[ubuntu-us-in] Gutsy Release Party

Simón Ruiz simon.a.ruiz at gmail.com
Sat Oct 13 23:13:53 BST 2007


On 10/13/07, Robert <robert at martz.us> wrote:
>  Home use with dial up and being able to set up a printer. It is no good
> walking into someone's house, showing them the new system, then not being
> able to set up their printer. Most home users want to print. The old CUPS
> interface just would not work for a grandmother who wanted to print out pics
> of the new grandbaby. I am fairly fluent with IT and I could not set up my
> Brother MFC420CN as a network printer with 7.04(7.10 it was a ten minute
> job). I would not even consider recommending to most because of the printing
> issues. The forums are filled with the same type of comments. I think this
> was why the new printer interface became a top priority in 7.10. I think
> everything else was ready enough and they were waiting to deal with this
> until they got most o the other issues taken care of. The new printer
> interface says, "Let's now make this usable to the novice home user."

I'm excited about that, myself. Truly plug and play.

>  M$ WIndows has some issues too, I agree, but when someone buys a printer or
> scanner, they can easily get it to work. Just try asking someone with very
> little experience to open up a terminal window and give them the cryptic
> commands they would need to type in to install any new package, then watch
> the look on their face. :-P

Watch the look on their face when you say "Go to Start -> Settings ->
Internet Options, then move over to X tab, and click Y button.
Then..." ;-)

I don't know that a non-technical user, with no prior experience, can
get their printer working on Hasefroch easily, since I've always been
consulted when the non-technical people I know buy a new printer, or
scanner, or laptop with wireless, or what-have-you. I've never seen a
non-technical person have an easy time installing anything where it
didn't automatically set itself up, like Gutsy does for printers.

I know what you're saying about the terminal, and I definitely agree
that it's a Good Thing that everyday it becomes less necessary to ask
new users to use it.

Getting wireless working when you've got a Broadcom adapter is
probably the single biggest improvement in the user experience, in my
opinion. I don't know if you've ever had to get a Broadcom wireless
card to work before Gutsy, but it was quite the pain, involving
downloading and compiling from source as recently as Edgy.

On the other side of the learning curve (stepping away from the
non-technical user perspective), the terminal is a beautiful thing.

I honestly find myself using the terminal more and more often the more
I learn because it's simpler, easier and more powerful for many things
once you get the hang of it. Not to mention it's more or less
universal (you reset the Samba server the same way from a terminal
regardless of whether you're using GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or a headless
server, whether you're running Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, etc., "sudo
/etc/init.d/samba restart"), and can be easily automated through
scripts.

Do I want to Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package
Manager, click X button, search for the package I want, check the box,
click apply, Yes, Ok, then close everything out when I'm done? No, I
want to "sudo apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird".

Do I want to go through Places, Connect to Server..., plug in all the
right data, then double-click on the icon, and drag and drop the
folder I want to transfer from my server? No, I want "scp -r
server:data ./"

>  Umm, that is where I keep the computer hidden. ;-)

No need to hide it! Step into the light! ;-)

>  Can't party, I am a Mennonite. Can't use electricity either. O:-)
>  (BTW, that was a joke. The electricity thing, not the Mennonite thing.)

And the party thing? ;-) If it helps, we can call it breaking bread
and sharing fellowship in celebration of Gutsy Gibbon's release.

>  How is the Python teaching going?

It's going. Teaching is hard, but it's cool to see a light bulb go on
in a kid's face.

>  Peace.

Peace!

Simón



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