[LUGSB] Getting started with Linux

[Matthew Blair]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Justin Seyster <justin at seyster.org> wrote:
>    My girlfriend needs to get started with Linux because of a number of
> math packages that are not really available for Windows.  She's looking
> for some references, but I'm not really familiar with any beginner-level
> resources.
>    What do you guys think is the best way to learn Linux?  Are there
> any really standout websites or books for beginners?  What are the most
> important things for the average Linux user to learn?  I'd appreciate
> any thoughts everyone has.  Thanks!

I had a positive experience with Apress' "Beginning Ubuntu Linux."
This was back in January of 2009, so I had the 3rd edition. A 5th
edition came out recently:

http://amzn.com/1430230398

I felt like it spent too much time on multimedia and OpenOffice, but
it's well-written and boring sections can be skipped without trouble.
The other sections (installation, introduction to packages, basic
Bash) are very good.

Some tips:
- Start her off with Ubuntu. It has the gentlest installer (by far).
She can always move to other distros (like Arch or a BSD) if she
outgrows it. Like Brian said, it has tons of packages.
- Be ready to answer lots of questions about how to do something.
- Free up a decent amount of HD space (10GB should be fine, more is
better), and install it alongside the Windows partition. I did this
with my girlfriend, and it went well. She can always boot into Windows
temporarily if she gets frustrated, which might happen. VirtualBox is
another solution, and works damn well if you have the RAM. Once she's
comfortable, just reformat and give Ubuntu the whole disk.
- Do not upgrade in-place when 11.04 comes out next month, it will
give you headaches. Download the LiveCD via BitTorrent (Deluge is the
best GUI client, btw), burn it and reformat. An external HD comes in
handy here. Also, keep a text file with all of the modifications to
the system and stick it in Dropbox. Reformatting will be much easier
(I made mine into a bunch of nice scripts that I've been meaning to
put on GitHub for a while now).
- Skype and Adobe Reader are available in the Ubuntu "partner" repos.
Uncomment that line in /etc/apt/sources.list, and then 'apt-get update
&& apt-get -y install skype acroread' and you're good to go. Ubuntu
comes with Evince, but I find that it farts with lots of PDFs, and a
lot of people ask for Skype.
- If she uses Chrome, install Chrome instead of Chromium, as it comes
with a nice built-in PDF viewer and comes with a bundled Flash, which
is updated more quickly than the flashplugin-installer package that
Chromium uses. You can get libpdf.so online, but that's annoying. Plus
Chrome has a sexier icon. The Dev channel is plenty stable:

http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Linux

>    Also, how did the Haskell talk go?  I wasn't able to make it,
> unfortunately.

I enjoyed it, and it prompted me to finally start LYAH:

http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

which really is very good. I originally planned to port a useful
subset of Rietveld's codereview.py to Ruby (my day-to-day language),
but I'm going to do it in Haskell now :-)

-Matt B.