Why the hate for typing ?

Why are you /always/ comparing Linux to Windows? Because it's vastly superior, so it makes it easier to prove your point? What about comparing Linux to Mac OS X, from the end-user's point of view? Far more user-friendly GUI but you /still/ get a command-line tool for you to tinker with. BOBW, really.

 

Yes it is easier for you and for them at that point. However! (and it is a big however) They do not learn anything but to type the letters you tell them to and until they have done that exact same thing many times. They can't do what the command line input does again and they still don't know what it does.

With a GUI once the new person does something they can search the menus and find what they clicked on again without you being there. After having done this a couple of times it will get easier and since there is no confusing syntax the names they click on will acquire meaning in just a couple tries. Hence they learn as they work without having to study a bunch of hard to read and boring text. As far as copy-paste goes that is no guarantee that they won't mistakenly copy just part of the lines or in the case of written instruction have to deal with inaccurate instructions or maybe wrong case in the instructions.

 

Some Additional Help For New Linux Users

Install the man-pages from the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) on your system:

sudo yum install man-pages

After that gets installed, you'll be able to view the man pages for all the various Linux commands. Example:

man ls
man rm

Most man pages DO NOT give you examples and aren't that user-friendly. They're there mainly to just remind one of the syntax of the various commands.

One useful command is apropos. Do this to read it's manual:

man apropos

Before apropos will work, one needs to build the whatis databases. Do this to build them:

sudo makewhatis

Because there's something amiss with sudo behavior with Linpus, you'll get that error message and it'll look like nothings happened, but if you watch your hdd led, you'll see it's churning through your system. This can take some time.

Now do something like:

apropos list files

This will present you with all the commands that have anything to do with listing files.

Any time you do something that presents a long list of results, stuff will simply scroll up the terminal window. If there is more than can be accommodated, using the scrollbar to get to the top will not show you all that has been spit out. You might consider sending results to a file rather then to the screen. Here's an example of doing this:

apropos list files > listfiles.txt

You can then look at listfiles.txt to see all the results that came from that command.

To view the listfiles.txt, you can:

less listfiles.txt

less is like cat, except you can scroll up and down within the file using arrow keys (up, down, pageup, pagedown). Use Q to quit less.

Finished reading it? Remove it:

rm listfiles.txt



man rm

Why the short command names? Just to keep on topic in this thread - to save typing. Remember Linux is a multi-user system. Login to a Linux box on the other side of the world using ssh, and you'll be inside that computer at a command prompt. You can completely control that computer from the commandline just like you can control your local computer from a commandline. We want SHORT commands to save on typing. And we want tab completion to assist us even further.

Cheers.

 

Point taken, although I must add with my sister that she's actually gotten to know what the command line things DO by looking at them and rationally thinking, plus having to do different ones. I think any kind of rote instruction, be it GUI or commandline, won't teach someone who only wants to get the direct solution and then forget about it.

Well yeah, nothing is perfect. But copy-pasting commandline stuff is a LOT easier to get exactly right, really. ANY kind of instructions can be misinterpreted....to be perfectly honest, no matter what the instructions are they should be accompanied by detailed explanations of what's being done, be it GUI or text that the work is being accomplished in. But for emergency fixes and the like, I just find in my experience text works with a lot less hassle for both savvy and non-savvy users. I don't mean to expect everyone to be using the commandline on a day-to-day basis; that's more case-by-case and user-by-user.

EDIT:
Figured I should mention two things. For one, one of the reasons why CLI instructions are so common for Linux is, I think, because there are so many different desktop environments one could use, and so much customization with them; the command line, meanwhile, is pretty much the same. That's why VLC's instructions for installation in Fedora are just three short lines of text, not just because it's faster than browsing to an rpm download page, hitting download, installing the rpm, opening your package manager, finding vlc and hitting install....it's also because theoretically people running fedora could be running KDE or Gnome or XFCE or FVWM or whatever and they could even be heavily modified, but as long as it's Fedora (or even Fedora-based like the AA1's Linpus, which is again radically different as a GUI in many ways) it'll work perfectly.

