Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
Flatland_Spider wrote:...
Beginner's Guide to the Vi editor
http://acs.ucsd.edu/info/vi_tutorial.shtml
VI Tutorial for Beginners
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/vi_tut ... beginners/
...
just brew it! wrote:Seems to me that expecting a *NIX n00b to pick up vi as part of the initial Linux learning curve is a bit much. Don't most distros include nano as part of the base install these days? Yes, I know vi is much more powerful (and FWIW I do prefer it to nano); but it can have a rather daunting learning curve for people accustomed to GUI-based text editors.
I'd save vi for the "intermediate" course.
TheWacoKid wrote:I'd recommend jumping to Fedora or CentOS as a beginner...too many things can be fixed by simply Googling with Ubuntu without ever understanding what you're doing.
Flatland_Spider wrote:The modelness of vi is pretty weird. You can explain vi to a new user in about six sentences, depending on how they are parsed.
Flatland_Spider wrote:You need to start here http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options. I recommend Xfce.
Flatland_Spider wrote:You can explain vi to a new user in about six sentences, depending on how they are parsed.
Madman wrote:Flatland_Spider wrote:You can explain vi to a new user in about six sentences, depending on how they are parsed.
Ok, I'm listening...
I tried that editor, and holy cow it gets in a way. I opened the fstab file, I need to insert something, started typing and whole lots of stuff starts happening. Why?!!!
Resorted to nano and mcedit, and no more unexpected crap. And unexpected crap is the last thing you want to do when you edit system files.
And honestly, even though I'm geeky type, CLI gets old. You need your OS to do stuff. OMG I can haz editz the MBRzzz with Hex editorz!!! gets old really fast.
What Ubundtu did right is that everything works out of the box, but you can still Alt+Ctrl+F1to do some messy stuff if you need it. And things like ifconfig, iptables, fstab, grep etc. are really super powerful and super efficient. But messing with console all the time stinks for primary OS. I tried Mandrake 9.x, Mandrake 10.x, Fedora ?.x, Ubuntu 6?7?.x and none of those systems lasted longer than few days.
Manual sound card installations, kernel recompilations for something, flaky SMB shares and NTFS support, that thing is what makes Linux stay below 1%. And Ubuntu is the only distribution that is trying to change that trend.
Insert CD, install, everything works - Firefox, Flash, LibreOffice. VLC, Skype is 2 clicks away and there you go, full blown OS with hardware accelerated interface and zero system configuration.
All other distros, IMHO, are only good for servers where programmers/administrators ssh into and do the maintenance/deployment stuff. For everyday use I don't want to see that AT ALL!
Don't scare people away with all those hardcore server distros. You can learn everything about Linux through Ubuntu while using it as a primary OS, while other distros are mostly for experimenting and tinkering with stuff that doesn't allow you to do most primary tasks effectively.
flip-mode wrote:...
As a infrastructure platform, GNU Linux is fantastic and fully competitive with pretty much anything.
As a desktop OS, it has some very certain limitations.
In my opinion.
[SDG]Mantis wrote:Even most modern integrated graphics will run Gnome or KDE fine and they just look better.
Madman wrote:I tried that editor, and holy cow it gets in a way. I opened the fstab file, I need to insert something, started typing and whole lots of stuff starts happening. Why?!!!
Resorted to nano and mcedit, and no more unexpected crap. And unexpected crap is the last thing you want to do when you edit system files.
Madman wrote:And honestly, even though I'm geeky type, CLI gets old. You need your OS to do stuff. OMG I can haz editz the MBRzzz with Hex editorz!!! gets old really fast.
just brew it! wrote:Yeah, the main issue is that it was one of the first "full screen" editors (dates back to... what... mid-'70s?), and therefore still retains some of the modal UI paradigm of an old school line-by-line editor designed to be used on hardcopy Teletype terminals!
[SDG]Mantis wrote:That entirely depends on hardware specs. I would not use Xfce unless I had lower-end hardware. Even most modern integrated graphics will run Gnome or KDE fine and they just look better.
Flatland_Spider wrote:If you want lightweight, Fluxbox and Openbox are better solutions.
flip-mode wrote:There's a post worth quoting. IMO, GNU Linux needs to be 100% usable (i.e. configurable and maintainable) from the GUI (and Ubuntu is pretty well there). We're past the point where having a GUI is "squandering resources" even on servers.
Flatland_Spider wrote:flip-mode wrote:There's a post worth quoting. IMO, GNU Linux needs to be 100% usable (i.e. configurable and maintainable) from the GUI (and Ubuntu is pretty well there). We're past the point where having a GUI is "squandering resources" even on servers.
Linux is 100% configurable from the GUI. The vendors have done a good job of creating tools to make configuration easy, and there is Webmin too.
bthylafh wrote:...so you're saying that with Fedora you're not going to get help when you need it? Right. Good idea for n00b.
skialex25 wrote:... what should I be aware of...?
just brew it! wrote:Seems to me that expecting a *NIX n00b to pick up vi as part of the initial Linux learning curve is a bit much. Don't most distros include nano as part of the base install these days? Yes, I know vi is much more powerful (and FWIW I do prefer it to nano); but it can have a rather daunting learning curve for people accustomed to GUI-based text editors.
I'd save vi for the "intermediate" course.
Madman wrote:Flatland_Spider wrote:You can explain vi to a new user in about six sentences, depending on how they are parsed.
Ok, I'm listening...
flip-mode wrote:But it will continue to be a problematic platform for as long as many major mainstream applications continue to ignore it. Adobe. Autodesk. Turbo Tax. And so on. The open source community cannot replace those. It's too high of a wall to climb. It'd take millions of programmer-days to do it. There aren't enough open source programmers to go around, and most of the best programmers are already working for Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and so on.