[BadVista Advocate] Linux for Newbies

[Iskren Chernev]

Hi everyone!

I'd like to point out some things about 'Newbies'. Everyone is busy
nowadays and uses a
computer as an instrument to be more productive. If a typical windows
user has problems
with their computer, they will pay for professional help, or (how it
happens here in my
country and in many others) ask a more experienced friend for help.
They (refer to typical user) are so concerned that computers are
extremely complicated that they do NOT believe
they can fix it in their own.

In Linux nowadays most problems for newbies, I think, come from
hardware and more
precisely - additional gadgets (printers, scanners, usb drives, etc.).
I'll give an example. My
girlfriend has a Xerox Phaser 3117 laser printer. Previously on fedora
4/6, now in Ubuntu
7.04 I had to install it. Almost every distribution uses CUPS but
unfortunately this printer is not
listed there. I tried several other Xerox drivers but non of them
worked. I searched and
search and searched ... and there were sites telling me that this
printer works fantastic with
some kind of generic Post Script Driver .... but it didn't. I
understood that there were specific
files for cups, specifying the different printers, so I only needed
that file (*.ppd). I kept
searching but non such file was found :(. Recently when I installed
ubuntu 7.04 and had the
same problem, the searches I made gave the result - I had to use the
driver for Samsung
ML 6040 (just tell CUPS it was samsung). I have to admit - this is NOT
user friendly! I don't
understand why there isn't a big and cool web site for cups where
every newbie can find the
information needed. And why is Phaser 3117 not in the list with the
driver for samsung - I
don't thing it is too complicated and time consuming to do that.

My point was that most newbies will have problems whit connecting
their printers, scanners
etc. and the information they need is specific to the distribution and
to the device itself. This
thing do not need tutorials - they need properly managed 'systems'
(for example CUPS).
Others thing that newbies need are: office and multimedia. The
openoffice is pretty similar to
the MS one, and the multimedia nowadays is becoming easier and easier
to use (I was
surprised how good Ubuntu 7.04 managed missing codecs :) ).

Tutorials are for people who want to learn. Newbies don't want to
learn - they want to use with
as little effort as possible. I have to admit that I'm kind of newbie
to linux (only use it for 2
years), but I want to learn about it and I don't care that tutorials
are old and outdated,
because I learn a bit from any one of them. I thing a well supported
forum for each
distribution (but only ONE such forum for every distro) is enough to
keep newbies happy :)


Iskren Chernev