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On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:40:13 +0100,
Richard Rasker <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I don't know about the rest of you, but I sometimes have this experience of
> particular classes of problems coming up in clusters, both in my repair
> shop ("the week of the blown high-power amps", "the week of only loose
> contacts", "the week of four Philips MG2.1 chassis repairs") and in IT.
>
> Last week, I had quite a funny experience of the latter kind, as three
> relatively unexperienced (and rather frustrated) Linux users called me with
> very similar problems, all with one very similar solution: just try the
> easy way.
>
> First, a user called me about trouble installing his newly bought USB
> printer: even after half an hour of trying, he couldn't get the drivers to
> install from the CD. So I asked if he'd tried simply plugging in the
> printer -- but he hadn't dared to, because from his Windows eXPerience, he
> knew that first installing drivers could be crucial to get things working
> properly.
> I told him that he didn't have to worry about that, so he plugged in his
> printer, and presto: his printer was automatically recognized and
> configured. One more happy user.
>
> Two days later, another (newbie) user called me about installing software;
> he'd found quite a lot of stuff he wanted to try out, and thus downloaded
> numerous (source) tarballs; he then tried installing these, and after a bit
> of digging on the Internet even succeeded in unpacking the tarballs and
> starting the compiler -- but he then had to give up because of all kinds of
> unresolved dependencies (missing development packages, no doubt). Turns out
> he'd completely overlooked the package manager, used as he was to the
> Windows way: "Download from the Internet, then install".
> Four menu steps was all the hint he needed: System -> Configuration ->
> Configure Your Computer -> Install Software. A few hours later, he called
> me back and reported enthusiastically that everything was great, and that
> he'd call me after checking out all the newly installed software. Which
> could easily take a week or so (and I haven't heard from him since :-)
>
> And just now, I got another call from someone with an almost identical
> problem as the first user; this time, the user wanted to download the
> pictures from her new cameraphone onto her recently installed Linux
> machine. The camera's manual warned her explicitly to install the drivers
> and other software first, she too loaded the CD and tried installing it.
> No go, of course. And here again, I told her to simply plug in the camera,
> and see what happened. And lo and behold: a window turns up, offering her
> to download pictures with DigiKam (among two other options of opening the
> storage device in a new window and doing nothing). And after DigiKam's
> configuration step (which consisted of selecting the Photographs folder as
> the folder which would indeed hold all photo albums), everything was
> peachy.
>
>
> Could it be that Linux is becoming so easy to use that it actually confuses
> people? ;-)
>
>
> Richard Rasker
It's certainly a lot easier to use than MS-Windows.
Apps, and preinstalls, that's the battleground now. The ease of use
thing is done, stick a fork in it, MS lost.
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--
Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a
computer.
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