Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
bootlogd. Activating swap. fsck 1.35-WIP (01-Aug-2003) Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done. Please contribute if you find this software useful. DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 Starting Xprint servers: Xprt. If the pause were after fsck and it was showing that it was checking the disk that would let me know the machine is doing something. If the pause is after DHCPDISCOVER I can surmise that if the network isn't hooked up then it is waiting for a timeout there. I would go further. The first time I saw these messages I didn't know what DHCPDISCOVER or fsck meant. BUT I knew this: * If it hanged after DHCPDISCOVER, I should look up DHCP on google to find out what went wrong * If it hanged after fsck, I should look up fsck on google to find out what went wrong. Already useful information. Admittedly, I've seen some less than useful messages on boot (mostly overly generic messages where I couldn't figure out what part of the system could possibly be producing them). Still, most of the messages are really pretty good, if you know how to filter for the key words. -- Nathanael Nerode neroden at gcc.gnu.org http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
* Alan Shutko | Steve Lamb [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: | | Oh, look, someone else who CCs when it is obvious the person they're | responding to is participating right here. | | Maybe you should stop whining and just set the Mail-Copies-To header, | which is generally respected by posters on Debian lists? Or perhaps the poster should know the policy on Debian lists which is _not_ to Cc unless explicitly requested. -- Tollef Fog Heen,''`. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' : `. `' `-
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hi, On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:15:59PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 21:38:19 +0200 Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apple has a great way of doing that. They don't dumb down, they don't belittle you, they assume an intelligent being who can grasp reasonably complex English sentences, but who has less knowledge of computer idiom. *blink, blink* Funny, I consider Apple on of the worst when it comes to dumbing down the interface. Let's not forget they only took about 10 years to get *2* mouse buttons because it was too confusing. To each his own mistakes. The point is that they seem to succeed relatively often in creating messages and dialogues that are both informative to the knowledgeable user and intelligible to a non-computer savvy person. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies - Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 http://www.e-advies.nl
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hi, On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 11:06:53PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: * Emile van Bergen | Hi, | | On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 10:19:53AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: | | And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... :-P | | I would even scream at | | /Variable Data/ | | simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag | behaviour, because such path names are impossible to type in (and this | one even requires escaping the space to distinguish between the argument | separator). Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. I've considered tab-completion and /Va*, but you must realise that they work only in the shell. Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. There are lots of other cases where you must type a pathname in full. scp (on the remote side) is one that's important. /Va* further has the problem of requiring two awkward shifts. [SNIP] Geeks use systems a lot and for long periods of time, so using more or less obscure interfaces is good, not bad for us. :) I think that we prefer interfaces are ultimately very fast and are willing to live the learning curve and obscurity that currently comes with it. There may be an inherent tradeoff, but I think that we shouldn't be too quickly in dismissing UI changes that improve the linearity of the learning curve, if they can be shown not to harm the efficiency at the end of the curve. Of course, any change that actually shifts the balance from convenience for the frequent user towards ease of use for the incidental user should IMHO be treated with a lot more scepsis -- if not outright rejected. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies - Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 http://www.e-advies.nl
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Am 6.08.03 um 13:04:41 schrieb Emile van Bergen: Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. I've considered tab-completion and /Va*, but you must realise that they work only in the shell. Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. In Vim insert mode, press ^X^F for completion, ^N/^P to choose among many. Also, in GTK+, file selector boxes allow for tab completion. Bye, Mike -- |=| Michael Piefel |=| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |=| Tel. (+49 30) 2093 3831
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003 13:34:49 +0200 Michael Piefel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am 6.08.03 um 13:04:41 schrieb Emile van Bergen: Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. In Vim insert mode, press ^X^F for completion, ^N/^P to choose among many. Also, in GTK+, file selector boxes allow for tab completion. *blink, blink* Wow, Neat! Learn something new every day. -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. |-- Lenny Nero - Strange Days ---+- pgp01MoUXbK9M.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Michael Piefel wrote: Am 6.08.03 um 13:04:41 schrieb Emile van Bergen: Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. I've considered tab-completion and /Va*, but you must realise that they work only in the shell. Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. In Vim insert mode, press ^X^F for completion, ^N/^P to choose among many. Also, in GTK+, file selector boxes allow for tab completion. Also, in emacs one of the expansion techniques used by hippie-expand is to perform filename completion. -- Keith P.S. Despite that I'm in favor of shortness. Even ls instead of dir is worth it for me ;)
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi, On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 11:06:53PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: * Emile van Bergen | Hi, | | On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 10:19:53AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: | | And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... :-P | | I would even scream at | | /Variable Data/ | | simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag | behaviour, because such path names are impossible to type in (and this | one even requires escaping the space to distinguish between the argument | separator). Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. I've considered tab-completion and /Va*, but you must realise that they work only in the shell. Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. There are lots of other cases where you must type a pathname in full. scp (on the remote side) is one that's important. Use the ZShell, then! ;-) Otherwise, I of course fully agree that names like /Variable Data/ are evil. Regards, Andy -- Andreas Rottmann | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.8ung.at/rotty | GnuPG Key: http://www.8ung.at/rotty/gpg.asc Fingerprint | DFB4 4EB4 78A4 5EEE 6219 F228 F92F CFC5 01FD 5B62 Make free software, not war!
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hi, Emile van Bergen wrote:
I would even scream at
/Variable Data/
simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag
behaviour
/VaTAB isn't too bad, typing-wise, especially if you also have a
case-insensitive file system.
