Void's Forums

Ok All,

I don't expect to win any popularity contests with this post, and as any of you who know me I am an avid Linux fan even though I've only been using it regularly for about 8 months or so. But there are a few things about Linux that bother me, and it seems to me that discussion of these topics is not inappropriate for a Linux forum. So please, Viodmain, don't bounce me for this post.

1) It takes forever and a day for my main Linux box to open programs like OpenOffice Write. I'm running a 2.4 GHz P4 w/ 256 MB of RAM and it takes a good 15 seconds to open. I try to actively convert Windroids to Linux, but constantly have to apologize for the length of time needed to open write. I have set up a Celeron 400 MHz with 96 MB of RAM in my office to demo Linux with. OK, actually I just sold it to one of my students for $20, but it's still there today and will be for a few more days, and that poor old thing must take a full minute to open OOWrite. Rreasonably well configured with Win98, that old box could open M$Word97 within 5 seconds or less.

2) Teaching some poor student with no exposure to anything but Windows and no command line experience how to install a program on a Linux box is painful beyond belief. I wil admit that this is probably more a fault of Windows which tries to hide everything from the user than a Linux problem, but if you're trying to lead Windroids out of the darkness and into the light, this is a stumbling block.

3) VI or VIM. I love VI. But if you could experience the blank stares and incomprehension of kids when I tell them to type "vi .bashrc" or something similar and then try to show them how much better this is than notepad or whatever the current Windows ascii text editor is. The looks on their faces is really ummm.... special. I realize that there are other Linux ascii editors, but I am too old and stupid to learn them, so this may be more my problem than a Linux problem, but I can't imagine working in *nix without vi. And most kids today have a real problem with it.

4) So many programs that people use (especially kids) are Windows-specific; the music file sharing programs, tax programs, games, and etc. My students live using Kazaa, WinMX and similar music file sharing programs. Linux equivalents may exist, but I don't know about them and when they find that out, they lose interest. Hell, I still have a WIn98 box (and a DOS box) bacause there are games I like to play that won't run on Linux and I do really like to do my taxes on a computer. Call me infantile, or lazy, or whatever, but I am a computer user and I do want what I want. So are my students.

OK, so I've had my little rant here. Voidmain, please don't bounce me. This isn't the Windowsbbs site after all. Other readers, I have an asbestos suit on, so I feel reasonably well protected from your anticipated flames. Linux is the best OS I've yet worked with, though I do have a REALLY soft spot for VMS and OpenVMS and damned near cried when my employer decided to shut down my Alpha and replace it a damned Win2K POS. So please cut me a bit of slack.

Jim

Well it certainly doesn't belong in the "Why I Like Linux" forum so I moved it to the lounge.

1) I don't seem to have the problems you are having and you must have something severely wrong. I have a 1.4Ghz Athlon, I just clicked the OOwrite button and it took exactly 5 seconds for it to pop up on my screen.

2) How is this a Linux problem? This is a social engineering problem.

3) vim = edlin on steroids, gedit = notepad, kwrite = wordpad on steroids, joe/pico/emacs/jed/jstar = edit

Try adding this to your ~/.bashrc:
alias edlin=vim
alias edit=jed
alias notepad=gedit
alias wordpad=kwrite
alias write=kwrite

I wouldn't force them to use vim but it certainly would be beneficial for them to know the basic vi command set as these are portable across all *NIX systems. If they are just going to be a 'user' then forget about it.

4a) Sharing music files? I'm guessing they are sharing these music files illegally? Sounds like not having access to these programs is a good thing. Stealing music today, stealing cars tomorrow. These programs do exist by the way but I'm not the one to ask about them as I use ssh, Apache and/or email for sharing files.

4b) Taxes? This year you could have filed your taxes right through your web browser but you are right, it doesn't excuse the tax software vendors for writing their tax software in "VisualCraptastic" ® rather than something portable.

4c) Games? There certainly aren't as many as there are for Windows at the moment but the list is growing and eventually will not be an issue, not that it really is a Linux issue, it's a game vendor issue. I realize that doesn't get you access to more games. I don't personally play games (except for the occasional Mahjongg or KSokoban).

