Stupid Question #1 - Samba Client
 

Firstly Hi to all, I'm new here.
Secondly, PC man for 15 years, small amounts of unix exposure, now and again.
Thirdly, here come the stupid question thick and fast
Fourthly, thanks in advance to anyone considerate enough to help me.

OK Stupid Question #1 - Samba Client

I,ve got as far as using mount -t smbfs to map (oops Windows terminology!) shares to a WinXP machine, and once mounted I can then use Konquerer to browse the share, all ok.

This is however a bit cack-handed. Is there not a GUI front end for discovering and mounting shares?

Running SUSE 8.1 on a 2Gig Athlon, PC. Seems pretty slick, and user friendly (certainly compared to Solaris) although it appears to me that this OS is not idiot-proofed like MSWin, plenty of ways to knock it flat on its arse if you aren't careful!

Cheers all

since when was it cack-handed to do it the proper way? :confused: there are crappy front ends such as linneighborhood and gnomba, but they only really server to let windows lovers pretend they are still using explorer.

create an idiot proof program and it will only used by idiots

Chill man.

I personally don't have a huge problem with "doing things the proper way", however I could not recommend Linux to many of my customers at the moment if they could not browse for available share and point and click at what they want. They have difficulty enough with windows!!

And as for "idiot proof software is used only by idiots", dare I guess that you are a programmer? If Linux is ever to be seen as anything other than the preserve of the techno-nerd, then it needs to become more intuitive and less command line.

You need to realise that most of humanity isn't as clever as you are...

i meant to put that last line in quotes, i read it somewhere and i really think it's true. Not just computers of course but everything in life and society... but that's irrelevant...

sure there are issues about usability and the reasons for and against certain aspects of it, but it's such a tired subject on this site i daren't kick it off again.

BUT like i said there are solutions available. and yeah i'm a programmer (for given values of "yeah") http://acidrip.thirtythreeandathird.net

That wasn't a "you are a programmer" in a detrimental sense, hey some of my best friends are programmers!! Its just programmers seem to think that if they understand something then any John Doe in the street will understand it as well.

As I said most of humanity isn't as clever as you are...

P.S. I include myself under the banner of techno-nerd as well!

Unfortunately you still have a point. It's little things like that users pounce on to start complaining. Nevermind all the benefits, we can't find our files!!! Whaaaaaaa! We're gonna start crying!!!! It's incredibly petty, but that's what you deal with in consulting. And when customers are looking for a reason not to do something those stupid, seemingly inconsequential little things are what they hold up as reasons.

Still, progress is coming in big steps. I've got the office almost ready to try a LAMP project...which will bring us up to where the rest of the world was last year. We'll get there.

I see you've been there and got the T-shirt. If you are going to sell something as a usable product to the company at large then you must aim at the lowest common denominator, which is where MS have got it right. XP, if you can get it stable (strangely I seem to be the only person who has got it working on 3 machines -at home - and not had any probs bar driver issues), where was I? - yes XP is what my wife calls "telly tubby software" any idiot can use it therefore every idiot will use it, hence MS's domination of the market.

If the Video recorder or the DVD player required several weeks of study just to make it work, where do you think we'd be. Yes a few clever individuals would be extolling the virtues of using them, but everyone else would simply not bother.

That Linux is superior in most ways to MS means as much as Betamax being superior to VHS, Token Ring being superior to Ethernet, ATM being superior to just about any WAN technology that you can name - i.e so what. If Joe average doesn't buy it, you have a technical white elephant, not a maintream technology.

Sorry , lecture over, prehaps I should write a book :rolleyes:

Total sympathy, Pete. That topic has been discussed at length here.

Tempting to just to cede the "telly tubby" (I love that term, btw) users to M$. But that would be giving over the largest part of the market...at least at my customers.

But there is still progress happening. LAMP projects on the back end and at least one customer looking at running a test to replace some of their "white seats" (low-end users) with diskless Linux thin clients. That's real progress. Before they'd waive the open source flag only as means to squeeze a better deal out of the M$ rep. Now they're pushing ahead with projects in spite of the perks, concessions, and wailing objections of the ring wraiths of Redmondore.

There's a reason people like you and I are showing up in places like this. The first of many more.

I'm in complete symbiosys with Baldy, and I propose a new Linux environment standard that could be called for start "Leanux" with the same shell but totally drained of "mirrorware" or should I say "uselessware". If Linux is to become a usefull environment for everyone, there will come a time when standardization of process will become apparent. Right now it's everybody's standards making it one of the most welcome (read awfull) melting pot ever created...

to my taste, there's too many ways of doing the same thing, it's like having 4 or 5 browser to surf the net installed by default!!! what good is it? perhaps including the other 4 and keeping one and only the defacto standard in a lean package... but that's utopy isn't it???