Apple's OS X translates the pathnames in the GUI _only_, so you get
Applications in English and Programme if you switch to German. The
file system understands only the original name, of course. I have my own
directory, named Programme, alongside, and while there's some initial
user confusion WRT two identically-named directories, the UI does a good
job keeping them distinct. (The fact that the Apple directory has a
distinct icon helps, of course. ;-)
--
Matthias Urlichs | {M:U} IT Design @ m-u-it.de | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Disclaimer: The quote was selected randomly. Really. | http://smurf.noris.de
--
Mythology: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin,
early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true
accounts which it invents later.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: Or perhaps the poster should know the policy on Debian lists which is _not_ to Cc unless explicitly requested. Noted. I was unaware of this, having not seen any mention of this policy when I subscribed. My apologies for any inconvenience caused. -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--,'``.fL meow /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 21:38:19 +0200, Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You know, I think these are actually good suggestions. I think there's a lot to be gained *not* by dumbing down, *not* by losing any information that might be useful to a geek or to a new user as (s)he's learning, but by phrasing texts so that they appeal more to generally intelligent human beings, rather than to people that just happen to have some specific knowledge. Sometimes jargon is more understandable for a non-native speaker because it has a very narrow sense. -- Oohara Yuuma [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian developer PGP key (key ID F464A695) http://www.interq.or.jp/libra/oohara/pub-key.txt Key fingerprint = 6142 8D07 9C5B 159B C170 1F4A 40D6 F42E F464 A695 Er, let's get into all the messes of the parliament. --- shinichiro.h, diary 2003/3/24 parliamentary bullet-dodging system
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 09:55:59AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline documentation except a post it note with the root username and password. On other systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc) I am clearly shown where to look for more information (on Windows, in fact, the OS goes to the other extreme and tries to ram help down your throat), but on Debian, there was no clear path to the documentation. Since your debian distribution seems to be non-standard (a blend of stable/testing/unstable); it would seem only appropriate for your vendor to have supplied some information regarding where you may trip up from looking at conventional sources. Thus a large part of your difficulty can be attributed to them, rather than debian. -- Jon Dowland
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
* Ian Hickson | On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: | | Or perhaps the poster should know the policy on Debian lists which is | _not_ to Cc unless explicitly requested. | | Noted. I was unaware of this, having not seen any mention of this policy | when I subscribed. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/index.html#codeofconduct (Linked to from the top of lists.debian.org, «please see the introduction to Debian mailing lists [...]») | My apologies for any inconvenience caused. No harm done. :) -- Tollef Fog Heen,''`. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' : `. `' `-
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Yo! Em Tue, 5 Aug 2003 20:13:44 -0500, Gunnar Wolf [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: I completely agree with you... I was arguing with a friend of mine, a Ximian developer. He insisted me that they were bringing Unix to the desktop of people, just like what Apple did. I insst that is *not* what they are doing. Even though under every Ximian and MacOS X system there is a Unix box, the user only uses a strange abstraction that -maybe without the user's knowledge- uses Unix itself. I haven't thought about the Ximian stuff you are talking about, but yes, I guess you're right. Let's say they're bringing 'Unix-like quality as a base' in which they build a user-friendly abstraction layer =). Besides, I really doubt that even one tenth of the Debian developers would be happy to switch ;-) Yes =). []s! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Gustavo Noronha http://people.debian.org/~kov Debian: http://www.debian.org * http://www.debian-br.org Dúvidas sobre o Debian? Visite o Rau-Tu: http://rautu.cipsga.org.br
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 01:40:41AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Admittedly, I've seen some less than useful messages on boot (mostly overly generic messages where I couldn't figure out what part of the system could possibly be producing them). Still, most of the messages are really pretty good, if you know how to filter for the key words. No need to know that -- you can let google do it :) I often paste whole error messages into the search field. It tends to work. Richard Braakman
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Michael Piefel dijo [Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 01:34:49PM +0200]: Neither tab-completion or globbing is available when I'm editing a file and have to write those path names. In Vim insert mode, press ^X^F for completion, ^N/^P to choose among many. Also, in GTK+, file selector boxes allow for tab completion. ... So vim is just vi becoming Emacs? I know the hard-core vi guys just hated Ctrl-combinations. Anyway, this thread is not about editor wars. The flames are set on user friendliness. Back on topic... :) -- Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hey guys, I was amused to see my blog post [1] made it to this list. I figured I'd clarify a few points which were omitted from that blog in the interests of brevity and humour. Mike Hommey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunately, his main problem is Having not used Debian for about 8 years. Most of your new users (all of them in fact, by definition!) will never have used Debian before. This should not stop them using your product. Part of the problem I had was that I had a vague understanding that there was something called apt, but that I didn't know what it was or how to do anything with it. The man page said to see apt-get's; apt-get's man page suggested the tool was a back-end but didn't really give any clues as to what front end to use. The strange thing is that he has been able to apt-get install aptitude, but tryed something else for xchat at first... I did actually try using apt-get originally when I had my original libgtk1.2 problem: # apt-get libgtk1.2 E: Invalid operation libgtk1.2 I tried to understand this: # man apt-get /E: Invalid Pattern not found (press RETURN) After reading the whole man page, I did try apt-get install libgtk1.2, but then I got the whole conflict problem I mention later in my blog. I decided to get the source and do it myself, but since I didn't know where that would be, I switched to trying to get X-Chat, and since I was already in source mode, it didn't even cross my mind to use apt-get for that. (After all, apt-get had just failed me, why would it succeed now?) To the end user (me), apt-get is arbitrarily verbose. Selecting previously deselected package libbla3.2? Get:1 ftp://apt sid/main libbla3.2 3.2.10-9 [827kB]? Look at operating systems used by less intelligent users. They just see: [# ] 60% 2 minutes remaining Admittedly, this is usually followed by a crash, but the user is not intimidated. (Having said that, personally, I quite like seeing the verbose output, it's useful for debugging. Most users don't.) And another thing : it seems that the pre-installed Debian he got was configured with both testing/unstable in the sources.list file. Pinning is not the easiest thing to catch when you are (alone) beginner with Debian... Matt Zimmerman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's also a really stupid trick to pull on someone for whom you are installing a system where they hope to get actual work done. Yeah. Unfortunately, to support my radeon chipset I have to use the unstable version apparently. (though it's equally possible that he did this himself, making random changes without understanding them in the hope of making things work) Nope, I wouldn't even have known where to start with respect to using unstable releases if it wasn't for the kind people on #mozilla. :-) Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | | I used apt-get to get aptitude. I fired up aptitude. The writer is obviously a moron if he did this with such ease and it never occured to him he could've done the same for any of the other packages he needed. While I wouldn't like to dispute my moronity, as I described above, I had tried apt-get earlier with little success. I used it for aptitude possibly because Eddy suggested I do that, or possibly because having had a break, I was no longer locked on to the idea of getting the source for the packages I wanted. I think Debian's package system is remarkably nice. Unfortunately, it's UI leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest problem is probably the package names: freetype, pango, libgtk2.0, etc, mean absolutely nothing to me, as a user, and I really shouldn't ever have to even see these packages. I really think aptitude should only show end user packages with decent, readable, localised names (Apache Web Server, x Chat (IRC Client), Infrared Control for XMMS). At the moment the user is completely overwhelmed by the list of packages, which is not helped by the fact that each one comes with a dozen or more libraries, extensions, and so forth. Anyway. Just a few thoughts. :-) -- References -- [1] http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1060025253count=1 -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--,'``.fL meow /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tuesday 05 August 2003 10:33, Ian Hickson wrote: Hey guys, I was amused to see my blog post [1] made it to this list. I figured I'd clarify a few points which were omitted from that blog in the interests of brevity and humour. Mike Hommey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunately, his main problem is Having not used Debian for about 8 years. Most of your new users (all of them in fact, by definition!) will never have used Debian before. This should not stop them using your product. What I meant with that is that your main problem is that you have an old linux user approach. A typical new user won't even try to build from sources. [snip] After reading the whole man page, I did try apt-get install libgtk1.2, but then I got the whole conflict problem I mention later in my blog. This is the problem with pinning. It is not easy to handle for beginners (especially if they are by themselves), and it is IMHO a very bad idea from whoever installed a Debian system on your laptop to have put different releases sources in the sources.list file. [snip] (After all, apt-get had just failed me, why would it succeed now?) Because Dr. Murphy sometimes forgets to annoy you ? ;) [snip] Yeah. Unfortunately, to support my radeon chipset I have to use the unstable version apparently. I think the testing version works at least in 2D for every radeon chip. What can't be denied, is that X is not the easiest part to configure on a Debian system... (though it's equally possible that he did this himself, making random changes without understanding them in the hope of making things work) Nope, I wouldn't even have known where to start with respect to using unstable releases if it wasn't for the kind people on #mozilla. :-) When trying to solve debian issues, try #debian ;) Mike -- Do you know what's the best thing about being me ? There's so many me ! -- Agent Smith Reloaded
