Re: [tlug] Suse blues

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "paul" == paul arenson <paul@example.com> writes:

    paul> I just didn't understand that, for example, "X" simply means
    paul> the desktop.

Close enough.  There are differences between "X" (aka "X11" or "X11R6"
or "XFree86", plus various expansions of the acronyms), "GTK+",
"Enlightenment" (or other window managers), and "GNOME", but from your
point of view at present they're not important.  Other common terms of
the same ilk are "Sawfish" and "Metacity" (popular window managers),
"Qt" (a high-level graphics library for creating GUI desktops,
equivalent to GTK+) and "KDE" (a desktop standard, like GNOME).

The differences will become important when (a) you become curious
about how things works or (b) you see something on somebody else's
desktop that you'd like to have on yours, and you want to change one
or more of the components so yours will work like that.

    paul> I though it was something in the TERMINAL.  And
    paul> I discovered that terminal neededn't be so scarey.  In
    paul> pre-Mac days, on my Apple II as a member of TWICS, I had to
    paul> use Telnet and Pine.  It seems that is basically also
    paul> TERMINAL, right?

Yes.

    paul> Another thing I found is that some of my mouse problems
    paul> disappeared when I disconnnected one of the video outputs
    paul> from my computer to the monitor (IO Data 19inch combination
    paul> TV and monitor).  It seems it is not good to have both
    paul> connected. Luckily the drivers for that were installed into
    paul> the display itself when it was hooked up to Windpows...

Then it's definitely a driver issue.  I would say stick with SuSE,
because they're the ones who support XFree86 (the basic services that
all Linux GUI desktops use, including mouse and video board drivers)
development most.

    paul> (4) Can I just put a CD or DVD of any good installation and
    paul> write over it?

    Stephen> No, because you'll have different hardware etc.  Fix the
    Stephen> installation you've got, or find someone to fix it for you.

    paul> But just for the sake of knowledge---if I were to get redhat
    paul> (called fedora now?) as someone mentioned, and DID stick it
    paul> in the drive and said INSTALL, would it?

Ah, I thought you meant get a copy of the _installed software on a
working machine_.  But you seem to be using "installation" and
"distribution" interchangeably.

It's still generally not a good idea to "install over", because
different distributions organize the installation differently.  This
means that you could have strange executables lying around in the
search PATH, leading to very hard-to-diagnose errors.  The safe thing
to do is to reformat the disk.  (You don't need to zero it or anything
like that unless it's the kind of data you would shred if it were on
paper.  ;-)  Just tell the installer you want to reformat the disk.)

I don't think you want Red Hat (or Fedora) any more.  Red Hat has made
it quite plain that their interest is in supporting the (yokozuna-
class) "enterprise", not typical users.  While the people I know there
are just as friendly as ever, _if_ you know what question to ask, the
company orientation is now much more toward entities that can afford
to pay people to become very expert in using and supporting Red Hat
products.  And Fedora is now basically the same as Debian: a user-
supported distro (admittedly, the biggest user is Red Hat itself, and
they continue to contribute a huge amount of effort to Fedora), whose
users are very expert and tending toward the bleeding edge through
need or hobby.

    paul> (and if there is nothing equivalent to Yast in other
    paul> distributions, it seems like I SHOULD stay with Suse for
    paul> now).

They all have something like it, but if you're comfortable with YaST I
don't a good reason to change.  YaST is surely slicker than what's
available from most distros like Debian or Knoppix.



-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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