I wouldn't think of banning you. I might tie a muzzle on you but I wouldn't ban you. :) I would seriously get that Office thing checked out, it's not right. Have you tried Red Hat 9? You might try disabling the splash logo which you can do by changing the "Logo=1" to "Logo=0" in the sofficerc file, here's how I would do it:

# perl -i -p -e "s/Logo=1/Logo=0/g;" `locate sofficerc`

Hi Voidmain,

I tried editing the /usr/lib//openoffice/program/sofficerc file but it still took a good 15 seconds to open. There was no splash screen, but it was still slow. Do you think that more RAM might help? As inexpensive as RAM is lately, if another 256 MB would help this it would be worth it to me on my computer. This still is no real help for someone using a low end machine though.

I just bought another 40 GB hard drive a couple of days ago thinking of an earlier suggestion you made about having different versions of Linux on separate hard drives. I will be installing RH 9 on the new drive and when the next verson of RH comes out I will overwrite my RH 8 drive. I went to CompUSA yesterday, but they wanted $49.99 for RH 9 and I think that I'll order my copy direct from RedHat Like I did with RH 8 and save a few bucks while still supporting "the cause." If RH 9 is faster opening programs, then I can remove that objection.

The need for a command line may be a "social engineering" problem. I LIKE command lines. Heck, if I could access your site easily with lynx, I wouldn't have much reason at all to startx. But the fact of the matter is that most young people today are "point and clickers." Today, my better students use the best of both systems. I don't mind that. A recent graduate, Lauren, currently employed by Lockheed Martin in IT, would use the command line where that was more effective, and the GUI at the same time where that had its advantages. She was really impressive. A few years before that I would only allow my students to work from the command line and I never got smart enough to work effectively from a GUI. Darned old fart that I am. Linux requires that users be capable of working with a command line interface and even though that is one of the things that I like about Linux, I see it as a hinderance to the widespread adoption of the OS by young people. If we're ever going to displace M$, we have to have an OS that young people are willing and able to work with.

Ascii editors... I just tried to do something with gedit. I told you I wasn't very smart on many occasions. Pretty interface. Might be easy to work with..., I couldn't even figure out how to open my .bashrc file with it. About edlin... I always kind of liked edlin. One of the things (one of the very few) about NT4 that I liked is that they kept edlin. It's not nearly as "smart" as vi, and certainly not as fast for small files as DOS "copy con" was, and not as easy as VMS's eeve, but I did like it and still use it at work. I even found it on my daughter's WinXP machine.... and it works like it always did. I guess I should spend some time and learn gedit and allow my students to use it. It seems to be quite similar to DOS edit or notepad. But for me, vi or vim is the best ascii editor around. I even use it on my DOS and Windows boxes (the UNIX2DOS version). If only I could get students to appreciate its power, speed and flexibility.

Games and file sharing are a fact of life with younger computer users. Tax programs are a fact of life for people like me. If Linux is going to displace Windows, issues like these have to be addressed. You said that there are file sharing programs and that you don't want to publish them here. That's fine. But there are legal ones (I believe) for Window;,I don't use my computers for that stuff myself, but my children and students do, and it's important to them. BTW, I thought that most of those sites and programs were legal. If not, I fully agree with you that they should not be supported in any way.

Muzzle me if you must, but please don't ban me. And also please make sure that the muzzle has an opening for my beer or you might as well ban me

Jim

I don't know if more RAM will solve your problem of a slow OOo, not enough information to compute. All I can say is my machine which is half as fast as yours only takes 5 seconds max to open oowrite. As far as your old machine taking a long time to load office, how fast will it open Office XP under Windows XP on the same machine? I can say that I noticed a significant performance increase with RH9 over RH8 (at least when running RH8 with a default installed kernel).

