Re: [PLUG] Yet Another Distribution Question

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 08:10:31PM -0700, multiple seriousity wrote:
> around in Unix" not "learn how to administer a system."  Why don't you
> just set her up as a normal user on one of your boxes with something like
> a glorified X-Terminal as her logon system?  She'll still learn command
> line stuff, it's hard to avoid it.  Let her customize her own setup.. even
> a well-written and decent .xinitrc can stand a little customization by a
> newbie editing some well-documented files. 

She already has an account on my main machine.  The catch, in my opinion,
is that if you have "just a shell account" on somebody's machine, it takes
longer to learn the stuff, still using Windows as your primary desktop,
than it does if you use *nix (almost) exclusively for a while, because the
vast majority of your files are still on the Windows machine.  I'm trying
to think of what a newbie would want to do in the shell -- lynx?  Although
she *has* expressed interest in wanting to "read [her] mail like [I] do"
(I use mutt).

She *does* use X windows on my machine on occasion, but she hasn't
customized it.

As far as "what does she use at work", she doesn't use Unix at work or
school yet.  (Her day-to-day job is using AutoCad on NT.)  But she's
noticed that many job lists for physicists mention the need for Unix
proficiency, and this past February, at the observatory in Arizona, the
main application that she was using with the telescope was on a Sun
workstation (not sure if it was SunOS or Solaris).  (Interesting side note
-- at the observatory, the number-crunching machine was a Sun, the machine
to enter movement commands for the telescope was an old 486 (I think)
running some application on top of DOS, and I was told that computer that
actually interfaced with the telescope was a Linux machine.)  When I
mentioned the reply about learning what she uses at work, she suggested
she might look at the job listings more closely to see what flavor, if
any, of Unix they mention.  I also suggested to her that she become
familiar with at least the basics of vi, since it's pretty much the one
editor you can count on having on any Unix machine you might encounter.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,  we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously."          -- Benjamin Franklin


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