Introduction to Linux for Chris

Sat Apr 23 13:32:58 UTC 2005

Thank you very much.

You've been a great help.

Take care,

Chris Norman
<!-- chris.norman4 at ntlworld.com -->
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Chase" <blinux.list at thechases.com>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: Introduction to Linux for Chris

> Welcome, Chris, to the list.
> 
>> Can I have some information on Linux's opperation?
> 
> [phony accent] vell dis opperation kan be wary difficult, as ve 
> plan to extract schom schpace on hard disken and putten in a bit 
> of der Linuxen.  (grins)
> 
> No, really..it works, and there's a whole list of folks here to 
> help.  It, much like Windows, is acutally fairly boring for your 
> average Joe.  What matters are the applications, and how easily 
> you can use them.
> 
>> Is it totally command line based?
> 
> It can be.  I've got one of my boxes (an old P133 laptop) set up 
> to run in only command-line.  I find it fast, as I've been using 
> the command-line for years.  It's one of those things that with 
> experience, you may never want to go back.  There's also a GUI 
> portion which is, like everything else in Linux, customizable to 
> the Nth degree.  There is some screen-reader software--the GNOME 
> project has Gnopernicus and the KDE project has their own (the 
> name escapes me at the moment) but last I heard, they're still 
> about on par with MS Narrator.  If you have some sight, you can 
> tweak your XFree86 configuration to display in a much 
> lower/magnified resolution and take advantage of the built-in 
> panning provided by X's virtual desktops.  You can crank the 
> graphics back to 640x480, 320x200, or even lower, yet give it a 
> virtual desktop of 1024x768 or even higher.  X takes care of all 
> the panning details.  You just ram your mouse against the edge of 
> the screen, and it does the rest. (grins)
> 
>> is it still open-source? 
> 
> Yep...always has been, always will be.  That's the beauty of the 
> GPL (General Public License)
> 
>> If so, what language?
> 
> This is a bit ambiguous...do you mean programming language or 
> spoken/written language?  If it's spoken/written language, Linux 
> supports far more languages than I speak.  Some distros are 
> customized for a particular language.
> 
> If, however, you're talking about programming languages, there 
> are so many, it would be impossible to enumerate them all. 
> However, for low-level and huge apps, often C or C++ is used.  In 
> addition, there's Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, PHP, 
> shell-scripts, TCL/TK, and surely piles more I'm forgetting.  For 
> my personal spin, I prefer to avoid C/C++ when I can, in the same 
> way I avoid assembly programming at work. (grins)  For 
> application development, I lean towards Java or Python.  For web 
> development, I'm a PHP guy, though Python has its appeal on that 
> front as well.  For some reason, Perl just drives me nuts.
> 
>> Where can I get either the source or bineries
>> from pleasE? and how do I install.
> 
> Well, if you truely want to install, you can download any of the 
> ISO images for any number of distributions, or ISOs modified by 
> blinuxy folk, to make them more accessible.  I think there's a 
> modified Fedora Core boot ISO that's been tweaked so that the 
> speakup kernel is loaded by default.
> 
> As an alternative, if you just want to test the waters first 
> without actually installing, there are a number of boot-from-cd 
> distributions such as Knoppix.  One of its derivatives, Oralux 
> (http://www.oralux.org), has been specially tweaked to provide an 
> accessible environment from bootup without the need to install. 
> This might be a good place to start.  In addition, you'll likely 
> want to read some docs on getting started with Linux, as it 
> sounds like you've not been steeped in the Linux/Unix world, thus 
> absorbing it in passing.  I'd recommend some of your first stops 
> to be:
> 
> The Linux Documentation Project:
> http://www.tldp.org
> 
> The Linux Cookbook (one of my favorite resources for command-line 
> tools; very biased towards Debian-based distributions, but that's 
> okay, as I use Debian and its derivatives such as Knoppix) which 
> can be found at:
> http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_toc.html
> 
> Hopefully that's enough to get you started.  The list is here and 
> there are plenty of smart folks to help you out.
> 
> -tim
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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