As far as opening your .bashrc in gedit just type "gedit .bashrc". Or you can do it very much like you do in Windows. Just remember that files that start with "." are pretty much the same as files with the "hidden" attribute turned on in Windows. So the Windows way would be to click your home folder on your desktop, set your folder preferences to show hidden files, right click on ".bashrc" and select "open with gedit". I personally can't stand gedit and believe "kwrite" to be far superior all the way around as far as GUI text editors are concerned (spell checker, syntax hilighting, etc). But you and I both know that nothing beats VIM. I don't mind it if others don't agree as long as it makes me happy.

As far as the file sharing programs, I didn't say you couldn't discuss them, I just said I don't have any need for them and don't know anything about them so I won't be of any help, but I do know they exist and I have seen others talk about them. So far the only thing I have seen them used for is illegal activity which I personally have no interest in. The file sharing programs are not illegal, it's what most people use them for is what is illegal. I just can't imagine a single good use for them.

As far as tax software it isn't going to do any good to complain on this forum about it or to complain to Linus about it. You (we) need to complain to the tax software vendors, it is their decision to only produce a Windows version. This is one type of software that doesn't really fit in the open source model (unless the IRS itself were to produce the software which will never happen because there would be a little problem with the existing vendors). Maybe you could start your own software company and write tax software for Linux. It probably wouldn't be very lucrative in the beginning but it would help bring more people to Linux if it is good software, then you'll be king of the tax software hill.

this topic made me think of the following article: Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux Today. The author opines that all the best features of linux have come about by people complaining that that feature didn't exist, so he's complaining about all the things he thinks need fixed in linux in the hope that they will be fixed too. he also has a page of the 'Top N Things that have been fixed'.
The article hasn't been updated since july 2002 and already quite a few of the issues he's raised have more or less been totally attended to (i think he should update it to top 5 or 6 things myself!)

here are some other threads that comment on that article:
http://www.handcoding.com/archives/000132.shtml
http://bandung.linux.or.id/article.php?sid=109
just for those with a passing interest.

Now:
1) this is one of the issues i have had with openoffice too, it is one of the reasons i wanted to install from the openoffice.org binaries instead of the rpms when i had red hat (rightly or wrongly hoping this might change the situation), and it's the reason i haven't bothered to install openoffice yet now i have changed to slackware.

2) i am sure there must be GUI tools for installing rpms and probably even other packages, each distro probably has its own way of doing this, meaning it's harder to explain it to somebody who wants to use more than one linux. i don't use gui anymore to install stuff, it's easier to use command line no matter whether one is a point and click kiddie or not. if they want click and run, they need to buy lindowsOS, or stick with XP. sorry that's harsh but if they can't get past the fact they need to type 'rpm -Uvh packagename.rpm' as root (it's not bloody hard!) then they will find a million other things wrong with linux and will not be happy with it compared to windows in my opinion. tough nuts for them.

3) text editors, there are tons. my favourites are xedit, gedit, nedit, kwrite and there are probably a lot more, i think there's probably one called gnotepad too. All of those (with the exception of xedit) will be totally intuitive to anybody who uses notepad, and they all have some nice features that notepad doesn't have. xedit is not intuitive to a windows user, but might be intuitive to a *ix user, i don't know. it took me about 20 seconds to figure out and it works, so those are my criteria filled! that said, i too tend to use vi (or whatever it's symlinked to, i think 'vi' points to 'elvis' at the moment) for text editing, or bluefish for html stuff (and bluefish is a good point and click text editor too, but is total overkill for normal text editing). I'm sure all those gui editors i mentioned above (except xedit!) will have the usual windows style File -> Open dialogue by the way.

4) p2p multimedia file sharing. this is something that is fiddly and irritating no matter what platform/client you use. i don't tend to use this method much anymore for getting music or whatever. still, i have gtk-gnutella installed and i have heard that gnapster is a good one too. the former can connect with commonly used networks such as the morpheus, bearshare and gnutella networks, and the latter i think connects to opennap servers. i have little to no knowledge of how this works or how good it is but i would hazard a guess that these programs are as good as their windows counterparts and probably as intuitive. gtk-gnutella looks like kazaa or morpheus to me, but having only used kazaa for about 2 minutes i wouldn't know. other people say they are nothing alike so take your pick. i really have enough music without having to use some networking client thing on dialup to get more.