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
I think Debian's package system is remarkably nice. Unfortunately, it's UI leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest problem is probably the package names: freetype, pango, libgtk2.0, etc, mean absolutely nothing to me, as a user, and I really shouldn't ever have to even see these packages. I really think aptitude should only show end user packages with decent, readable, localised names (Apache Web Server, x Chat (IRC Client), Infrared Control for XMMS). At the moment the user is completely overwhelmed by the list of packages, which is not helped by the fact that each one comes with a dozen or more libraries, extensions, and so forth. Some people like Ian Hickson don't want to see package names like libgtk2.0. But _I_ want to see this, I am sys admin and want to know exactly what I am putting on _my_ systems. Just one of the reasons why I like GNU/Linux ... I know what I'm doing! Anyway, does this mean we need something like a GNU/Linux Debian and a GNU/Linux Debian For Dummies showing only icons? Fred -- http://www.linox.be L I N U X .~. The Choice /V\ of a GNU /( )\ Generation ^^-^^
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Frederik Rousseau [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I really think aptitude should only show end user packages with decent, readable, localised names (Apache Web Server, x Chat (IRC Client), Infrared Control for XMMS). At the moment the user is completely overwhelmed by the list of packages, which is not helped by the fact that each one comes with a dozen or more libraries, extensions, and so forth. Some people like Ian Hickson don't want to see package names like libgtk2.0. But _I_ want to see this, I am sys admin and want to know exactly what I am putting on _my_ systems. Just one of the reasons why I like GNU/Linux ... I know what I'm doing! Anyway, does this mean we need something like a GNU/Linux Debian and a GNU/Linux Debian For Dummies showing only icons? It probably means there should be a configuration option in aptitude to hide sections like devel, libdevel, libs, and interpreters, since end users typically don't care (and 90% of the time I find myself not caring, too). Perhaps suggesting to new users that they look in the tasks section of aptitude would help reduce the package overload, too. I don't think we need to abandon the power of our current infrastructure, just have ways of making it less visible for people who don't want it. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal. -- Abra Mitchell
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 15:04, David Z Maze wrote: I don't think we need to abandon the power of our current infrastructure, just have ways of making it less visible for people who don't want it. Just a random off-the-wall idea, but *maybe* there could be a new package tag added which means that a package is something that Joe User is likely to use, i.e. a good word processor/web browser/etc. Then a minimal graphical interface could be built to show just these. Of course, the flames when deciding what packages to tag would be huge... Ross -- Ross Burton mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.burtonini.com./ PGP Fingerprint: 1A21 F5B0 D8D0 CFE3 81D4 E25A 2D09 E447 D0B4 33DF signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:33:19AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: Part of the problem I had was that I had a vague understanding that there was something called apt, but that I didn't know what it was or how to do anything with it. The man page said to see apt-get's; apt-get's man page suggested the tool was a back-end but didn't really give any clues as to what front end to use. Not directly, but the SEE ALSO list does include dselect(8) which is what you really should have used. [...] To the end user (me), apt-get is arbitrarily verbose. Selecting previously deselected package libbla3.2? Get:1 ftp://apt sid/main libbla3.2 3.2.10-9 [827kB]? Look at operating systems used by less intelligent users. They just see: [# ] 60% 2 minutes remaining I don't see how some extra verbosity hurts. apt-get still displays a percentage and a time estimate. Frankly if verbosity loses us some users, too bad. I'm sure we pick up more users because of the same. To rant a bit, the thing that bugs me the most about MS Windows is how when it breaks randomly you can't fix it because it runs on smoke and mirrors and doesn't give helpful information on what went wrong. With UNIX/Linux you get details and you can fix it. I think Debian's package system is remarkably nice. Unfortunately, it's UI leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest problem is probably Which UI did you use? We have a few. apt-get is not an interface for the Debian newbie. dselect and aptitude are GUI tools if that's what you need. Hamish -- Hamish Moffatt VK3SB [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Hamish Moffatt wrote: On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:33:19AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: Part of the problem I had was that I had a vague understanding that there was something called apt, but that I didn't know what it was or how to do anything with it. The man page said to see apt-get's; apt-get's man page suggested the tool was a back-end but didn't really give any clues as to what front end to use. Not directly, but the SEE ALSO list does include dselect(8) which is what you really should have used. The term dselect means nothing to me. It isn't a usable name. That's another example of the problem I mentioned. Would it not be possible for debian to have a command setup or install or something similarly named? Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. To the end user (me), apt-get is arbitrarily verbose. Selecting previously deselected package libbla3.2? Get:1 ftp://apt sid/main libbla3.2 3.2.10-9 [827kB]? Look at operating systems used by less intelligent users. They just see: [# ] 60% 2 minutes remaining I don't see how some extra verbosity hurts. It hurts because it scares users. My dad would take one look at the text, and give up. (And 15 years ago he was a VMS administrator, so it's not like he's computer illiterate.) My mum wouldn't even give the text a chance, she'd just see a wad of text with odd punctuation and run for the hills. Frankly if verbosity loses us some users, too bad. I'm sure we pick up more users because of the same. You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. To rant a bit, the thing that bugs me the most about MS Windows is how when it breaks randomly you can't fix it because it runs on smoke and mirrors and doesn't give helpful information on what went wrong. With UNIX/Linux you get details and you can fix it. Just to clarify, I've nothing against verbosity itself. /var/log, for instance, is great (although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story). The problem is verbosity when things don't go wrong. I'm all for a tell me what is going on feature for debugging. Even then, though, it would be nice if the verbose messages were consistently formatted, and used plain english instead of jargon. Error messages like E: Invalid operation foo are not helpful. I think Debian's package system is remarkably nice. Unfortunately, it's UI leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest problem is probably Which UI did you use? We have a few. apt-get is not an interface for the Debian newbie. dselect and aptitude are GUI tools if that's what you need. I used aptitude. It is not easy to use. It's fine for me, as I'm a geek. But if I told my mum to load aptitude and install X, she wouldn't have a clue how to do it. I just tried using deselect, to see if it is any better. The first option I'm faced with is: * 0. [A]ccessChoose the access method to use. I have no idea what that means. I tried using it (not logged in as root) and I got the following message: dselect: requested operation requires the superuser privilege Yet another example of an obscure error message. :-) -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--,'``.fL meow /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 08:14:23 -0700 (PDT) Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. I do believe they are mentioned several times in the manual. Y'know, that thing collecting dust over yonder. It hurts because it scares users. And? You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. And? There are a slew of other OSs and Linux distributions as well. This is what always gets me in discussions that are based on the lowest common denominator in computer users; the presumption that everyone wants to cater to them. It has been my experience that packages that cater to the lowest common denominator are packages I don't care to use because I find them *hard to use* even though they purport to be easy to use. I have almost always been on the side of the scale where I preferred the harder package because in the long run, once I got over the nominal learning curve, it was easier to use. However there was always that drive to go for the lowest common denominator, the computer illiterate. It has ruined more programs that I care to list because they would add too much, dumb things down, make the program too large and hard-to-use in the quest to get people who have to ask Left or right click after the first time you tell them to right-click something. IE, people with no concept of default behaviors/actions. I have never, EVER understood why anyone would want to take a package which is beloved by the niche geek market and destroy it for the illiterate market. That is triply so for commercial packages. You're wrong in saying that we (in general) would gain more by making our package (program, OS, etc) more palatable to the neophyte. As I said above, there are a slew of OSs and distributions that cater to that segment. To move Debian into that realm would be to lose what it has and compete with established entities. 