This is more an argument for terminal instruction for Linux overall though, within the purview of a single setup (like the AA1s) then my additional argument here doesn't have a huge point, hah.

But the other thing I wanted to mention, offtopic as it is, was

I saw that with the demo AA1 at Staples (where I work part time during Uni) but when I picked up one myself I swear I never saw that problem...or was there something I would have done right when I first got this thing that managed to fix that as an unintentional side-effect? (despite my most invasive mods to the Linpus interface being the right-click menu and changing some of the desktop shortcuts in the xml file)

 

You need to understand that with Linux, the real power lies in the commandline. Many, many Linux GUI apps are simply frontends to the basic Linux commands. The main problem with a GUI is that YOU are limited to using ONLY what the developer of the GUI programmed into the application. If it's missing a particular checkbox or radio button, there's no way to use that aspect for the task at hand. Linux has a whole different psychology and method behind it then Windows. It's there to FREE up the power of ones computer and to give access to the end-user to all aspects of controlling that computer. Of course, with this inherent power and control comes responsibility. One has to learn how to muster that power and control.

In short, one can use an OS like Windows or OSX where someone working in a proprietary software development lab somewhere decides what you can or cannot do with your computer or you can use Linux and be free to do as you will with your computer - including screwing it up. Not that proprietary software can't also seriously screwup a computer. Just look at the problems that come running Windoze.

Cheers.

 

Phil_Urich

Re: the sudo error. I'm wondering how to fix it myself? Did you by any chance assign a password to root?

Cheers.

 

In a sense, comparisons between Linux and Windows (or OS/X) are slightly off the point, because there are perfectly viable ways of working with command-line tools on all those platforms. Its better to avoid being dragged into a my-OS-better-than-your-OS contest because that just detracts attention from the matter at hand.

I think that the division between command-line and graphical tools really comes down to a division between things you have to learn (or be taught) to use, and things you can figure out by trial and error. It isn't _always_ the case that things you have to learn to use will be more useful in the long term, but that very often turns out to be the case.

Most command line operations are things you have to learn. In some cases what you learn will be useful in future, in some cases it won't. But you can't win 'em all. However learning, for most people, is slightly painful, especially when it's learning about something you aren't all that interested in.

The standard GNU/Linux command-line utilities like grep, find, rsync, tar, more, cut, split, etc., are available on just about any computer platform. Heck, I even use these on my MP3 player. And I can promise categorically that learning how to use tools like really well this _will_ increase your productivity, unless your use of your computer is completely cursory (like my wife's five-minutes-a-day e-mail). But what I can't promise is that the increase in productivity will be large enough to justify the time spent learning -- that depends on how you use a computer, and what for.

 

To be more precise, given the first few letters of a command or filename, press 'tab' and the system will complete as much as it can unambiguously.

If you have the files 'abcde', 'abcdf', and 'xyzzz' in the current directory, and start a command line "cat xy" then immediatly press tab, the system will complete the filename xyzzz for you, as it's the only valid thing you could have meant. If you type 'cp ab' and press tab, it will complete the filename as far as 'abcd', which is far as it can get before there are two valid options. Press tab again at that stage and it will list the options for you (after warning you if there are lots of them).

You can do the same with the command itself.

Other useful basic stuff: pressing the up arrow brings back the last command, keep pressing it and it will roll back through your command history (there's a limit but I haven't checked what it's set to on the One). Whe you get to the lien you want you eitehr hit ENTER to run it, or you can edit it (perhaps to dot he same thing to a different file).

Press CTRL-R and a few characters of a command you've used before and it will bring up the most recent match (so if in the end you used the 'cat xyzzz' command above, pressing "CTRL-R xy" will probably bring it straight back up for you, unless you've used 'xy' in another command since. Again you can hit Enter to repeat the command, or edit it. (For example, the command to check the temperature of the CPU in the One involves calling a Perl script with arguments which include "58". I can't remember the command at all, but CTRL-R 58 on my One does it any time).