1) OpenOffice - Like I said, I have seen *significant* performance improvements in OOo in RH9. Now I can't say everyone will see those performance increases but I can say for a fact that 5 seconds to open any of the OOo apps is pretty quick if you ask me. And my system is extremely outdated compared to what is being sold right now. No it's not a P-100, and no it's not a 2.4 Ghz. In addition to the above Ximian is coming out with some enhancements to OOo that are supposed to make it faster and better looking (we'll see).

2) Hmm, isn't Synaptic pretty much like click-n-run?

3) Again in RH and I assume most of the others you can do thing very similar to the Windows way by browsing your files in your graphical file manager (Nautilus in this case, but a Windows person will see it as "explorer"). That is, click on your home folder on your desktop and it will bring up something very similar to Windows explorer. If you right click on a file and select "open with" it will give you a list of editors. I don't know about you but I would figure after trying each one once most people would be able to select one from that point on that they are comfortable with.

4) Never used it, never plan on using it, can't comment on it.

You guys sound like you've never used Linux (or at least any recent version). I just don't get it.

OK, that's it!!! I say we all get together and go over to dishawjp's house, drag him out into the street a string him up on the nearest lamp post!!!
How dare you sir? To be critical of Linux is the same as spitting on the flag. I cannot condone or support such drivel!! My seconds will call, you may rest assured; pistols at dawn, I say.
I guess that's enough, after all, this isn't the OTHER place; we have to be reasonable here. I'm just going to throw my $0.02 in here and say that whatever the reason that applications start faster in MS products than they do in Linux (and my half-wit explanation would be integration of proprietary code) I don't really see it as a problem. I'm posting this from the new, improved Bullgoose box (tm). It's an Athlon 1.1 Mhz processer with 768 Mhz of pc-133 RAM; believe me, app's open QUICK, even OO, but even if we were talking 15-20 seconds, I would still prefer OO, simply because it's not an MS product; not only that, how many of us remember when WIN95 came out? EVERYTHING was slow opening; EVERYTHING crashed regularly; people, that wasn't that long ago. Have we gotten so used to speed that we've forgotten that 8 short years ago, you were damned lucky to get anything done on the first try? And to put things in a more realistic perspective, how many folks were using Linux 8 years ago (not you, Void, you're a plank owner) ? Let's give Linux a break; it'll be just as fast as Windows before you know it; now's the time to gt as many new users started, because, based on past history, Linux is going to be making quantum leaps; I can't wait for the 2.6 kernel to be released, things will start hopping then, you bet.

I don't know, Linux has always been faster than Windows in my experience. When I say faster I don't mean to say that every individual application is faster, some are some aren't. When I say faster I am actually referring to efficiency, the amount of work done over a specified amount of time.

I can install a Linux machine complete with all software and updates necessary to function as a workstation in much less time than it takes to install Windows.

I don't have to spend several days a year doing inventory trying to figure out if my licenses are up to snuff so the BSA doesn't come pull me out of my workplace and stick me in jail.

If I want to set up a SQL database I don't have to go through the red tape of getting SQL Server approved and passed through the purchasing department which can take days/weeks/years. And when I get it I have more licenses to worry about and manage. With Linux more than likely I already have a SQL server installed on my system that is more than what I need.

If I want to do some programming I have all the tools I need. Again I don't have to go through the purchasing process to get VisualCraptasic ®.

I don't have to worry about installing virus software or lose time and energy recovering from viruses. I don't have to reboot every few hours because of a crash or every time I install a new piece of software.

I am much more efficient in Linux than in Windows, but I have equal amounts of experience on both Linux and Windows from the beginning of both of their existences. How many people can actually say they are truly 50/50 or better? A small percentage I'm sure, hopefully the numbers are rising...