100% of this slice is better than 1% of *that* slice. Just to clarify, I've nothing against verbosity itself. /var/log, for instance, is great (although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story). The problem is verbosity when things don't go wrong. Erm, no, it should not be. While it is a historical name it is a name that should remain because every person who's ever worked on a Unix-like system during that history knows where /var is, why it is there and what is in it. It is up to those new people to catch up, not for us to ruin what works and works well in the vain attempt to catch more of a market which, in the end, doesn't really matter as this is not a commercial venture. I'm all for a tell me what is going on feature for debugging. Which is why you need verbosity when nothing is going wrong. Let's see a show of hands on this situation. Ya boot up a Windows box post after '95. Here's the sum of it letting you know something is going on: a rotating palette for the bar at the bottom. The palette stops rotating. So, uh, what's wrong? Oh, wait, it started rotating again. No, wait, it stopped again... for 30 seconds. No, there it goes, it's fine. Even then, though, it would be nice if the verbose messages were consistently formatted, and used plain english instead of jargon. Error messages like E: Invalid operation foo are not helpful. No, that's a bad idea. Take a look at IE's 404 message sometime. It's a dumbed down version which doesn't explain jack or shitte. Error messages are there for people who know what they need to do. People who don't know what they need to do will not have that knowledge suddenly imparted upon them by a plain english error message because, without the jargon to point you in the right direction, there would be absolutely no place to start. The first option I'm faced with is: * 0. [A]ccessChoose the access method to use. I have no idea what that means. I tried using it (not logged in as root) and I got the following message: Did you choose it to find out? dselect: requested operation requires the superuser privilege Yet another example of an obscure error message. :-) Uh, no, it isn't. Superuser, aka, root. But not always root. sudo can grant superuser access w/o root. Also any account with a uid of 0 has superuser access but that doesn't mean it is called root. I recall one job where we had root and jfroot. Both were uid 0 but they had different passwords. Don't ask me why we had to 0s w/different passwords. Didn't make sense to me then, doesn't make sense to me now. But the really ironic part about all this is that the above message is more of the plain english message you want. Root is jargon. Yank someone off the street and ask
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 08:14:23AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Hamish Moffatt wrote: On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:33:19AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: Part of the problem I had was that I had a vague understanding that there was something called apt, but that I didn't know what it was or how to do anything with it. The man page said to see apt-get's; apt-get's man page suggested the tool was a back-end but didn't really give any clues as to what front end to use. Not directly, but the SEE ALSO list does include dselect(8) which is what you really should have used. The term dselect means nothing to me. It isn't a usable name. That's another example of the problem I mentioned. Tools have names, and they don't really have to be generic. I think it's quite acceptable for the installation manual to tell you the names you need to know to get started, and it does: see sections 8.11 to 8.15 of http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual. mozilla isn't a particularly obvious name, when you get down to it; why not web-browser? (Because it's not the only web browser on the planet, of course. Likewise, it's important not to confuse people migrating between distributions by having the generic name setup do something completely different wherever you go because people were scared of using program names.) Would it not be possible for debian to have a command setup or install or something similarly named? I think that's a good example of why generic names may not be a good thing to encourage people to expect; /usr/bin/install has existed for a long time, can't feasibly be changed, and is definitely not what you're looking for. Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. They all show up for 'apropos package', along with a bunch of other stuff, but yes, that would probably be a useful enhancement to at least one of those man pages. To the end user (me), apt-get is arbitrarily verbose. Selecting previously deselected package libbla3.2? Get:1 ftp://apt sid/main libbla3.2 3.2.10-9 [827kB]? Look at operating systems used by less intelligent users. They just see: [# ] 60% 2 minutes remaining I don't see how some extra verbosity hurts. It hurts because it scares users. My dad would take one look at the text, and give up. (And 15 years ago he was a VMS administrator, so it's not like he's computer illiterate.) My mum wouldn't even give the text a chance, she'd just see a wad of text with odd punctuation and run for the hills. However, it's better for a command-line tool to be verbose up-front, because if it crashes or blows up or just goes slightly wrong, at least the last of which is frequent with buggy packages, we need the information for bug reports (at any rate until such time as we have logging in dpkg, but since that's bug #957 I wouldn't hold your breath ...). With a graphical front-end it's much easier to hide the verbosity and have a show me the installation log option in case of error. I've seen graphical front-ends for the Debian package management system that do exactly this. I wouldn't suggest that your mum use apt-get in any case, no more than I'd try to get my parents to do everything on the command line. I'd suggest a point-and-click package manager instead, if I were having them do routine package maintenance at all. Frankly if verbosity loses us some users, too bad. I'm sure we pick up more users because of the same. You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. That hasn't historically been a good argument on Debian mailing lists. :-) Fundamentally, we're trying to produce the best, most stable, most reliable, etc. system we can, not get as many users as we can. The two goals aren't always entirely synonymous. In fact, computer-literate users may often be better from our perspective because they often produce better bug reports! That's not to say that the goal is user-hostility, just that user-friendliness isn't always the all-defeating trump card when discussing relatively low-level tools like dpkg and apt-get. To rant a bit, the thing that bugs me the most about MS Windows is how when it breaks randomly you can't fix it because it runs on smoke and mirrors and doesn't give helpful information on what went wrong. With UNIX/Linux you get details and you can fix it. Just to clarify, I've nothing against verbosity itself. /var/log, for instance, is great (although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story). You can't get there from here, I think. Unix admins coming to Debian will scream blue murder if it starts being /My Variable Data/Logs, and that group is important to us. The problem is
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Em Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:49:17 +0200, Frederik Rousseau [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: Anyway, does this mean we need something like a GNU/Linux Debian and a GNU/Linux Debian For Dummies showing only icons? Yes, I think so... Debian-Desktop should be that, probably. I would like to see a package manager like the one suggested by Ian Hickson you don't need to mess with all of Debian, you just need a better UI, really. The short description, together with a good selection of 'what is for the users, what is for the developers and what is for system admins' could be used to achieve that. []s! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Gustavo Noronha http://people.debian.org/~kov Debian: http://www.debian.org * http://www.debian-br.org Dúvidas sobre o Debian? Visite o Rau-Tu: http://rautu.cipsga.org.br
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Steve Lamb wrote: Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. I do believe they are mentioned several times in the manual. Y'know, that thing collecting dust over yonder. What manual? I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline documentation except a post it note with the root username and password. On other systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc) I am clearly shown where to look for more information (on Windows, in fact, the OS goes to the other extreme and tries to ram help down your throat), but on Debian, there was no clear path to the documentation. Typing help at the command line, which to most new users would seem like a sensible starting point, gives very terse information about bash and shell commands. (The bit at the top of this does mention 'man', but it scrolls off the top of my screen so it's not that helpful to a new user who doesn't know about Shift + Page Up.) The only manual I was aware of was apropos and man. But as I said in another message, neither apropos install nor apropos setup lead the user to look at any of apt-get, dselect, or aptitude. It hurts because it scares users. And? From a usability point of view, scaring users is a bad thing. You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. And? There are a slew of other OSs and Linux distributions as well. And I'm a geek, one who has been using GNU-based distributions on multiple machines on a daily basis for at least 3 years, and Sun for 6 years before that, and I _still_ have difficulty. This should be ringing usability alarm bells. This is what always gets me in discussions that are based on the lowest common denominator in computer users; the presumption that everyone wants to cater to them. Being usable does not mean catering for the lowest common denominator; I fully agree that other distributions are more adequately positioned to target computer illiterate users. although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story Erm, no, it should not be. While it is a historical name it is a name that should remain because every person who's ever worked on a Unix-like system during that history knows where /var is, why it is there and what is in it. It is up to those new people to catch up, not for us to ruin what works and works well in the vain attempt to catch more of a market which, in the end, doesn't really matter as this is not a commercial venture. Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. The number of future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks, instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions? I'm all for a tell me what is going on feature for debugging. Which is why you need verbosity when nothing is going wrong. Let's see a show of hands on this situation. Ya boot up a Windows box post after '95. Here's the sum of it letting you know something is going on: a rotating palette for the bar at the bottom. The palette stops rotating. So, uh, what's wrong? Oh, wait, it started rotating again. No, wait, it stopped again... for 30 seconds. No, there it goes, it's fine. Right. That's poor UI. However, it's not _that_ much better on Debian: Incomprehensible status message #1. Incomprehensible status message #2. Incomprehensible status message #3. (long pause) Incomprehensible status message #4. Incomprehensible status message #5. Incomprehensible status message #6. By Incomprehensible status message I mean things like: bootlogd. Activating swap. fsck 1.35-WIP (01-Aug-2003) Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done. Please contribute if you find this software useful. DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 Starting Xprint servers: Xprt. ...all of which are taken directly from my boot log. Why can't we instead have nice friendly messages? e.g.: Startup logging has begun. Log will be stored in '/var/log/boot'. ...instead of bootlogd. Even then, though, it would be nice if the verbose messages were consistently formatted, and used plain english instead of jargon. Error messages like E: Invalid operation foo are not helpful. No, that's a bad idea. Take a look at IE's 404 message sometime. It's a dumbed down version which doesn't explain jack or shitte. Again, IE's 404 message is terrible UI. It is much, much too long and is not very helpful. It is, however, a little better than: 404 Error Resource
