I’m a highly experienced Windows guru with the chops to back it up. But now I find myself having to install, configure, and manage CentOS–all without the slightest idea how to do even the most basic system administration tasks in Linux, like managing users and groups, and managing drive partitions–or even what each partition is supposed to do. Under the covers, Linux is so fundamentally different from any other OS I’ve ever used (and I know a few others besides Windows), that I find myself forced to take my vast experience and throw it away and start from scratch, because it is almost completely irrelevant under Linux. There is very little (outside of my knowledge of TCP/IP) that I can apply from the Windows world to the Linux world.
What really, really bothers me about Linux is that none of the fucking Linux hippies I encounter, on the Internet or in person, has a fucking STRAIGHT ANSWER FOR ANYTHING!!! All I want to know is how to install GIMP under CentOS. Under Windows, it’s a breeze; click-click and you’re done.
I’ve googled the question: “Install GIMP under CentOS 5″ and I get 20,000 different answers from 20,000 different “experts.” And exactly none of them descripe a simple “click-click” install, which is what a total n00b like me needs.
I have a bunch of Linux people here in my office (and a friend or two) who resentfully turn up their noses at everything Microsoft and swear on their dead grandma’s graves that Linux is the greatest thing to ever be invented in the history of Earth, better even than the wheel or fire. Well, I got news for you Tofu-eating Linux hippies: Windows doesn’t make me RECOMPILE THE FUCKING KERNEL to install a simple graphics editor! These guys scratch their heads in squnty-eyed wonder why end-users aren’t flocking in droves to Linux. If the Goddamn learning curve wasn’t VERTICAL, I’m sure you’d get more users.
God help me when I try to install Asterisk and use this thing as a phone switch.
April 26th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Gregory – This post litterally had me spitting out my cereal I was laughing so hard. ‘Linux hippies’ hehehehe. I used to have an LJ friend who gave *reasonably* straight answers about Linux (and other) programming questions but she’s disappeared. Doesn’t Sean C. know Linux?
April 26th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
“Yes he does,” he said, typing “gimp” at the command line prompt of his home computer running CentOS 4.4 distribution and watching as the program loaded.
Greg, have you tried “yum install gimp” at the root command line? Gimp might not be a default package that’s installed (and frankly, it’s been awhile since I actually installed my system, long enough for it to become obsolete) as CentOS is generally targeted for server operations, not desktop use.
You are also correct in that the Unix way of doing stuff is different from the Windows way (and frankly, if you were to force me to manage a Windows network, you would hear me swearing up a storm); in some ways I think it’s better, and I’m sure in some ways it’s worse (personally, better because you don’t need a GUI to make changes; worse because you don’t have a GUI to make changes).
And for the record, I’ve never had to recompile the kernel to install a graphic manipulation program.
April 27th, 2010 at 10:26 am
I would’ve never thought to try yum install gimp because I’ve never installed anything under any flavor of Linux before. I got similar advice from one of the Tofu-waving Linux hippies here, and it worked.
Y’know, this has been a pretty humbling experience; I now fully understand how utterly helpless an end-user feels sitting before their highly uncooperative, recalcitrant, stubborn computer as it stands defiantly between them and the completion of their daily tasks.
April 27th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Oh–I should mention that a GUI isn’t required any longer to do administrative tasks under Windows Server, either–Linux-like CLI counterparts have been added to just about all Windows administrative components to supplement the GUI and make administrative tasks scriptable via VBScript.
April 28th, 2010 at 1:54 am
To be fair to you, the different Linux distributions use different package managers—RedHat derived distros use yum, Debian derived distros use apt-get, Gentoo uses its own thing, etc.
At the very least, one can always download the source code and compile (and in 95% of the cases, to install it’s “tar xzvf tarball.tar.gz ; cd tarballdir ; ./configure ; make ; make install” (but “make install” should be done as root; the rest of the steps can be done as a regular user). The only issue with that is the dependency tracking (manually, and it can be a bitch for large projects like Gimp).
Don’t get me wrong—I have *plenty* of gripes about Unix (Linux) administration and each Unix (or Linux distribution) does things *slightly* differently in some cases (mostly that can be attributed to the differences between BSD and SysV) but given enough experience, one gets to know where to look for the skeletons.
August 24th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
[...] a number of months ago, I wrote a journal entry deriding Linux (no, Corsair, really? You? Deride Linux? Go on!); and several months before that, I’d written [...]