Well, that's scratched the surface for you!

 

That is a fact and is one of the things that adds value to the system since you can do stuff that others can't do but for most users it is not what they want as they are not interested in that much computer power.

 

Thanks, Daldred, that explanation makes the use of the Tab quite useful.

 

Indeed - but that is the whole point oof this topic. Many of those users do not simply say "sounds nice, but I do not need it and are much more comfortable with a graphical interface"- but "eeewwww - old fashioned crap ! Get it awaaaayyyy !"

I want to know why

 

You want to know why people dislike the command line?

That one is simple. Habit, and the fact that to many people, computers are just a means to an end whereas to those of us who like to tinker, they're often an end in themselves.

The typical user wants to plug in their computer and do things. Although Windows isn't really intuitive--I remember in the old days explaining to users that you shut it down by clicking the start button to get to the dialog--we're so used to it that it has become what we know, ergo, intuitive.

Those who get interested in Linux as something itself, rather than simply having gotten fed up with MS, get into the command line. With the new, newcomer friendly Linux distributions, though, there is a new influx of users who are just there because they don't like Windows.

Therefore, to those people (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with being one of those) the command line is a somewhat arcane thing that they don't really want to spend their time mastering--they want the computer to do what they do with computers.

I don't have anything against this. It's really everyone's individual choice. In the same way, if you learn to use Windows command lines, your control over the O/S is increased, but the majority of Windows users don't investigate it.

Shucks, even the command line changes between distributions, especially these days when so many distributions seem to be getting more and more insistent on, as a friend said on another forum, wielding training wheels into place.

 

That explains why they do not wish to learn how to use them. Which is perfectly fine.

It does not explain why they have to talk with contempt about those who do, and deny that the commandline can be vastly superior to a menu driven system for certain applications. "It is oldfashioned" - period. No matter how much more productive one can be, no matter how much faster one can work, no matter how much time can be saved - the commandline is a relic that must be avoided.

 

Hrrm, ok, I guess that that's a psychological thing, If I can't do it, it must be bad. <shrug>.

My users don't have contempt for it, as they have seen how often it can save them tremendous amounts of work--for example, a designer who had to rename over 1,000 files and thought she would have to right click them and do it one by one. I made a little shell script which did it for her. She was happy.

 

We increasingly live in a culture in which taking an interest in technical matters is seen as peculiar. It's not cool to be interested in how stuff works. People who are interested are dull. I know a lot of people who need to use computers and, truth be told, enjoy working on computers, but seem worried about taking an interest in what's actually going on. I've known people ask why the computer does something some way and then refuse to listen to the explanation once a word like `file' or `memory' comes up. They almost put their fingers in their ears and go la-la-laaa.

Because I'm an old fogey I'd like to say that young people are more likely to behave this way -- but I can't. I have friends who positively revel in their ignorance of computers, even though they use them all the time, with no obvious discomfort. I'm sure they think that if they express an interest in how the machine works, they'll be forced to read science fiction and wear sandals with socks. Or maybe they think that they will fall out with their friends, who are all busily doing the same kind of stuff to buff up their image as a `people person'.

To use command-line stuff on a computer effectivley, you have to know how stuff works. You can't get by with a superficial understanding plus trial and error. This fact is deeply unattractive to many people, in my experience. But you can use GUI tools quite effectively without really understand anything -- all you need is a bit of common sense and a willingness to experiment. Of course, you're relying on the cleverness of the programmers to ensure that your experimentation doesn't usually cause your CPU to catch fire, but that beside the point.

To a person with a self-created, pathological dread of understanding technology, the benefits of command-line operation will never outweight the costs. After all, the cost is the total destruction of your self-image -- what benefit can offset that?

Of course, most people are not like this. Most people don't use command-line stuff because they don't think the benefits will offset the cost of learning how to do so, and often they are right.

 

Well said Kevin.

 

lp0 on fire?