Greetings all, I thought I'd write and update you on my newbie experience with Linux et. al. To refresh your memory, my old laptop died just as I had been given a new Linux box and just before the Spring semester had started. I really was feeling stressed. But here are some high points of the past month: * Novell distro installed (and reinstalled (twice!) after a glitch) and updated without a hitch. * Evolution is now my email client of choice for two reasons: I couldn't figure out how to install Thunderbird and I wanted to sync my Palm to something. * I'm successfully popping all my Gmail and myrealbox accounts (13 total). I've never seen my filters run so fast (for junk and legit mail). * Palm Zire 21 now works beautifully with Evolution. I keep it simple and don't need more than the personal calendar. * Open Office installed and updated. I'm using 2.0.1.3 and have begun using Impress to create a presentation for school. * I have taken advantage of the desktop functions, using five work spaces and putting buttons on the tool bars. I love how smoothly my desktop works and allows me new workspaces. * Novell client for Linux working beautifully to connect me to the server upstairs (thanks Bob!) * I've been playing around with the GIMP image editor and in my opinion it is as robust as Photoshop (which I know very well). * I have successfully completed all the Novell Linux Desktop 9 Learning Center modules. The training was good and I would recommend it for new users. * I am successfully running Music Player and copying my CDs to the network. I can now burn a CD/DVD. Here are my observations/complaints: * While I've used both YaST and Red Carpet to install programs, I'd like to see something developed to click and run installation programs, much like the .exe files most are used to. Coming from that environment into a Linux environment, this is critical. If you want to make Linux more attractive for desktop users, software installation has to be easier. The average office user *ME* does not know how to work with code and such to install programs. * I'm still trying to find video capture and editing software. Any recommendations? * Now I also need software to create a business plan. Any recommendations? * I would love to listen to radio station web streams. I live in the boonies and get no radio reception. I do have RealPlayer on this but so far it hasn't worked for grabbing a radio web stream. I miss my Boston radio stations. Well, that's all I can think of for now. Oh, I did meet a wonderful teenager from Worcester who is very knowledgeable about Linux. His name is Stephen and I just wanted to send a shout out to him. I urged him to joint WLUG--he's a gem. Finally, I appreciate everyone here for all the marvelous advice, encouragement and patience. I consider it an honor to be part of your group. Thanks for letting me in! All my best, Marie
Marie, For capture software there's a couple of options out there. I've got a fire wire card in my machine so I've been using "Kino" to capture the raw DV off of my camcorder and it works great. It's a basic but functional NLE that supports encoding to mpeg2. I don't have any recommendations for business plan software, though I'm not quite sure what a business plan would look like, I thought it was just a regular document? As for RealPlayer, I haven't touched it in a couple of years, but POS has never really worked that well for me. They came out with the helixplayer, but it was worse than Realplayer! I do listen to a couple of stations via shoutcast (using xmms, which is Linuxes version of winamp) but those tend to be rather hit or miss. Hope that helps! Tim. On 2/22/06, Marie I MacDonald <mimsresearch@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings all,
I thought I'd write and update you on my newbie experience with Linux et. al. To refresh your memory, my old laptop died just as I had been given a new Linux box and just before the Spring semester had started. I really was feeling stressed. But here are some high points of the past month:
* Novell distro installed (and reinstalled (twice!) after a glitch) and updated without a hitch. * Evolution is now my email client of choice for two reasons: I couldn't figure out how to install Thunderbird and I wanted to sync my Palm to something. * I'm successfully popping all my Gmail and myrealbox accounts (13 total). I've never seen my filters run so fast (for junk and legit mail). * Palm Zire 21 now works beautifully with Evolution. I keep it simple and don't need more than the personal calendar. * Open Office installed and updated. I'm using 2.0.1.3 and have begun using Impress to create a presentation for school. * I have taken advantage of the desktop functions, using five work spaces and putting buttons on the tool bars. I love how smoothly my desktop works and allows me new workspaces. * Novell client for Linux working beautifully to connect me to the server upstairs (thanks Bob!) * I've been playing around with the GIMP image editor and in my opinion it is as robust as Photoshop (which I know very well). * I have successfully completed all the Novell Linux Desktop 9 Learning Center modules. The training was good and I would recommend it for new users. * I am successfully running Music Player and copying my CDs to the network. I can now burn a CD/DVD.
Here are my observations/complaints:
* While I've used both YaST and Red Carpet to install programs, I'd like to see something developed to click and run installation programs, much like the .exe files most are used to. Coming from that environment into a Linux environment, this is critical. If you want to make Linux more attractive for desktop users, software installation has to be easier. The average office user *ME* does not know how to work with code and such to install programs. * I'm still trying to find video capture and editing software. Any recommendations? * Now I also need software to create a business plan. Any recommendations? * I would love to listen to radio station web streams. I live in the boonies and get no radio reception. I do have RealPlayer on this but so far it hasn't worked for grabbing a radio web stream. I miss my Boston radio stations.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. Oh, I did meet a wonderful teenager from Worcester who is very knowledgeable about Linux. His name is Stephen and I just wanted to send a shout out to him. I urged him to joint WLUG--he's a gem.
Finally, I appreciate everyone here for all the marvelous advice, encouragement and patience. I consider it an honor to be part of your group. Thanks for letting me in!
All my best, Marie
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Marie I MacDonald wrote:
Greetings all,
HI Marie, It sounds to me like you've made a lot of progress. Keep up the good work! I'm sure you've learned a lot so far. I wish somebody would teach *me* how to use GIMP - I find it the most counterintuitive program I've ever used (and no, I'm not a Photoshop user, either). I understand the print dialog very well (hint: I wrote its manual), but the rest is a frustrating mystery to me. For web radio streams, I have listened to them using XMMS. To capture a stream and write it to an MP3 file, I downloaded a program called streamripper which works rather well. There are probably many other choices. For simple video editing, take a look at avidemux2 (which works on more than AVI files). I use it to cut the commercials out of video streams which were recorded by my TV capture card. Have a lot of fun! Andy - -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFD/bfNHl0iXDssISsRAgDLAJ949J30pALRSpxekQSDic5LfT8oNwCfXCPq Vk7EpJQEVwc3vekMqKbYjIY= =RDLb -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (3)
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Andy Stewart -
Marie I MacDonald -
Tim Keller