Mike
I'm a Civil Engineer and spend much of my day buried in AutoCAD drawings, writing engineering reports in MS Word, analyzing projects using MS project, We run macros and calculations in Excel and convert things back and of forth between AutoCAD and MS Office products by importing and exporting things through XML. I am also building the company intranet among other things.
I will always have a CAD workstation running Windows, AutoCAD and MS office and other higher end software on my desk at work. So I understand. I have switched to Linux at home because I cannot afford to maintain all of the computers in my home with Windows products. I am counting on Linux to fill the need at home and to build a web development environment at home were I do most of my intranet development.
Although I have some experience professionally doing IT with some of the companies I have worked for, it has never been my primary job. When I turn on my computer it is to develop web pages and dynamic content. My family will use their systems to surf the web, right home work reports, do basic accounting, listen to or watch media content and doodle.
With this perspective on my use and needs I hope that it becomes a little more understandable that I don't plan on trying to know how to tweak Linux to run on 30,000 blade servers in a data center, or to build and maintain high end load balanced virtual servers or an enterprise level LAN or WAN. I want to know enough about Linux to configure a moderately basic LAN at home with decent security for it. That is the first real milestone. After 3 months of pouring through books and researching the net I still cannot tell you if my file permission is really talking to Samba correctly or if I have set up the file mount points with the right settings. (Drupal was having file access issues on a test install just the other night).
What is my point? I am not your average computer user but the average ones would have been scared off by know. And they aren't going to go pay to go school to learn an OS unless they are planning to go into IT. Because frankly they aren't in to computers to learn OS's. Case in point: AutoCAD (basic) has more than 4,000 commands Civil3D has double that and runs on top of a GIS graphical engine tied to a database structure the rivals an Oracle database engine. To be competent in Civil Engineering and to build engineering models with that one application will take 6 years minimum (that does not include the engineering degree or becoming licensed) That is a total of ten years of a person's life devoted to learning a highly technical field and use one program.
If we the users of Linux are going to bring in more users than they need to have early and consistent success with there OS configurations. Because although you are technically correct about Linux vs Windows vs OSX, human beings hate change, and it is our nature to judge negatively the things we don't understand, regardless of the accuracy of our assessment.
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:34 PM, Mike Hoy
<mhoy06@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm very grateful for PLUG. Dennis and Der.Hans and Preston (ASULug) are the ones that really got me going on it. I actually make my living with Linux 100% now. PLUG has gotten me over that initial phase and that 'initial phase' what I wanted to point out.
I think there is harm anytime we make a big deal out of things or when we make a novelty out of them. Not everything is that important. It's just code that runs hardware afterall. You really want access to the disk and other resources right? Well both OS's can do that much so one can't be that much worse than the other.
When I use Windows I use Windows and when I run Linux I use Linux. I no longer get excited when I boot into debian or whatever and depressed when I feel like I am forced to use Windows. It's just how my computer rolls.
Let some time pass, absorb what you can and incorporate it into your life. You won't escape Windows most likely, so why try? Just use what you want. The right tool for the right job. I will go so far as to say this: I prefer to use Linux for everything except gaming. And I don't give credit to windows or blame for that. Not everything needs to be 'good' or 'bad'. I think we tend to get a little too excited about the divide between the two camps.
But then again a lot of what I'm talking about is just who I am as a person.
Just wanted to pass on my experience over the last years.
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Phillip Waclawski
<waclawski@mesacc.edu> wrote:
I can understand that all too well, I remember when I started out with Linux, and especially vi, I spent an hour trying to remove all the "~" that vi had put in there ;)
Course, in addition to the PLUG, which is a great source of information (wish I could make more of the meetings, but I teach until 10pm at night M-Th), there are classes out there that cover that material. At Mesa Community College (and others ;) we teach CIS126DL which is intro to the Linux OS, and covers much of that material. I teach it at MCC, along with Der Hans, Dennis Kibbe as well. Let me know if you have any additional questions,
Phil Waclawski
From: "James Dugger" <
james.dugger@gmail.com>
To: "Main PLUG discussion list" <
plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 6:21:41 PM
Subject: Re: Looking for October presenters for PLUGdev
I am new to the group and to linux and thought I would give a newbie's opinion here. I am not concerned right now about kernel issues (directly) I am trying to resolve basic fundamental issues. Things like file and directory permissions, configuring your system for network connection (i.e. network addressing, setting up your domain, hostnames, nameserver resoltuon)
While I know that any one of these can get very very complex, even just the first few steps have been pretty huge. But I want to learn. There is only so much you can learn in a linux forum depending almost entirely on the disposition of would-be experts and how they can communicate.
My perspective is that even though I have worked in a highly technical field as a power user in Windows it is obvious pretty quickly when making decisions to configure even the smallest of home network systems that I have relied heavily on Microsoft to help me configure things.
Consider that most homes in the US have more than 1 computer and many have more than 2. While just about anyone can download Ubuntu or (other distro) follow instructions and have a system up and running in 1/2 hour the minute they have to network 2 or more computers life just got way more complicated. In today's world were every home may have some sort of network, the amount of things I have had to learn and do to network my home systems would make Linux a deal breaker for many people.
The frustration is that there is no place to go to get a general overview of what needs to be configured, and how to do it. I know there is no one answer, but there are best practices and they are going to differ depending on the need.
I have been "mapping net work drives" in Windows for 15 years and never new until 3 months ago what SMB/CIFS was or Samba, or NFS, Having to understand Samba alone just to get Linux/Unix to talk to Windows or MAC can cause many to run screaming back to $MS with there wallets open.
Maybe there needs to be a PLUG beginners group or a CONFIGFEST if this is too braud to tackle in presentations. But after the last 3 months of trial and error configuration problems in my network at home I would eagerly sit through a 4 hour hands on well prepared discussion on file server configurations with SMB/CIFS and understanding how to get smb.conf and fstab and file permissions to work together.
Sorry of the length. $MS is an addiction I am trying to beat everyday.
James
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