[LUGSB] Getting started with Linux

[Justin Seyster]

Thanks everybody for the advice.  Right now she's starting off with
Ubuntu on Virtual Box, which seems to be working quite well.  I'm a fan
of Ubuntu myself.  I'll pass on everybody's website and book
recommendations to her.
        --Justin

On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 22:10 -0400, Matthew Blair wrote:
> 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.