Void Main wrote:1) OpenOffice - Like I said, I have seen *significant* performance improvements in OOo in RH9. Now ...

well yes, i have installed openoffice quite a few times in various ways on various versions of mandrake and red hat and sometimes the performance is much better than other times, i have yet to figure out why. openoffice does seem a little slow to me but my computers have been an 850Mhz P3 and a 703Mhz celery, so what can i expect? some apps are just slow. usually i only use lighter apps so i don't notice it, OOo is a big app so i notice it more. i have been using koffice, abiword and pathetic writer (from the SIAG office suite) and they all save as rtf if i want, pathetic writer can just 'File > Save As... pdf' which is nice, but if i need to start saving in OOo/Sun/Wordperfect/MSWord formats, i'll try out openoffice.org again, and no doubt it will not be too slow.

2) Hmm, isn't Synaptic pretty much like click-n-run?

my apologies, yes it is, of course it's distro specific isn't it? i have heard that it can only work on debian and red hat because of needing to have available repositories (i know i am wrong even as i type this!) and mandrake has a couple of half finished attempts at a similar thing, i have used the Mandrake Updater (it tends to freeze up) and heard about this rpm-get thing they have... I just find installing binary packages from command line (whether rpm or tgz or whatever) is a morsel of urine so to speak, and nobody can tell me it is difficult after they have tried it a couple of times.

3) Again in RH and I assume most of the others you can do thing very similar to the Windows way by browsing your files in your graphical file manager (Nautilus in this case, but a Windows person will see it as "explorer"). That is, click on your home folder on your desktop and it will bring up something very similar to Windows explorer. If you right click on a file and select "open with" it will give you a list of editors. I don't know about you but I would figure after trying each one once most people would be able to select one from that point on that they are comfortable with.

yep, that right click menu will only contain those text editors if your system has thoughtfully added them to the right click menus for konq and nautilus though. most do, but i am sure there are notable exceptions.

4) Never used it, never plan on using it, can't comment on it.

i can, it's not very good. i only mentioned it to try and answer the question. if somebody wants to use some filesharing program in linux that they had in windows, better to give them the equivelant program and let them get bored with it themselves i say

You guys sound like you've never used Linux (or at least any recent version). I just don't get it.

now this is the bit i really wanted to quote, i am kind of confused here, because i am sure we are all using the latest versions of whatever distro we are using (i am), but the thing is, lets face it, linux is so damn good that it is easy to criticise!

wait wait wait! i will explain myself, say i ran windows, i can't criticise it! i am used to its hundreds of niggly little things i don't like, or that don't work that i can't change, or else i have already done some cack handed fix and forgotten about it (like overwriting telnet.exe with putty.exe, not that i would bother doing that, i'd just drop putty.exe into a the system directory so it's in the $PATH or whatever it's called in windows) so i don't even notice windows' faults in a distinct way. windows is so crap that its faults blind me to its other faults, if you follow so far.

linux works a lot better, i mean often it doesn't when you first install it, and if you are a newbie that can be really irritating but me, i installed slack 9 and because i have been nutting out mdk and RH for a while now, it takes me about 20 minutes to edit all the relevant files (/etc/fstab, /etc/profile, /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and so on) to my satisfaction. nothing's largely wrong with my linux workstation that i cannot fix myself... EXCEPT these one or two issues. they become so noticable not because they are a big deal, but because they cannot hide behind the other flaws in the system, why? because there are very few other flaws to hide behind.

I think i am being longwinded here and vague but i hope you see what i am saying, i only moan about bad things in linux (and OOo is only an application for gods' sake, and it does actually work, it's just a few seconds behind!) because everything else about linux is very good...

Well I'll dump some views in.

I say one should criticise, however the criticism should always be positive, constructive where possible. One of my favourite things in Open source is the attitude of positive statements. The GPL says you can do this and you can do that, and I for one would sooner see 'I can't do this, it needs to be sorted out by someone with the skills', rather than no you cannot run that FoxPro on Linux because we don't like it (ha ha - ...sorry).

Anyway Open Office has a problem with slow start up, and on 2 GHz systems this should not be happening. In fact it is a big barrier, and the sooner they get it sorted the better. I find I get a quick startup, however I am finding that AMD systems seem to run a little faster with this kind of thing, and I am starting to wonder if this has more to do with display control than software, an area that AMD kicks Intels butt.

