Preface

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My own computing life began long ago in the Commodore/Atari days. The purchase of my first machine, no doubt inspired by Alan Alda’s television commercials at the time, was an Atari XL600 with a cassette drive for storage, and 16KB of RAM — more than I thought I would ever need at the time (ha!).

Most of my time on that machine, I must admit, was spent playing cartridge- based games and typing in pages and pages of machine code from the now-defunct magazine Antic to create even more games. Eventually, my interest in computers increased, especially after seeing my first, and actually the first, Macintosh at the UCLA bookstore. The very in-your-face nature of the Mac’s operating system caused me to become an operating-system maniac. To date I have worked with almost every operating system there is or ever was, including Mac operating systems up to and including OS X, every Windows version from 3.1 to XP, and even IBM’s much forgotten OS/2.

Though tempted to join the Linux fray, I continued to steer away from it for a long time, because I could not help but see it, as so many others do, as a system for never-seen-the-light-of-day-faced, late-night Dr. Pepper–drinking, Domino’s- pizza-eating compu-geeks. Moving to Japan and being surrounded with machines loaded with Japanese versions of Windows, however, presented me with numerous problems, such as language constraints. As everything, including help files, was written in Japanese, I ended up using only a fraction of the full potential of most software. Then there were those annoying Windows-type problems, such as the constant freezes and restarts, and the gradual system slowdowns, which were eventually only remedied by reinstalling the system. Getting the software I needed to do the things I wanted to do also took its toll on my wallet, and I began to rethink my initial resistance to Linux. With Linux’s multilingual support, system stability, and extensive and free software packages, there were plenty of incentives for me to get over my obsession with the stereotypical Linux user.

After a few failed attempts at getting Linux to work on the oddball Frankenstein-like collection of junk that was my computer, I finally succeeded the safe way with a CD-based Knoppix distribution, which worked well enough to hook me in a little further. I then moved on to Mandrake, as that was claimed to be the most newbie-friendly version, and then tried out SuSE as well, which I found rather quirky. Eventually, I tried out Red Hat Linux and stuck to that, as it just gave me no grief; and I, like most others, do not need any more grief than necessary.

I started off with my three desktop machines at work and home set up as dual-boot systems running both Linux and Windows, but I gradually found myself using only Linux. Although I had expected to encounter numerous limitations in Linux that would force me to return to Windows often, I instead found that I had actually increased my productivity. Other than lack of native support for Windows streaming media, I was actually able to do more due to the extensive software base that was now installed on my machine. Without having to fork out money that I could ill afford to spend, I was able to manipulate my digital images, rip songs from CDs, create vector drawings, create PDF files, and do a variety of other things that I wasn’t able to do under Windows. It was only a matter of a little time before my dual-boot setups became full Linux-only setups. I ceased to be a Windows user.

Of course, during the course of my adjusting to the Linux environment, I had to learn a lot. I was, after all, alone in a sea of Windows users with a Mac island or two on the horizon. What I needed to know I had to find out on my own. The basics, of course, were quite easy, as intuition alone seemed to be enough; but, just as with other operating systems, I had to resort to doing some research to learn to do other things. Given the baffling geek-oriented nature of most Linux books at the time, I had to turn to mailing lists, bulletin boards, and the ol’ proven and true system of trial and error. As my memory has never been that good, I kept notes of what I had to do in order to get something done so that I could do it again in the future.

The idea of writing a book, however, came a bit later. In fact, the inspiration for the book was, of all people, my mother. My mother had been using an old Windows 95 machine of mine for years, but it was reaching the end of its days. My mother, being retired and of fixed income, found buying a new machine a bit beyond her means, so I told her I would send her one of my extra machines. The only problem was that she didn’t have any software or even a system to put on the machine. All she had on her old machine was what I had installed long, long ago, and the installation disks were mere memories.

Buying new copies of Windows, Microsoft Office, and all the other odds and ends that she had grown accustomed to would cost a fortune, so I thought that perhaps I might just set up the machine with a Red Hat Linux system. Of course, I worried at first whether my 72-year-old mother was ready for entry into the Linux world. Thinking of my own experiences, however, I couldn’t really see any reason why she wouldn’t be. After all, she could handle her mouse as well as the next person, and the process of installing Linux had improved so much from the days when I got started that it had essentially become a no-brainer. Yes, with a set of decent instructions that a beginner could understand, she would do all right.

I told her what I was going to do, and she seemed receptive enough; however, when she said that she would go out and buy a book to get her ready, and asked me for suggestions, I was stumped. Having gone through many a book myself as I got started up with Linux, I couldn’t think of a single one that would be of any use to someone like her. Most books then, and even now, tended to follow a similar format: They started with a rudimentary gloss over the basics of installation and usage, and then they suddenly leaped into geek mode, discussing everything in terms of commands and focusing excessively on topics that the average user would be intimidated by (and have little, if any, use for), such as setting up servers. It seemed to me that such books would just confuse her or, worse yet, scare her away. After all, that was what they did to me. I therefore decided to just write up a set of instructions myself — instructions that even my mother could understand and have some fun with. When my auntie got a hold of the instructions, the power of Zeus took hold in her, bringing about her simple edict: “Publish it!” And that is what “inspired” me to take that set of instructions and my notes to myself to the next level and write this book. One must not fly in the face of the power of Zeus . . . or my auntie.

Who Is This Book For?

As you can surmise from the background you’ve just read, I wrote this book so that a total non-geek, such as my mother, could use a pretty standard Linux distribution without much in the way of pain and grief. Of course, you may be wondering who qualifies as a non-geek, so I will try to clarify the several types I had in mind.

The first type, the Mom group, consists of users who really don’t know much about computers other than how to use them for writing letters, sending email, and browsing the Web. Such users just want to be able to use their Fedora system in much the same way they had used their Mac or Windows systems, and to have a bit of fun along the way.

The other type, the me-and-my-friends type, consists of those users who are a bit more adept at using computers but are also new to Linux, and thus want to know how to get things done in the manner they are accustomed to, while at the same time wishing to learn just enough more so that they have a foundation on which to go further and push the envelope just a bit — the want-to-get-their-feeta-little-geeky types.

There is yet another type of user I had in mind, and I suppose I could call them the on-the-fence type. The on-the-fence users are not really users at all. They are people who have read or heard about Linux and are wondering whether or not they are ready to deal with it, perhaps being held back by the Linux-is-for-geeks stereotype. These on-the-fencers need a reason to make the switch and a bit of reassurance that they will be all right once they do. To such folks, I can say right now, cliché though it may be, c’mon in — the water’s fine.

All of this is to say that this book is pretty much for the average desktop computer user — someone who wants to use their computer for home- and even work-oriented productivity, music, art, and most importantly, fun. As such, there is no discussion of setting up a server or anything of that ilk. When and if you become interested in such things, you will have a lot of resources to turn to, and you will be well prepared to do so once you’ve read this book.

Instead, I try to explain how to do things within the framework of the comforting graphical interface. To the degree that it is necessary or might be of interest to those push-the-envelope-a-little types, I also provide a brief, though detailed, explanation of how to use the command line, with much handholding along the way. This may even be of interest to someone with some previous experience with Fedora Core or Red Hat Linux, or to a migrant from another Linux distribution.

No matter which of these types of users you are, this book will get you comfortable using Linux. If you are looking for a power-user Linux book, though, try the next book on the shelf.

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