tech-ed collisions

Linux (part 2) - not for the faint-hearted

Previously I have contended that Linux could be challenging for the novice home user, mainly due to the difficulties that can be encountered on installation and setup. However, here I am posting from my 'new' Linux environment and really enjoying it. There is no doubt that everything seems to run much faster in this environment as I guess it is a lot more lightweight and this makes it a more pleasant experience. However, the wireless network is still not functioning so I am unfortunately wired to a desk and not free to roam around the house. In fact, many hours have been spent getting to this point. I have learned more about wireless networks, encryption, MAC addresses, port forwarding on routers (for remote assistance), Linux command line commands etc than I ever thought I wanted to know. Installing Linux can actually be a great learning experience if you come across any problems and have a streak of stubbornness in you! It can also be a great introduction to the Linux community. I have been amazed at the amount of support people from this community are prepared to give. As long as you do have access to the Internet, some sort of help is not too far away. Being located in Australia can pose some timing problems but this is an extremely active global community. As I write this, there is an expert in Canada willing to give up his time and remotely connect into my pc to do some diagnostics with me. I think this says a lot for the power of social networks, the Web in general and the generosity of people around the world. Cheers, Jerry.

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Is Linux ready for the unsupported masses?

Linux on the desktop in enterprises/large organisations seems to have been reported on quite a bit lately. Organisations with access to good technical support are well positioned to take on such challenges but what about your average small office/home arrangement where no-one in that environment would consider themselves an expert user? At home I have been using Linux for a few years now and have played with distributions such as Red Hat, Mandrake, Vector, Gentoo and a number of other forgettable ones. Other members of my household are committed Windows users and cannot be convinced to have a go but I had hoped to change that with Ubuntu. Trialling it with a bootable CD it looked pretty good for a basic desktop with some office tools (OpenOffice), Internet tools, a few games and a few video/audio applications thrown in. I had no problems accessing the Internet so things were looking pretty good. Since I already had a Windows operating system in place I decided on a dual boot arrangement so some partitioning was required. This meant resizing the existing partition. A warning in the documentation hinted that this may not be the most robust of programs but it worked a treat. However, then things started to follow the usual path (based on my experience) with Linux distributions. That is, the documentation was either wrong or missing. In this case, quite a bit of both as the evening wore on. Getting the system up and running was relatively straightforward but then I tried to install a few apps in order to have a more efficient desktop. Following some recommendations from the documentation I tried installing Epihany, Abiword, XFCE, and a couple of others, all of which I have run before on other distros. None of these installed successfully although Abiword got as far as appearing in a menu! There was a system warning letting me know that some software was out of date and I should apply some updates so I did so. At some point in this process my network connection was lost and I could not recover from it. Not to be beaten so easily, I tried switching to my wireless network as the card was recognised but there was no way I could get that working either. However, when copying my wireless connections over (via USB memory stick) I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the operating system recognised the memory stick automatically. This is something that I have never experienced with Linux before as it has usually required quite a bit of manual effort (maybe because I have been using older distrubutions for a while). So now I had a desktop with (probably) corrupted updates, a few broken applications and no network access. Luckily for me the Windows partition still works a treat. The issue for me here is how ready is Linux for your average user who simply wants a working desktop and has no real access to technical support. Even in the Ubuntu documentation there is an article which makes the point that Linux is for the 'expert user' however expert is more or less defined as an experienced user. Since I have an interest in Linux I will probably spend a bit of effort sorting it all out but there will be a point when I have to ask myself, 'is it worth the effort'? For people at home there is often no technical support available and forums etc are not much good if you can't access the Internet. For the sake of a bit of money you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by installing a proprietary operating system and desktop applications - well most PCs are usually bundled with them anyway! While I am still a big supporter of Linux it still has a way to go for novice home users, of which there are many. So here I am signing off (in Windows).

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