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
I agree with every word There are lot's of packages to do Debian more user friendly, they are available at install time and after by running tasksel. Maybe the problem was the way that Debian was pre-installed I think they only installed base. This isn't suitable for a user. Maybe if you installed Debian by your own you could feeled more confortable with dselect and tasksel (called from debian installer) among other words/commands. You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. And? There are a slew of other OSs and Linux distributions as well. I think many people choose Debian because it's a geek distro, without those RH/Mandrake annoyances that are good for users and bad for us. After all .. all this problem happened not just because libgtk1.2 .. but to install a browser, right ? ... just apt-get install mozilla . =) C´ya and sorry for poor english .. just my 2 c. []'s On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 12:41, Steve Lamb wrote: You will lose many more than you will gain, since there are many more computer illiterate users than geeks. And? There are a slew of other OSs and Linux distributions as well. This is what always gets me in discussions that are based on the lowest common denominator in computer users; the presumption that everyone wants to cater to them. It has been my experience that packages that cater to the lowest common denominator are packages I don't care to use because I find them *hard to use* even though they purport to be easy to use. I have almost always been on the side of the scale where I preferred the harder package because in the long run, once I got over the nominal learning curve, it was easier to use. However there was always that drive to go for the lowest common denominator, the computer illiterate. It has ruined more programs that I care to list because they would add too much, dumb things down, make the program too large and hard-to-use in the quest to get people who have to ask Left or right click after the first time you tell them to right-click something. IE, people with no concept of default behaviors/actions. I have never, EVER understood why anyone would want to take a package which is beloved by the niche geek market and destroy it for the illiterate market. That is triply so for commercial packages. You're wrong in saying that we (in general) would gain more by making our package (program, OS, etc) more palatable to the neophyte. As I said above, there are a slew of OSs and distributions that cater to that segment. To move Debian into that realm would be to lose what it has and compete with established entities. 100% of this slice is better than 1% of *that* slice. Just to clarify, I've nothing against verbosity itself. /var/log, for instance, is great (although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story). The problem is verbosity when things don't go wrong. Erm, no, it should not be. While it is a historical name it is a name that should remain because every person who's ever worked on a Unix-like system during that history knows where /var is, why it is there and what is in it. It is up to those new people to catch up, not for us to ruin what works and works well in the vain attempt to catch more of a market which, in the end, doesn't really matter as this is not a commercial venture. I'm all for a tell me what is going on feature for debugging. Which is why you need verbosity when nothing is going wrong. Let's see a show of hands on this situation. Ya boot up a Windows box post after '95. Here's the sum of it letting you know something is going on: a rotating palette for the bar at the bottom. The palette stops rotating. So, uh, what's wrong? Oh, wait, it started rotating again. No, wait, it stopped again... for 30 seconds. No, there it goes, it's fine. Even then, though, it would be nice if the verbose messages were consistently formatted, and used plain english instead of jargon. Error messages like E: Invalid operation foo are not helpful. No, that's a bad idea. Take a look at IE's 404 message sometime. It's a dumbed down version which doesn't explain jack or shitte. Error messages are there for people who know what they need to do. People who don't know what they need to do will not have that knowledge suddenly imparted upon them by a plain english error message because, without the jargon to point you in the right direction, there would be absolutely no place to start. The first option I'm faced with is: * 0. [A]ccessChoose the access method to use. I have no idea what that means. I tried using it (not logged in as root) and I got the following message: Did you choose it to find out? dselect: requested operation
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Colin Watson wrote: The term dselect means nothing to me. It isn't a usable name. That's another example of the problem I mentioned. Tools have names, and they don't really have to be generic. I think it's quite acceptable for the installation manual to tell you the names you need to know to get started, and it does: see sections 8.11 to 8.15 of http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual. Ok, that's fair enough. Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. They all show up for 'apropos package', along with a bunch of other stuff, but yes, that would probably be a useful enhancement to at least one of those man pages. I'm glad you agree. :-) However, it's better for a command-line tool to be verbose up-front, because if it crashes or blows up or just goes slightly wrong, at least the last of which is frequent with buggy packages, we need the information for bug reports [...]. That's probably true. It would still be nice if the verbose messages were more consistent, though. For example, 'apt-get' error messages start with 'E:' instead of the more standard 'apt-get:'. Similarly, when you do an apt-get update, you get some messages of the form: Hit ftp://apt sid/mail Packages ...some of the form: Get:1 ftp://apt ./ Packages ...and some of the form: Reading Package Lists... Done ...which is odd: why three different kinds of messages? What does Hit mean, as opposed to Ign or Get:1? And so on. This isn't only a problem with apt-get, of course. Error and status messages throughout the industry and in particular throught the free software world are often obscure, obtuse, and unclear. Indeed, Mozilla has its share of such problems! :-) With a graphical front-end it's much easier to hide the verbosity and have a show me the installation log option in case of error. I've seen graphical front-ends for the Debian package management system that do exactly this. That's cool. (aptitude doesn't, as far as I can tell.) :-) Fundamentally, we're trying to produce the best, most stable, most reliable, etc. system we can, not get as many users as we can. That's fair enough! :-) That's not to say that the goal is user-hostility, just that user-friendliness isn't always the all-defeating trump card when discussing relatively low-level tools like dpkg and apt-get. I think that user-friendliness, even at such a low level, should still be important -- just because the user is an expert doesn't mean he wants to have to decode messages. although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story. You can't get there from here, I think. Unix admins coming to Debian will scream blue murder if it starts being /My Variable Data/Logs, and that group is important to us. Note that there is at least one project which is looking at doing exactly that while retaining backwards compatability (GoboLinux). It may be worth, on the long term, looking at how it may be possible to migrate from obscure paths like /opt, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc, to more sensible names, in that way. And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... :-P -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--,'``.fL meow /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 12:33:18AM +1000, Hamish Moffatt [EMAIL PROTECTED] was heard to say: I think Debian's package system is remarkably nice. Unfortunately, it's UI leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest problem is probably Which UI did you use? We have a few. apt-get is not an interface for the Debian newbie. dselect and aptitude are GUI tools if that's what you need. aptitude is neither a GUI tool nor a tool for the Debian newbie. The GUI tool I hear mentioned most frequently is synaptic; maybe the writer would have better luck with that? Daniel -- / Daniel Burrows [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---\ | Will the last person to leave the Universe please | | turn off the lights and close the door?| \-Evil Overlord, Inc: planning your future today. http://www.eviloverlord.com-/
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tuesday 05 August 2003 18:55, Ian Hickson wrote: Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. The number of future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks, instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions? More comfort requires more system resources (except for a few really clever hacks). Beginners are most likely willing to accept that a few CPU cycles are used for making their computing time easier - you'll see that they like icons (animated ones even), tooltips, first-time wizards and so on. Now, the unix file system layout was never designed to be end-user friendly in the beginning (the short ASCII-style file and directory names take care of that), yet development didn't stop. What Linux and other OSes lack in the kernel space, has started to exist in the user space. With KDE, you've got a Home folder already and a Trash folder. With GNOME, you've got a Preferences container. You can easily write an implementation which fits your needs, e.g. a KIO slave for directory name translation, or a Hurd translator for system-level bindings. Of course, in order to not be flamed from time to time, you should come up with a nice concept first. You don't have to write the code yourself, but you do have to invent the user-friendly layer and make it public. Josef -- Play for fun, win for freedom. Hurd^H^H^H^HLinux-Info-Tag Dresden 2003: http://www.linux-dresden.de
