Installing and newbies

[Neil Winchurst]

After eighteen months with Edgy I did a fresh install of Gutsy last
week. It went well though I had a lot to do once I had restarted the
computer.

I set numlock to turn on at boot.
I changed the mouse to double click for icons.
I had to add a user since I did not get the choice to do so during
the install.
I had to set up my printer. It was turned on during the install but
was not found.
I had to play with kmix to get sound to work.
I made konqueror the default file manager instead of dolphin.
I commented out the reference to the install CD which was in
sources.list.

The following programs were not included with the install so I added
them afterwards :-

firefox, thunderbird, opera, gnucash, kedit, kdf, mysql, gimp, Sun
java, flash. 

OK, so some of those were personal choices, but I was
very surpised that FF, the Gimp and Thunderbird were missing from the
install.

And the point of all this? Well, after my experience with Edgy and, in
all, six years using Linux all the above was simple. But for someone
new to Linux I think they would need some hand-holding to get
started. I still feel that more needs to be done to get newcomers to
feel confident with Linux.

What do other people on the list think?

Neil Winchurst