediately when things changed). I didn't keep checking to see if the feature that I wanted had been added yet. Like I said I will probably switch back to Gentoo in the future. I think it will be great once it matures, but I just didn't like dealing w/ the growing pains.
Re:the dark side of gentoo...
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, I used Gentoo for about 8 months before it finally drove me nuts and I quit using it. In my opinion it certainly has a dark side, but I think you kind of missed it. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of things that I really liked about Gentoo (bleeding edge software, and the ease of installing new stuff mainly), but in the end I just didn't have the endless hours to hold its hand and help it along. I am certainly not a Linux expert, but I can hold my own w/out much trouble. I managed to get Gentoo into a state where it wouldn't boot two or three times and got out of those jams w/out a complete reinstall. These major problems were generally due to bad ebuilds. This problem has been partially fixed by having and unstable and stable portage tree as well as the devs paying more attention before releasing a mission critical ebuild w/ a bug.
Here are my issues w/ Gentoo...
1. When a big ebuild dies in the middle for some silly reason (i.e. I forgot to switch openGL drivers or something) I have to start all over from the beginning. I had a problem w/ getting kdebase to compile that I could never figure out (yes, I posted to the forums and other places several times, but no one could figure out why it wouldn't build). It would happen about 90 minutes into the build and every time I would have to try something new and wait 90 minutes to see if it helped. Why can't there be an option to not rebuild the entire package (I mean they are using make)?? Seems a bit silly if you ask me. I never did get kdebase under KDE 3.x to build via the ebuild. It would build fine from the latest CVS, but never from the Gentoo ebuild. Go figure.
2. Disk space!!!! Gentoo uses a TON of disk space compared to the other distributions that I used. I figured that since I would only install the things that I wanted I would have plenty of disk space. WRONG! Gentoo keeps all kinds of stuff lying around in/var. It is nice to not have to download the source code each time when only a small patch is applied for the recompile, but it takes up a ton of disk space. You can flame away that I can just clean up the src code each time. Yes, I can, but then I have to download it when I need it again. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
3. Keeping track of exactly what is installed on my system and uninstalling the stuff that I don't need. Yes, there are some utilities (i.e. qpkg) to help with this task, but none of them work very well in my opinion. I know that I had a ton of junk lying around that I had installed at one time to play w/ a new package. I could maybe remember the package, but not its dependencies. In the end I had as much useless kruft on my system as with other distros. The difference I had to update and recompile this kruft whenever a new version came out.
4. Time to maintain the distro!!! I am willing to spend some time tweaking my load and making sure things work like I want, but Gentoo just seems to take A LOT more time than other distros. A lot of the time I was trying to figure out why this or that wouldn't build quite right or trying to figure out how critical system files had changed and merge my customizations. I guess I just never got good w/ etc-update, but that sucked a bit of time on the files that are updated frequently and often customized (make.conf comes to mind). This was probably b/c I used the unstable portage branch, but if I want bleeding edge then doesn't it make sense to use that branch??
I am sure that I will try Gentoo again in the future, but for now it was just took too much time and had too many little quirks (I never could get my env vars to work quite the way I wanted and how they work in other distros...and I fought that stupid opengl-update script too many times) to use for now.
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We have 4 computers in the house for my wife, my child, and me. One computer belongs to my 18 month old son. Yeah, it is the computer that is 5 years old... Instead of spending lots of money on a fancy setup to keep the kid away from the computer find a cheap old machine and turn him lose. He can learn how computers work and if he screws it up no big deal. My son really isn't very interested in the other computers in the house when he knows he can go and play his computer. He learned early on via good old fashioned discipline that he doesn't touch the computers that don't belong to him. He is currently satisfied with using his own computer. That may change, but it seems to be working for now. Good luck...
I had the chance to be associated with a CS research group as a freshman. Everyone there used LaTeX so I just kind of picked it up with help from those guys. Sure it took me A LOT longer to write those first few papers, but now it is my preferred way to do things. Four years later I can say that learning LaTeX was one of the best things that I have ever done. Sure it is great for math, but I use it for almost anything. Why you ask? Well, using div2ps I can generate postscript...using pdflatex I can generate pdf...and using latex2html I can generate html. It is very handy to have one base format that nicely generates ps, pdf, and html. And it automates easily with a Makefile.
That said LaTeX isn't without its faults. The good does outweigh the bad though. It is great to have automagic numbering of your figures, sections, citations, equations, etc. Doing things like that with other office suites is possible, but generally doesn't work well. In fact, I know one professor who uses MS Word exclusively for everything but writing papers because LaTeX is just so much easier when it comes to labelling and referencing figures, equations, citations, etc. There is nothing that can touch the ease of use provided by LaTeX in that arena. When you have to submit papers in a required style it is very easy to apply a style file instead of worrying about violating the style requirements using another office suite. Need an index or table of contents? Very easy in LaTeX. That is considered an advanced user's problem in other office suites. The one problem that I had with LaTeX at the start was that it doesn't place my figures exactly where I would like them. This is true. I have since learned to not care so much. The figures appear close enough to where I want them. Others may complain about white space. I see that as a moot point. There are many ways to control your white space and make things look just right. You just have to invest the time to learn the commands. I did my resume in LaTeX. White space is super important so that it looks good and allows me to cram as many things on it as possible. No problem in LaTeX. It would have been a nightmare in MS Word (that may be b/c I don't use MS Word, but I still think it would have been a nightmare for someone who knows Word).
