[conspire] SuSE Personal/Prof, apt4rpm, Newbie Ed. -was- Distros for novices

[Mark S Bilk]

In-Reply-To: <20040909054111.GZ30789 at linuxmafia.com>
Organization: http://www.cosmicpenguin.com/911

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 10:41:11PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>...
>Quoting Earl (innate_ideas at yahoo.com):
>...
>SUSE:  I have SUSE Linux Personal Edition 9.1 and SUSE Linux "live CD"
>9.1, both for i386.

SuSE 9.1 Personal does not include any development tools, not even 
gcc or make.  But the Professional version of course has everything,
and it's legal to make copies of it and give them away.

http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse_linux/prof/pers_prof.html
(Lynx does not display the comparison chart properly.)

If you install the Personal version, you can point the installation/
administration program, YaST, to a SuSE website from which everything 
missing can be installed.

Also, there are apt4rpm scripts for SuSE which automatically deal 
with dependencies, and a site with the appropriate files which are 
kept closely up to date with the SuSE ftp site and other sources, 
and thus with bug/security fixes.

http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/home.html
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.1-i386

This server delivers at over 100KByte/sec (at 4am to Comcast).
Various SuSE fans on Usenet are very happy with it, but newbies 
would probably need some coaching.

Actually, all computer users really need to have some idea of the
meaning of bytes, files, directories, directory trees, file managers, 
ASCII, WP docs, executables, data, CPU, RAM, disk, MIME, etc., in 
order to be productive and not a nuisance to others.  Otherwise they 
do things like writing text with MS-Word, "saving it as an icon on 
the desktop", and have no idea what they actually did or where their
file is, and e-mailing 200KB of advertising gifs with their 6 lines 
of text in HTML.

Kind of like teaching people what the steering wheel, brakes, 
traffic lights, etc., are before they drive a car.

Presumably there is a level of AI that would render this unnecessary
("Computer!"  "Working..."), but MS is certainly nowhere near it, 
judging from the appalling Windows quandaries that I sometimes try 
to help with over the phone.  Of course the worst part is the ones 
that are _sure_ they don't need to learn anything in order to cope, 
and get angry with me for wasting _their_ time when I try to teach 
them.  When the AI really does develop, this lot will be known as 
"Copper-Tops".