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hi, On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 09:55:59AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: [SNIP] Why can't we instead have nice friendly messages? e.g.: Startup logging has begun. Log will be stored in '/var/log/boot'. ...instead of bootlogd. [SNIP] Error messages are there for people who know what they need to do. So if I do something wrong (like get the command line arguments to 'apt-get' wrong, as I did), then I don't deserve to be helped by the program? What would be wrong with a helpful message, such as: apt-get: the first argument should be one of 'install', 'remove', 'update', or another operation ...instead of just E: Invalid operation foo? [SNIP] How about a message such as: dselect: to select an installation source, superuser privileges are required (try logging in as root) It's still accurate, but now it's helpful as well, and uses a more friendly voice. (This also changes access method to installation source, which makes more sense to me.) You know, I think these are actually good suggestions. I think there's a lot to be gained *not* by dumbing down, *not* by losing any information that might be useful to a geek or to a new user as (s)he's learning, but by phrasing texts so that they appeal more to generally intelligent human beings, rather than to people that just happen to have some specific knowledge. Apple has a great way of doing that. They don't dumb down, they don't belittle you, they assume an intelligent being who can grasp reasonably complex English sentences, but who has less knowledge of computer idiom. I think this is an area in which software can be improved without scaring the geeks with offensive 'my first Sony' UIs, teletubby landscapes, informationless error messages, and stupid attempts to fix things behind the users back (simply displaying expired pages from a cache for instance). Indeed, Microsoft gets it all wrong, from a UI standpoint. But instead of assuming that we are pushed in that scary direction when someone complains about our UI, we may also realise that there are things that can actually be improved, without harming Unix's strong points, UI-wise. I fully agree with the poster that increasing the number of intelligent and intelligible English sentences that we output is one of those things that can be done without harming the hacker in any way. Of course, like any enhancement, it needs a volunteer who can scratch his or her itch by doing this work. This may actually be one of the bigger problems. Most developers who can do the work have gotten used to the idiom and badly worded error messages. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies - Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 http://www.e-advies.nl pgprXSw5bIZGU.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hi,
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 10:19:53AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote:
And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... :-P
I would even scream at
/Variable Data/
simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag
behaviour, because such path names are impossible to type in (and this
one even requires escaping the space to distinguish between the argument
separator).
Don't underestimate the typing convenience of TLAs! They may not be the
most descriptive, but at least they're blindingly fast to work with when
you get used to it.
In short, such path names are definitely no improvement from a UI
standpoint, even though it may seem that way from a casual observer.
Even shorter: UIs are rarely obvious. And there must be a reason why
geeks like working with Unix.
One thing for me is that the command line allows me to work almost as
quickly as I think. I really hate it when the UI drags me down ('open
folder, open subfolder, click on file, type Ctrl-C, open other folder,
type Ctrl-V', it's just horrible). The computer should wait for me, not
the other way around!
Cheers,
Emile.
--
E-Advies - Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 http://www.e-advies.nl
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Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Debian should not change its attitude or methods to meet the end user's needs. Think of Debian as a the painter's palette. All of the tools you need are available to you. It installs a base system and you customize from there. Would I recommend Debian for John Doe user? As a base raw install (even with X), I would not. However, Debian is a wonderful tool. I can pick and choose what packages I wish to install and how I wish those packages to be configured. If I so desire, I can setup a Debian to meet the needs of an end user. An end user has different needs such as a router, an OpenMosix cluster, a desktop machine, and the list can go on and on. Debian is a generalist. Debian sub-projects and Debian based distros takes the Debian tools to meet the needs of the end user. Without the painter's palette, the pictures for the end user cannot be created. By the way, I like the verbose messages. Also, there are mechanisms to submit bug reports to fix code and documentation bugs. That's my two bits. carlosP -- QOTD: Recursion n.: See Recursion. -- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary Carlos E. Pruitt, Jr. National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering 102 Carrier University, MS 38677 USA phone: 662-915-7786 On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Colin Watson wrote: The term dselect means nothing to me. It isn't a usable name. That's another example of the problem I mentioned. Tools have names, and they don't really have to be generic. I think it's quite acceptable for the installation manual to tell you the names you need to know to get started, and it does: see sections 8.11 to 8.15 of http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual. Ok, that's fair enough. Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. They all show up for 'apropos package', along with a bunch of other stuff, but yes, that would probably be a useful enhancement to at least one of those man pages. I'm glad you agree. However, it's better for a command-line tool to be verbose up-front, because if it crashes or blows up or just goes slightly wrong, at least the last of which is frequent with buggy packages, we need the information for bug reports [...]. That's probably true. It would still be nice if the verbose messages were more consistent, though. For example, 'apt-get' error messages start with 'E:' instead of the more standard 'apt-get:'. Similarly, when you do an apt-get update, you get some messages of the form: Hit ftp://apt sid/mail Packages ...some of the form: Get:1 ftp://apt ./ Packages ...and some of the form: Reading Package Lists... Done ...which is odd: why three different kinds of messages? What does Hit mean, as opposed to Ign or Get:1? And so on. This isn't only a problem with apt-get, of course. Error and status messages throughout the industry and in particular throught the free software world are often obscure, obtuse, and unclear. Indeed, Mozilla has its share of such problems! With a graphical front-end it's much easier to hide the verbosity and have a show me the installation log option in case of error. I've seen graphical front-ends for the Debian package management system that do exactly this. That's cool. (aptitude doesn't, as far as I can tell.) Fundamentally, we're trying to produce the best, most stable, most reliable, etc. system we can, not get as many users as we can. That's fair enough! That's not to say that the goal is user-hostility, just that user-friendliness isn't always the all-defeating trump card when discussing relatively low-level tools like dpkg and apt-get. I think that user-friendliness, even at such a low level, should still be important -- just because the user is an expert doesn't mean he wants to have to decode messages. although var is a historical name that really should be replaced by something more user friendly, but that's another story. You can't get there from here, I think. Unix admins coming to Debian will scream blue murder if it starts being /My Variable Data/Logs, and that group is important to us. Note that there is at least one project which is looking at doing exactly that while retaining backwards compatability (GoboLinux). It may be worth, on the long term, looking at how it may be possible to migrate from obscure paths like /opt, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc, to more sensible names, in that way. And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--,'``. fL meow /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ -- QOTD: Recursion n.: See Recursion. -- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary Carlos E. Pruitt, Jr. National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering 102 Carrier University, MS 38677 USA phone: 662-915-7786 -- QOTD: Recursion n.: See
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
* Emile van Bergen | Hi, | | On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 10:19:53AM -0700, Ian Hickson wrote: | | And I would scream if you called it /_My_ Variable Data/ too... :-P | | I would even scream at | | /Variable Data/ | | simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag | behaviour, because such path names are impossible to type in (and this | one even requires escaping the space to distinguish between the argument | separator). Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. | In short, such path names are definitely no improvement from a UI | standpoint, even though it may seem that way from a casual observer. | Even shorter: UIs are rarely obvious. And there must be a reason why | geeks like working with Unix. UIs have two costs: an initial learning cost and a «running cost» (which also includes the retaining the learnt level) which is per operation (a little bit simplified, but you get the idea). If you are going to use a system a lot and over a long period of time, the initial cost matters a lot less than if you are only going to use the system occasionally and for short periods of time. Also, catering for the different conditions of users is important; I'd hate to have to use a command line interface with obscure unix-like commands for operating an ATM, since I fairly seldom use those and therefore the running cost is less important than the initial cost. Geeks use systems a lot and for long periods of time, so using more or less obscure interfaces is good, not bad for us. :) -- Tollef Fog Heen,''`. UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are : :' : `. `' `-
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Steve Lamb wrote: Note that, if for some reason the user knew about the command apropos, even that wouldn't help him -- none of dselect, aptitude, and apt-get come up for apropos install or apropos setup. I do believe they are mentioned several times in the manual. Y'know, that thing collecting dust over yonder. What manual? I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline documentation except a post it note with the root username and password. On other systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc) I am clearly shown where to look for more information (on Windows, in fact, the OS goes to the other extreme and tries to ram help down your throat), but on Debian, there was no clear path to the documentation. [...] * In my experience the windows-help system is frequently next to useless, it looks pretty, but is not helpful. * $total_computer_newbie is completely at loss with windows, too (just tried it two months ago). If somebody set up your machine totally b0rked (mixed sid/testing) without installing the docs it is not Debian's fault. If you want to start with Debian, Suse, RedHat, or whatever you have always have to find a decent manual or at least a person who sets up the system and helps you. Yes, you probably can install RedHat by just pressing enter but you'll get stuck on the third day without manual and learning to help yourself, Debian will just bite you earlier. cu andreas -- Hey, da ist ein Ballonautomat auf der Toilette! Unofficial _Debian-packages_ of latest unstable _tin_ http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ametzler/debian/tin-snapshot/
