I found this article in the Orkut community for Linux . Do check it out. “Another lost year for Linux”

It nicely focusses on the various issues the Linux community still has to address; especially for a user migrating from Windows to Linux. The blogger has described an intersting situation:

Lot’s of Linux fans think that they are on a holy quest for spreading freedom and that they have every right they can think of. The most common zealot thinks like this: “I’ll install a good distro on their computer, set up their internet access, install open office and Firefox and we’re ready”. After convincing the user to try the new thing and ensuring him that windows will be left unharmed the install is made and the zealot puts a joker smile. The user starts fooling around with KDE and zealot goes home in peace. Next day Joe user calls zealot on the phone:
- Hey John
- Hey Joe, everything OK with Linux?
- Yeah sure, it’s fine, but I can’t find photoshop, where is it ?
- You can’t have photoshop on linux, try looking for GIMP.
- I found it but it’s a piece of crap and I don’t know how to use it. Anyway I can’t find my games too.
- There are some open source great games for KDE already installed.
- Haha ! Anyway i tried to make some copies of my DVDs to my hard disk and can’t find DVD ripping software on the net, can you help me with that ?
- Yeah sure, there’s a great guide on blah..blah.org, it’s only 12 pages in PDF.
- OMG. John can you come over and remove this Linux thing ? It’s taking 20GB of my hard disk for nothing.
- You ignorant capitalist pig, don’t wait for everything to work on themselves. Go read some manuals and leave me alone. God I’m sick of noobz !

Do you think Joe user will love the benefits of Linux ? Do you think he’ll go on the net reading manuals 2 hours a day for something he was already doing on windows without manuals ? Zealots think that. That’s why they turn “noobz” into Linux haters.
Linux is not ready for the average users so there is no reason for promoting it to them (yet).

Anyone in Joe’s place would never bother to read a long manual. We are used to Windows applications; change is rarely appreciated by anyone. But the users of Linux must realise that we can’t have exactly similar applications like Windows (copyright issues, I suppose).

The things that the Linux community still needs to work upon (according to me, of course) are:

1.) Have a common package system across all distros (it is quite difficult, I know. I read some time ago on OSNews that such plans are in place; but I suppose it might take a lot of time before it is actually available)

2.) A suggestion for KDE developers. I know how much you love the ‘K’ word but it confuses the users a lot. digiKam, korn, kexi, koffice, konsole seem really nice words, but it might be better to keep the name like KDE Office, so that beginners can understand it easily.

3.) Yes, about the release cycle. Fedora has a release cycle of 6 months, Mandriva too now has of 6 months. It is too short. A release cycle of about 2 years should be acceptable. We can have a Windows like Service Pack system, that would help (I suppose).

4.) And last but not the least, since Linux can’t be Windows, just do your best and keep it.

Well, today I finally managed to configure the trackpoint on my Linux. I was doing so advanced for a long time, trying to install some extra drivers and re-compiling the kernel (some file configure-trackpoint.tgz), but the solution lay in the xorg.conf file itself. Beauty.

For those of you who want to configure it on their system too, do try this out. I got this working on openSuSE 10.2, but my guess is that it should work as long as the xorg version is same (or nearly the same).

Section “InputDevice”

Driver “mouse”
Identifier “Mouse[3]”
Option “Buttons” “5″
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Name” “TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint”
Option “Protocol” “explorerps/2″
Option “Vendor” “Sysp”
Option “EmulateWheel” “on”
Option “EmulateWheelButton” “2″
Option “YAxisMapping” “4 5″
Option “XAxisMapping” “6 7″
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″

EndSection

Restart X server (reboot or relogin).

To get the scroll feature working in Firefox, there is still one change to be made (because left/right scroll is configured to move the page backward/forward). Enter about:config in the address bar and change these settings:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withcontrolkey.action = 3;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withcontrolkey.numlines = 1;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withcontrolkey.sysnumlines = true;

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 0;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines = 1;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = true;

mousewheel.horizscroll.withshiftkey.action = 1;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withshiftkey.numlines = 1;
mousewheel.horizscroll.withshiftkey.sysnumlines = true;

For Opera change these settings:

Find the standard_mouse.ini file of Opera and comment out these lines:

Button6 = Back
Button7 = Forward

Like this:

;Button6 = Back;
;Button7 = Forward

To get the trackpoint press feature, enter this command as root

echo -n 1 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio0/serio2/press_to_select

Press to select should now be working.

Well, it is a great distro I got my hands on a month ago, and as far I have seen it is quite good considering the fact that it was not a full release.  It was pity that I had to disable the xgl effects (they looked really cool) because it slogged the processor and even watching a video was a difficult experience (though it might be because of the fact that it is still in experimental stage; maybe things will improve as it becomes stable).

Setting up wireless:

openSuSE 10.2 comes with ipw3945 and ipw-firmware packages. So there is no need to run around finding the drivers. But my Thinkpad has Atheros chipset, so I had to install the madwifi drivers. It was not difficult at all.

I also set up Dell wireless on one of my friends laptop. Once you install ndiswrapper (it’s in CD 1), just go the directory where the drivers for wireless in MS Windows are extracted and give ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf . Then do ndiswrapper -m and then modprobe ndiswrapper and reboot. lo! The device will be detected and you are ready to go.

The next thing I needed was the mp3 support. Adding packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.2 as a source to YaST does the trick. For NVidia cards download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2/ is the source to be added.

The thing about openSuSE is that everything I need is already included with the CD’s. Acrobat Reader, Flash plugins, lots and lots of games (some good ones too) and even wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is included. After all those incentives, I think it is finally a time for me to say goodbye to Windows and in effect also to software piracy…

Yesterday, we had our second ITWS (IT WorkShop) teacher teaching us for the first time. His part is to teach us Advanced Bash scripting.

As he entered the class, he moved towards the PC kept there and booted to Linux (Red Hat 9). The first thing he did was that he plugged in his flash drive and waited for the device to mount. But in those old days of Red Hat one had to manually mount the drive. The poor guy did not even know about the mount command and it was I who had to hop down there and help him out.

Now here are a few of his “anecdotes”.

” Operating System (he was telling us about the history of UNIX) is the life of a computer. Without it a computer is dead.”

“…. Do you see the cursor that is blinking? …. ”

“UNIX was developed in 1973″ (It is 1969 actually, maybe he should have read the text more carefully)

Well, seeing the way he teaches, I would prefer not to attend his classes; I can learn more that way.