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Quoting Neil Winchurst <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxx>:
Rob Beard wrote:The user system was again a big problem. Learning about root, users and their passwords, groups, the home folder etc. Wow. Scary again.Okay, this can be a little bit of a problem. Ubuntu uses Sudo which for me appears to be the closest thing to UAC on Vista and Windows 7 or Runas... on Windows XP. I find that 99% of XP home users tend to be in the Administrators group. At least with Ubuntu, if they need to run any updates/install any packages they are prompted for their password rather than asked to login as root, even on Fedora/Debian it asks for the administrative user (or root) password. So it's just one more password to remember. Not really that hard.I should have been clearer, it is mainly the permissions system which throws them.
One set of letters.... NTFS.NTFS as now generally used on Windows (from NT up to Windows 7) has security permissions. Sometimes I find that Windows can get in a real hissyfit with regards to permissions, and it's only made worse going from XP to Windows 7.
It's certainly not really much worse than Windows.
Installing new packages. Well on Windows, I think, you either download the exe file and double click on it or put the relevant CD/DVD in the drive, wait for the install button to appear and click on it. On Linux I could have mentioned apt-get, synaptic, adept, deb files, repositories, RPM files, dependencies, well you get the idea.But on the other hand there are hundreds and thousands of applications already in the repositories. Plus it's possible to add applications through packages. On Ubuntu 9.10, it's as simple as going to the 'Ubuntu Software Centre'. I think with the advent of the iPhone, more and more people are getting used to going to an 'App store' to get their software. Again I think a lot of it is explaining and talking the users through it.I use kubuntu so I know about repositories etc. But what about Mandriva, Suse and the other RPM style distros? And what about packages that are not in the repositories?
A lot of the time the main distros are catered for with DEB/RPM etc packages. Gentoo uses emerge and compiles everything from source when it's installed. I believe Slackware uses .tar.gz packages.
I find that most things that I'm interested in are either in the repositories, can be added by a 3rd party repository (which 9 times out of 10 have good instructions on how to add them, not to mention it's getting easier in Ubuntu 9.10 adding PPA repositories).
Suse has Yast which also makes it easy to add stuff (Suse also uses RPMs) and Mandriva (and I believe PCLinuxOS) use urpmi.
Fedora/Redhat/CentOS use yum which is fairly similar to apt, and IIRC has a gui interface available.
There is also autopackage (http://www.autopackage.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopackage) which packages up applications which can then be installed on various different distros regardless of what package management system they use. I gather they are specialised bash scripts which contain everything and check for required files on installation.
Anyway, thanks for your comments,
No problem. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html