Well, I talked to my grandpa's friend today. His computer is really starting to annoy him, and he's totally fed up. He is sure it's because of Microsoft, and he really hates Bill Gates (I'm not sure why, but eh?), and he said he wants to try something else. He mentioned that an old friend of his swears by Linux, and he was curious about it.
He uses his computer for:
- Email
- Internet
- Word Processing
And that's it. Always has been.
He was telling me that he misses the days of DOS, when everything was simple. And those days only ended a few years for him, when he upgraded to Windows XP. Since then, he's had many problems with things like viruses (I had a particularely horrible adventure trying to get rid of either Blaster or Slammer from his computer, I think I posted the story on vL's forum, or maybe here -- search my posts for Blaster or Slammer for more info).
So on Monday, I'm going to go down there, back up his files, and install Linux for him, as an experimental thing. I also want to keep the Apple option open, because I think he might like using a Mac.
I think it'll be an interesting experiment, to say the least. I have a feeling he'll have some trouble at first, then warm up to it. After all, he's just going to be a user, not an administrator, and I can remotely connect to install programs, if I have to.
Give him Fedora!
Quote from: rabbit on July 12, 2006, 09:42:16 PM
Give him Fedora!
I think he'd be more comfortable in Ubuntu.
He's not going to be installing his own packages or anything. All I need is firefox, thunderbird, and other software like that.
Quote from: iago on July 12, 2006, 10:26:18 PM
He's not going to be installing his own packages or anything. All I need is firefox, thunderbird, and other software like that.
Ubuntu. Easy to set up, has a comfortable login screen iirc, and according to people who've switched to it, is
very user-friendly.
Plus, it'll make keeping stuff up-to-date easier. AND it comes with Gnome! :)
Ubuntu is the Mac OS X of Linux, as far as ease of use, and the Windows of Linux as far as package availablity (not that it matters).
OpenOffice, and Firefox are already installed. sudo install mozilla-thunderbird will install Thunderbird.
I played around on Redhat before, but got bored and reinstalled Windows 98 :/
Give him KDE on Slackware and you're good to go.. assuming he knows how to read prompts.
Quote from: deadly7 on July 13, 2006, 02:08:17 PM
Give him KDE on Slackware and you're good to go.. assuming he knows how to read prompts.
Actually, if you just changed the runtime level it enters on boot (GUI login) (check Slackware handbook for more information) he'd be fine.
Go with that. :P
You can give Slack a GUI login as opposed to plaintext? Whoa.
Quote from: deadly7 on July 13, 2006, 03:28:31 PM
You can give Slack a GUI login as opposed to plaintext? Whoa.
Yeah, but I wouldn't for any intelligent person. You save 6 keystrokes, but if you need to do something quick or if something goes wrong, you're wasting a lot of time.
This is why you asked me how to start up in X?
I was weighing my options about what to do with that computer. I still haven't decided. But in the rc scripts, I can't find any reference to starting X-windows.. are you (Newby) sure about this?
Quote from: iago on July 13, 2006, 04:19:12 PM
I was weighing my options about what to do with that computer. I still haven't decided. But in the rc scripts, I can't find any reference to starting X-windows.. are you (Newby) sure about this?
Quote from: /etc/inittab
# These are the default runlevels in Slackware:
# 0 = halt
# 1 = single user mode
# 2 = unused (but configured the same as runlevel 3)
# 3 = multiuser mode (default Slackware runlevel)
# 4 = X11 with KDM/GDM/XDM (session managers)
# 5 = unused (but configured the same as runlevel 3)
# 6 = reboot
# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:3:initdefault:
Change that to 4.
The Gnome login manager is prettier, but eh? I dunno if it comes with latest Slackware since they removed Gnome..
Further reference, see
6.5 (xdm) of the Slackware handbook.
Cool!
And hmm, I just love this error for some reason:
ron@South:/etc/rc.d$ xdm
Only root wants to run xdm
Makes me laugh :)
You don't have to change the default runlevel, just add xdm/kdm/gdm to the list of daemons in rc.conf
At least, that is true for Arch, I could be wrong for Slackware
Well, changing the runlevel is the proper way of doing it. Yeah, I can load xdm or whatever on startup, but that's more of a kludge.