The learning curve can be quite steep though. I would recommend... A Guide to LATEX: Document Preparation for Beginners and Advanced Users (3rd Edition) by Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly (ISBN: 0201398257). This probably isn't a great book for beginners, but it is decent for beginners and is the reference book that I still use (I would probably only consider myself an intermediate user if that helps you gauge the level of the book). Between google, CTAN, and this book I haven't had much trouble at all making LaTeX do what I needed it to do.
> I am not sure. I ended up sticking with it after
> trying it out precisely because I find it's a very
> low maintenance distro for me. 'emerge -U world'
> every night before I go to bed is about all I need
> to keep the system 1) current, and 2) working.
I am not so sure that I totally buy this argument. Maybe my experience was due to the fact that I was using the unstable portage branch to get bleeding edge software and maybe it was b/c I didn't spend enough time reading the docs for all of the Gentoo admin tools, but I found that it was always as easy as emerge blah to get new software going or as easy as emerge -U world to keep things updated. Stuff didn't always build as advertised. Ebuilds didn't always work flawlessly. I guess I shouldn't have tried to figure out why things failed, etc. It ended up taking more time than just grabbing a new binary package when the updates came out.
> You know, I'm re-reading your post again, your
> gripes about how you never got the hang of the
> Gentoo admin tools, and I'm wondering... You DID
> read the many docs that Gentoo ships with, did you?
Well, I guess I didn't keep reading them as they were updated. Emerge seems to be a moving target with features being added and removed (and the docs weren't always updated immediately when things changed). I didn't keep checking to see if the feature that I wanted had been added yet. Like I said I will probably switch back to Gentoo in the future. I think it will be great once it matures, but I just didn't like dealing w/ the growing pains.
Hmm, I used Gentoo for about 8 months before it finally drove me nuts and I quit using it. In my opinion it certainly has a dark side, but I think you kind of missed it. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of things that I really liked about Gentoo (bleeding edge software, and the ease of installing new stuff mainly), but in the end I just didn't have the endless hours to hold its hand and help it along. I am certainly not a Linux expert, but I can hold my own w/out much trouble. I managed to get Gentoo into a state where it wouldn't boot two or three times and got out of those jams w/out a complete reinstall. These major problems were generally due to bad ebuilds. This problem has been partially fixed by having and unstable and stable portage tree as well as the devs paying more attention before releasing a mission critical ebuild w/ a bug.
/var. It is nice to not have to download the source code each time when only a small patch is applied for the recompile, but it takes up a ton of disk space. You can flame away that I can just clean up the src code each time. Yes, I can, but then I have to download it when I need it again. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
Here are my issues w/ Gentoo...
1. When a big ebuild dies in the middle for some silly reason (i.e. I forgot to switch openGL drivers or something) I have to start all over from the beginning. I had a problem w/ getting kdebase to compile that I could never figure out (yes, I posted to the forums and other places several times, but no one could figure out why it wouldn't build). It would happen about 90 minutes into the build and every time I would have to try something new and wait 90 minutes to see if it helped. Why can't there be an option to not rebuild the entire package (I mean they are using make)?? Seems a bit silly if you ask me. I never did get kdebase under KDE 3.x to build via the ebuild. It would build fine from the latest CVS, but never from the Gentoo ebuild. Go figure.
2. Disk space!!!! Gentoo uses a TON of disk space compared to the other distributions that I used. I figured that since I would only install the things that I wanted I would have plenty of disk space. WRONG! Gentoo keeps all kinds of stuff lying around in
3. Keeping track of exactly what is installed on my system and uninstalling the stuff that I don't need. Yes, there are some utilities (i.e. qpkg) to help with this task, but none of them work very well in my opinion. I know that I had a ton of junk lying around that I had installed at one time to play w/ a new package. I could maybe remember the package, but not its dependencies. In the end I had as much useless kruft on my system as with other distros. The difference I had to update and recompile this kruft whenever a new version came out.
4. Time to maintain the distro!!! I am willing to spend some time tweaking my load and making sure things work like I want, but Gentoo just seems to take A LOT more time than other distros. A lot of the time I was trying to figure out why this or that wouldn't build quite right or trying to figure out how critical system files had changed and merge my customizations. I guess I just never got good w/ etc-update, but that sucked a bit of time on the files that are updated frequently and often customized (make.conf comes to mind). This was probably b/c I used the unstable portage branch, but if I want bleeding edge then doesn't it make sense to use that branch??
I am sure that I will try Gentoo again in the future, but for now it was just took too much time and had too many little quirks (I never could get my env vars to work quite the way I wanted and how they work in other distros...and I fought that stupid opengl-update script too many times) to use for now.