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Oh, look, someone else who CCs when it is obvious the person they're responding to is participating right here. On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 09:55:59 -0700 (PDT) Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Steve Lamb wrote: What manual? I rest my case. I receieved the machine with Debian preinstalled and no offline documentation except a post it note with the root username and password. And this is the problem of Debian... how? I would ask why you weren't given better help from the person who installed it or why you didn't ask them for help. The facilities are there. On other systems (Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc) I am clearly shown where to look for more information (on Windows, in fact, the OS goes to the other extreme and tries to ram help down your throat), but on Debian, there was no clear path to the documentation. And on my install the same is true. KDE menu, Help. It hurts because it scares users. And? From a usability point of view, scaring users is a bad thing. Ever hear the saying Unix is user friendly, it's just picky about its friends. You missed my entire point. Debian isn't scaring off users. It is scaring off *neophyte* users. However, that segment of the population is covered by *other distributions*. This is a *good thing* as Debian often attracts users with some experience who want exactly what it has to offer. And I'm a geek, one who has been using GNU-based distributions on multiple machines on a daily basis for at least 3 years, and Sun for 6 years before that, and I _still_ have difficulty. This should be ringing usability alarm bells. No, it shouldn't. I should be ringing alarms about the veracity of your claims and your capabilities. Being usable does not mean catering for the lowest common denominator; I fully agree that other distributions are more adequately positioned to target computer illiterate users. Debian is quite usable. *NO* computer system, however, is going to be completely intuative to someone who is handed it with nothing more than Here, here's the username and password. g'luck! Quick, tell me, how do you get more software for Windows? Help doesn't point you to TUCOWS or the like. Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. No, it is selfish for people to come into a culture and flat out state, No, I don't want to learn so things should change to cater to ME! The number of future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks, instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions? Because they're not that hard to learn and the easier conventions are not easier in any quantifiable sense of the word. Furthermore any system you, or anyone else, would propose would cause no end of upheaval to the software that ran on it. It would take years to make any meaningful shift and in the end guess what would happen. New users would still have to learn where everything goes. Right. That's poor UI. However, it's not _that_ much better on Debian: Quite the contrary. By Incomprehensible status message I mean things like: bootlogd. Activating swap. fsck 1.35-WIP (01-Aug-2003) Running 0dns-down to make sure resolv.conf is ok...done. Please contribute if you find this software useful. DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 Starting Xprint servers: Xprt. If the pause were after fsck and it was showing that it was checking the disk that would let me know the machine is doing something. If the pause is after DHCPDISCOVER I can surmise that if the network isn't hooked up then it is waiting for a timeout there. Furthermore if I am calling up to my dad who is 400 miles away and doesn't know all that much about Linux he can read me the lines and I can tell him likely causes of problems and pauses. Try that with See, about 12 seconds into bootup the little bar stops rotating for about 30 seconds. Like I said, those messages aren't meant for the neophytes. The neophytes aren't going to get it either way. They're there for the people that have to fix it when it breaks which may be through the interface of the neophyte. Do you REALLY think I want to walk my father through turning on boot-up logging on his Windows box, have it boot, then talk him, through booting into safe mode and *then* have him drill down to where the log would be? Yeah, that's easy alright. Why can't we instead have nice friendly messages? e.g.: Startup logging has begun. Log will be stored in '/var/log/boot'. ...instead of bootlogd. Because when it breaks what do you fix? What mechanism logs? Oh, the user's going to have to find that out. When it says bootlogd failed
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
First off, error messages can always be improved, and I bet the program maintainers would be happy to accept patches, so long as those patches don't *decrease* the amount of information available. But in one area you're dead wrong: On 05-Aug-03, 11:55 (CDT), Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Without meaning offense, that is a very selfish attitude. The number of future debian users is *significantly* larger than the number of existing users, unless something drastic happens to either humanity or debian itself. Why should everyone who will use debian in future be forced to learn archaic commands, paths, and deal with other historical holdbacks, instead of the few who already use it being taught easier conventions? Without meaning offense, that's a very selfish attitude. You want to ruin a system that provide incredible productivity and ease-of-use for the experienced user, for the sake of some hypothetical users who might be better served by another OS? You see, a great many of us (not just Debian users, but Unix users in general) have learned what those archaic commands and paths are, and their very shortness increases usability -- not learnability perhaps, but actual usuability, for those who use it every day. Combine that with the fact that they are the same[1] from system to system, and any changes are a complete detriment to usability. To you, 'list' may look better than 'ls', but for someone who types it several hundred times a week, and is *far* more likely to mis-type 'list', 'ls' is completely superior. Compare 'ls -ltr' with the VMS equivalent[2] 'directory/sort=date/order=reverse'. Yes, the latter is easier to read *IF* you don't know either. But which would you rather type? Which should keep you (or whoever wants to do it) from building a shell that provides more english like commands. But please don't ruin the system for the rest of us. [Re: UI designers] Unfortunately we don't seem to have many of those in the free software community. Now *that* is a true statement. Steve [1] The existing variations are painful enough. Let's not add to the problem [2] Yes, I know that's probably not the actual VMS command. It's been a while, and I don't have manual handy. But it's close enough to get the flavor of it. -- Steve Greenland The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- seen on the net
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 11:06:53PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: Tab completion or using /Va* is about as fast as /var. Heh, teach yourself to type /Va* and you're going to get BURNED one day. (Your co-sysadmin finds a rootkit on another machine and stores it in /Various Dangerous Programs/ for later examination...) Tab completion is fine in contexts where it works. Richard Braakman
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 21:38:19 +0200 Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Apple has a great way of doing that. They don't dumb down, they don't belittle you, they assume an intelligent being who can grasp reasonably complex English sentences, but who has less knowledge of computer idiom. *blink, blink* Funny, I consider Apple on of the worst when it comes to dumbing down the interface. Let's not forget they only took about 10 years to get *2* mouse buttons because it was too confusing. -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. |-- Lenny Nero - Strange Days ---+- pgpNO5gaWvjcw.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 22:16:37 +0200 Emile van Bergen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would even scream at /Variable Data/ simply because it encourages slow and RSI-inducing click and drag behaviour, because such path names are impossible to type in (and this one even requires escaping the space to distinguish between the argument separator). Come now, there is always tab. Of course there is another reason why such descriptive names aren't all that great. Here's me sitting in a directory mounted off my Windows box. Can you tell where the unix system leaves off, where the Microsoft system catches on and why the Microsoft system was clearly never meant to be viewed from the command line? :) [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/mnt/morpheus_D/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Asheron's Call} If it were an all unix world we might have this: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/mnt/morpheus_D/Games/AC} No less descriptive, just as readable but, by gum, I have more than 3 spaces before my command wraps! And heaven forbid I go one directory deeper! -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. |-- Lenny Nero - Strange Days ---+- pgpf68OSEt0xK.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:03:54PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 09:55:59 -0700 (PDT) Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And I'm a geek, one who has been using GNU-based distributions on multiple machines on a daily basis for at least 3 years, and Sun for 6 years before that, and I _still_ have difficulty. This should be ringing usability alarm bells. No, it shouldn't. I should be ringing alarms about the veracity of your claims and your capabilities. Hixie's pretty well-known in certain other free software circles. What I've seen of him elsewhere implies to me that he isn't incompetent in the least, and frankly I think you're going way overboard in the hostility of your responses. I'm sure it's possible for us to recognize that things aren't perfect even if we disagree on how to fix them. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Steve Lamb [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Oh, look, someone else who CCs when it is obvious the person they're responding to is participating right here. Maybe you should stop whining and just set the Mail-Copies-To header, which is generally respected by posters on Debian lists? -- Alan Shutko [EMAIL PROTECTED] - I am the rocks. What's all this I hear about endangered feces?