Why is it more proper?
When I learn how to do things in linux, its usually from Arch's wiki or from googleing an error message, maybe you could enlightenme on the 'proper' way to do things (and why of course!)
Because you're editing the config so that it loads in the way X wants it to be loaded, instead of running it as a root-level daemon!
Quote from: unTactical on July 13, 2006, 05:45:23 PM
Why is it more proper?
When I learn how to do things in linux, its usually from Arch's wiki or from googleing an error message, maybe you could enlightenme on the 'proper' way to do things (and why of course!)
Well, there are certain ways that are intended to do things. I only know Slackware's conventions well, so I can't say anything about Arch. But the best way to do it is the way that's built into the OS.
Quote from: unTactical on July 13, 2006, 05:05:57 PM
You don't have to change the default runlevel, just add xdm/kdm/gdm to the list of daemons in rc.conf
At least, that is true for Arch, I could be wrong for Slackware
Apparently Arch doesn't go by standards (it would seem to me anyway) according to this:
Quote from: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter07/usage.html
SysVinit (which will be referred to as “init” from now on) works using a run-levels scheme. There are seven (numbered 0 to 6) run-levels (actually, there are more run-levels, but they are for special cases and are generally not used. See init(8) for more details), and each one of those corresponds to the actions the computer is supposed to perform when it starts up. The default run-level is 3. Here are the descriptions of the different run-levels as they are implemented:
0: halt the computer
1: single-user mode
2: multi-user mode without networking
3: multi-user mode with networking
4: reserved for customization, otherwise does the same as 3
5: same as 4, it is usually used for GUI login (like X's xdm or KDE's kdm)
6: reboot the computer
The command used to change run-levels is init [runlevel], where [runlevel] is the target run-level. For example, to reboot the computer, a user could issue the init 6 command, which is an alias for the reboot command. Likewise, init 0 is an alias for the halt command.
So, as you can tell, you should probably change the runlevel to 5, which would occur after going into 3 iirc. This is how the runtime scripts are supposed to work, anyway. Why start it as a daemon?
EDIT -- I'm currently building a LFS system so I happened to have read that. :P
Incidentally, Slackware and BSD use a SysV-style startup, but I don't think all Linuxes (Linuces?) do
Quote from: Newby on July 13, 2006, 10:22:35 PM
Quote from: unTactical on July 13, 2006, 05:05:57 PM
You don't have to change the default runlevel, just add xdm/kdm/gdm to the list of daemons in rc.conf
At least, that is true for Arch, I could be wrong for Slackware
Apparently Arch doesn't go by standards (it would seem to me anyway) according to this:
Quote from: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter07/usage.html
SysVinit (which will be referred to as "init" from now on) works using a run-levels scheme. There are seven (numbered 0 to 6) run-levels (actually, there are more run-levels, but they are for special cases and are generally not used. See init(8) for more details), and each one of those corresponds to the actions the computer is supposed to perform when it starts up. The default run-level is 3. Here are the descriptions of the different run-levels as they are implemented:
0: halt the computer
1: single-user mode
2: multi-user mode without networking
3: multi-user mode with networking
4: reserved for customization, otherwise does the same as 3
5: same as 4, it is usually used for GUI login (like X's xdm or KDE's kdm)
6: reboot the computer
The command used to change run-levels is init [runlevel], where [runlevel] is the target run-level. For example, to reboot the computer, a user could issue the init 6 command, which is an alias for the reboot command. Likewise, init 0 is an alias for the halt command.
So, as you can tell, you should probably change the runlevel to 5, which would occur after going into 3 iirc. This is how the runtime scripts are supposed to work, anyway. Why start it as a daemon?
EDIT -- I'm currently building a LFS system so I happened to have read that. :P
What scripts might not be running? Arch doesn't have seperate rc.d script directories for different runtime levels.
How are they not going by standards if 4 & 5 are reseved for customization? Seems to me that means they can do what they want with those 2 runtime levels and still be within the standards scheme.
@iago: Arch branched from Slack, so I imagine many of the basics of Slack are the same for Arch
Uhh, it is not a seperate directory. It's simply a file in /etc/rc.d iirc.