newbie user/root dycotomy

[ulrich steffens]

Am Freitag, den 21.01.2005, 10:30 -0400 schrieb Douglas Alves:
> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 07:54 +0100, ulrich steffens wrote:
> 
> >       get yourself some coffee, start smoking and upgrade to hoary. 
> >       for example, hoary contains the newest rosegarden-version. 
> > 
> > or
> > 
> >       get yourself some coffee, start smoking and go CLI ;)
> >       learn how to compile your apps if you always want to be up to
> >       date. often its not only the app thats important to upgrade, 
> >       these apps mostly depend also on the newest libs.
> >       so you can't use a 'bleeding edge' app and old libs anyways.
> > 
> > but either way you go: you can't avoid the command line. its linux.
> > 
> > hope this helps ;)
> >  ulrich
> 
> Ulrich:
>         2 Questions:
> 
> 1) Synaptic lists RoseGarden4 in Warty's universe, but it says it's for
> KDE. Does Hoary's RoseGarden come for Gnome?
> 
> 2) Being a newbie (thirsty to learn, though) I'm keeping to Warty out of
> prudence. Tell me something about these releases: if I install Hoary,
> will it start out with all the Warty stable stuff, or will I be
> installing unstable software from the beginning?
>    I know Hoary is for people who want to try things out, but does that
> mean NONE of the base-packages is stable?
> 
> My career profile is in computer science, but being a Windoze slave for
> many years has dulled my senses. I want to get up on my feet again with
> Linux and dust off my programming gloves! I just landed at Troy and
> haven't burned my ships yet!
> 
> appreciate your teaching, guys
> 
hi, as i would myself rank as really a low-fi brain, i discovered using
the command line has nothing to do with voodoo.
its fast and straight and its -though linux is a fine dektop- still a
big part of the os. otherwise than in windows the linux command line is
VERY comfortable and comes with a load of built-in tools to do almost
every task imaginable. so if you want to start *using* linux theres no
way to avoid the shell. as im also in no way a deleoper i see that lots
(most?) linux applications are splitted in commandline-core and GUI.
so the cli is not to abuse, its actually an advantage.

and even though some purists will tell you not to compile applications
for yourself, i also discovered that even me wasnt capapble of breaking
my system while i was actually compiling excessively mostly unstable
stuff. BUT it can happen to break your system! but switching to linux
(or every other os) mostly means 
           *do stupid things and learn by them*.
that sometimes involve breaking things.
and as a windowsuser you should be quite comfortable with reinstalling
your system :) (sorry i had to say that ;)

for the root thing:
be thankful that linux just let you unzip anything anywhere you want!
one of the biggest problems in the windows world is that everyone using
the computer is root while doing things. noone needs to be root to surf
the web, play a game or read emails... also in windows there is no
comfortable way (ok its better in xp now..) to do some quick tasks as
root while being logged in as a user. such things handle linux far more
better. and someone has to accept different concepts on different os'es.

and if youre into programming and computer science:
i better should start asking you ;)

and for youre questions:
2. hoary is the development branch. though i hadnt much of a headache
with it so far, its possible that you just upgrade some packages and
your system or parts of it break. 
1. as somerone other mentioned: no its for gnome/gtk, but if you happen
to install kde apps, you dont need kde. you just need some kdelibs to
actually run the program. but apt handles this and installs all required
libs.

-- 
- ulrich
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rule 3: It is OK to put all bad people in a giant meat grinder.