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 23:30:11 +0100 Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hixie's pretty well-known in certain other free software circles. What I've seen of him elsewhere implies to me that he isn't incompetent in the least, and frankly I think you're going way overboard in the hostility of your responses. I'm sure it's possible for us to recognize that things aren't perfect even if we disagree on how to fix them. You're most likely right, I'll bow out. -- Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls. |-- Lenny Nero - Strange Days ---+- pgp1k6Er4gb9A.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Richard Braakman [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Heh, teach yourself to type /Va* and you're going to get BURNED one day. (Your co-sysadmin finds a rootkit on another machine and stores it in /Various Dangerous Programs/ for later examination...) And gee, your shell beeps, completes up to /Various\ , and doesn't go further. How is this going to get you burned? -- Alan Shutko [EMAIL PROTECTED] - I am the rocks. Your rifle won't leave a wet spot on the bed after you use it.
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Em Tue, 05 Aug 2003 17:39:06 -0500, Alan Shutko [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: Richard Braakman [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Heh, teach yourself to type /Va* and you're going to get BURNED one day. (Your co-sysadmin finds a rootkit on another machine and stores it in /Various Dangerous Programs/ for later examination...) And gee, your shell beeps, completes up to /Various\ , and doesn't go further. How is this going to get you burned? I guess he's not talking about tab completion in this case, but about '*'... I actually use this stuff when I cannot use tabs... [~] [EMAIL PROTECTED] $ cd /ho*/k* [/home/khaotikuz] [EMAIL PROTECTED] $ This should make the problem clearer... I actually wanted to go to '/home/kov', but my dumb sysadmin (me =P) created a khaotikuz user... []s! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Gustavo Noronha http://people.debian.org/~kov Debian: http://www.debian.org * http://www.debian-br.org Dúvidas sobre o Debian? Visite o Rau-Tu: http://rautu.cipsga.org.br
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Em Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:19:53 -0700 (PDT), Ian Hickson [EMAIL PROTECTED] escreveu: You can't get there from here, I think. Unix admins coming to Debian will scream blue murder if it starts being /My Variable Data/Logs, and that group is important to us. Note that there is at least one project which is looking at doing exactly that while retaining backwards compatability (GoboLinux). It may be worth, on the long term, looking at how it may be possible to migrate from obscure paths like /opt, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc, to more sensible names, in that way. They had a presentation on the IV Free Software International Forum in Porto Alegre (Brazil) this year and I can assure you I didn't hear a lot of good things about this (I didn't actually attend to the thing, but other DD's did). It seems like a mess of symlinks and they say it doesn't need 'package management' when it actually has a bunch of scripts to handle the symlink 'farm' they grow on /usr/bin and such. Doesn't seem like a clean solution to me, no no no... It also seems like they want to have each package installed in its own directory, which I think sucks tremendously... I hated that when I lived with windows... I always wanted to have all my binaries in the PATH, etc. And the real end user does not even care about that. I don't really care about /. I think path abstraction should be achieved by graphical file management utilities like Nautilus, not by messing with something that's actually working, to then cause more problems. []s! -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Gustavo Noronha http://people.debian.org/~kov Debian: http://www.debian.org * http://www.debian-br.org Dúvidas sobre o Debian? Visite o Rau-Tu: http://rautu.cipsga.org.br
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Gustavo Noronha Silva dijo [Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 09:26:20PM -0300]: Note that there is at least one project which is looking at doing exactly that while retaining backwards compatability (GoboLinux). It may be worth, on the long term, looking at how it may be possible to migrate from obscure paths like /opt, /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc, to more sensible names, in that way. They had a presentation on the IV Free Software International Forum in Porto Alegre (Brazil) this year and I can assure you I didn't hear a lot of good things about this (I didn't actually attend to the thing, but other DD's did). (...) I don't really care about /. I think path abstraction should be achieved by graphical file management utilities like Nautilus, not by messing with something that's actually working, to then cause more problems. I completely agree with you... I was arguing with a friend of mine, a Ximian developer. He insisted me that they were bringing Unix to the desktop of people, just like what Apple did. I insst that is *not* what they are doing. Even though under every Ximian and MacOS X system there is a Unix box, the user only uses a strange abstraction that -maybe without the user's knowledge- uses Unix itself. Debian is a Unix system (ok, Unix-like for purism). It should stay a Unix system. We already have a very important user base, we are obliged not to give them such a headache. Besides, I really doubt that even one tenth of the Debian developers would be happy to switch ;-) Greetings, -- Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Alan Shutko [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Steve Lamb [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Oh, look, someone else who CCs when it is obvious the person they're responding to is participating right here. Maybe you should stop whining and just set the Mail-Copies-To header, which is generally respected by posters on Debian lists? Har! The people that use a decent MUA already know how to participate in list discussions, and those that don't won't pay a bit of attention to that header. -- I'm sick of being the guy who eats insects and gets the funny syphilis. pgpSznaaJXdBF.pgp Description: PGP signature
How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
Hello, I just found this, maybe auseful read http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1060025253count=1 -- Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Monday 04 August 2003 23:12, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Hello, I just found this, maybe auseful read http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1060025253count=1 Unfortunately, his main problem is Having not used Debian for about 8 years. The strange thing is that he has been able to apt-get install aptitude, but tryed something else for xchat at first... And another thing : it seems that the pre-installed Debian he got was configured with both testing/unstable in the sources.list file. Pinning is not the easiest thing to catch when you are (alone) beginner with Debian... Mike -- I have sampled every language, french is my favorite. Fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d'encul de ta mre. It's like wiping your ass with silk! I love it. -- The Merovingian, in the Matrix Reloaded
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 22:12, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: I just found this, maybe auseful read http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1060025253count=1 I used apt-get to get aptitude. I fired up aptitude. The writer is obviously a moron if he did this with such ease and it never occured to him he could've done the same for any of the other packages he needed. Scott signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: How to install X-Chat in five hours (or more)
On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 12:11:44AM +0200, Mike Hommey wrote: And another thing : it seems that the pre-installed Debian he got was configured with both testing/unstable in the sources.list file. Pinning is not the easiest thing to catch when you are (alone) beginner with Debian... It's also a really stupid trick to pull on someone for whom you are installing a system where they hope to get actual work done. (though it's equally possible that he did this himself, making random changes without understanding them in the hope of making things work) -- - mdz
