Newbie and using Ubuntu

[Jan Kokoska]

Hi Richard

On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 19:39 -0400, Richard Schinnell wrote:
> I have been reading the lists and it looks to me that 90% of the posters are 
> "grep-ds-grok" type people.

Some people know a lot, indeed. If there were not for them, there would
be no Ubuntu to talk about, or this list, in the first place. Ditto for
Linux and Unix.

> I would like to see a list for those of us who know nothing (or very little) 
> about Unix and are coming from the windows environment.  Answering someone's 
> question with well all you have to do is "sudo ad infinitum and Xf11Ceas" 
> type of stuff is going to discourage them from moving forward. I thought 
> that all the Linux people wanted to convert the MS Win people over to their 
> side.

No, we don't care (so much). We are just helping people (when we have
time), who have already made the choice themselves, read all The Fine
Documentation (TM), FAQs especially, mailing list archives, man pages
and still can't fix the problem they have. There is no pushing on the
ladder here, you've got to climb yourself.

> Talking to newbies in code will not help your case and send many back to 
> their familiar windows desktop environment. Telling them to go read a book 
> won't help either as I know many people who went to best buy, bought a 
> computer and took it home. Hooked it up and within an hour they were on the 
> internet. Not safely for sure but they saw action and were teased with the 
> possibilities..

http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/

Check out this one, it is a Debian Desktop Survival guide, but much (or
almost all) of it applies to Ubuntu, as it is based on Debian.

> There has to be a better way to figure out and recommend solutions to new 
> Linux (Ubuntu) users problems.
> 
> I have installed Ubuntu on a stand along machine which worked great. No 
> problems installing and getting to the graphics desktop.  This is where 
> people like me (and many others) belong. Not at the terminal prompt. Which 
> can be daunting to non dos or non unix people..

That is fine, that's why so much effort is being put into smooth Gnome
install in Ubuntu these days..

> I have problems getting a printer installed on my stand alone Ubuntu 
> machine.
> I have a windows 2003 network with a few XP workstations and a couple of 
> Linksys print servers for a HP LJ 4000 and a HPLJ 3330.
> I have shared the printers on a couple of workstations and even did it on 
> the server.  I know the ip of the print servers but can not get either to 
> print a test page.
> Even if someone told me that I needed to download a file and do something 
> with it. I probably could not do it outside of the graphic environment.

Well, there are general trouble with printing in Ubuntu *a lot* of
people reported and I guess you're in the queue (and some of the
supposedly guru-level people have trouble with it too, one guy on this
list)... I am typing this on Debian unstable where my printer via cupsys
*just works* so unfortunately I cannot directly help here.

You may like to examine your system logs, just see what
"rgrep -n cups /var/log" gives you. You can post it here, you will be
asked for more, if it is a unique bug that has not been reported yet, it
will go to bugzilla.

I realize you are new to Linux world, but you may know one of the
evangelists of Free Software: Eric S. Raymond, or ESR. Now imagine *he*
got frustrated with setting up CUPS, too! And wrote about it:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

So no matter who you are, how much experience you have, stay cool and
humble since there will always be problem to get you. The point of his
article is that sometimes the Linux folks suck at actually making things
work by default and that is exactly what Ubuntu is trying to change!

So give them a chance and search bugzilla.ubuntu.com for CUPS problems
and contribute to the bug reports there if you can.. I know they will be
working hard to make it work in final release due in a month or so, so
check back and test changes.

Regards

Jan