I find the problem with not understanding command line is an evolutionary darwinian style barrier, those that can do, those that can't get MCSE and work for lower wages with fewer prospects:)

The VI issue is already well explained above, and the trouble seems to really be that VI is not very mouse friendly (in fact I don't know if you can use a mouse in VI). That single alteration in VI would change many peoples views. And because of the lacking mouse support it is seen as backwards or outdated, instead of powerful.

The lack of top level programs and games available for Linux is disgusting, and will only improve if we keep shouting at these people that if you don't develop for us then you will never make a sale. Make it clear to them, that they need to port now, because in a couple of years the open source apps will be as good as theirs are, and then they will not have a market to sell to becasue the software will be free. They already know this, they are just holding out that M$ will somehow stop Linux, but IBM and SUN have realised that it can't be stopped. They jumped on at the evolionary knee point. The Linux OS has reached the point where it will do nothing but grow, and that curve is exponential, and it becomes unstoppable. However what they have truly failed to understand is that this cycle (the same one they used to get all their top positions) cannot be stopped by normal means. They are hopping beyond hope that some silly patent is going to prevent this from growing, but it can't, because even if they destroy RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian and any of the others, someone will just remove the offending code and write new code, find a way round and solve the problem. They are hopping someone will buy out Linux, which they cannot do. Linus gave away the rights to hold the code proprietary. They are hoping it will run out of money - too late peolpe are making millions out of this software. They are hoping people will stop developing for the Linux OS. Not going to happen, the coders get too much in return for their effort, payment is not what they want and the can only scratch this itch with Linux. They are watching their futures fail in the blind hope that they will be able to stop the unstoppable - the future looks black and white to me - with a little yellow beak.

The IRS are publicly funded, they want you to file on line it saves them a fortune, tell them that the only way it will happen is if they produce a Linux compatable version of their software. If they don't then they are going to be dealing with my paper filings. Of course I''m not going to pay to file my taxes either, but thats another issue.

Edit : In RH 8 and up double click the RPM, and it will install itself. /Edit

/rant

Hope I made my views clear.

I agree with much of your post but there are a couple of exceptions:

Linux Frank wrote:Anyway Open Office has a problem with slow start up, and on 2 GHz systems this should not be happening. In fact it is a big barrier, and the sooner they get it sorted the better. I find I get a quick startup, however I am finding that AMD systems seem to run a little faster with this kind of thing, and I am starting to wonder if this has more to do with display control than software, an area that AMD kicks Intels butt.

You may be correct that OpenOffice starts slow on *your* system but it is incorrect to say OpenOffice has a problem with slow startup in general. I may have agreed with you at one time, in fact not long ago. It had always been extremely slow for me as well, even on RH8. Something that made somewhat of an improvement on RH8 was to install a stock kernel. However I have since upgraded to RH9 and like I mentioned in the previous posts it takes a maximum of 5 seconds to open any of the Office apps (that actually sounds a lot longer than it feels, it feels almost instant relative to the old startup times of OOo).

You are also correct in saying that OOo should not be slow on a 2Ghz system. It is obvious to me that it doesn't have to be. What I can't tell you for sure is what the magic is that makes it run faster on my machine under RH9. Maybe it's the version, maybe it's a patch Red Hat installed, I don't know but I have absolutely no performance issue with OpenOffice on my machine (1.4Ghz AMD). Everything runs like butter.

The VI issue is already well explained above, and the trouble seems to really be that VI is not very mouse friendly (in fact I don't know if you can use a mouse in VI). That single alteration in VI would change many peoples views. And because of the lacking mouse support it is seen as backwards or outdated, instead of powerful.

VIM is not the type of editor that you would really want mouse support in (although you have it in GVIM). It would completely defeat the entire purpose of the keyboard and command layout. The idea is to never have to move either hand from the "home" row on your keyboard. It's extremely efficient if you actually know how to use it. If you want mouse support and a graphical editor use KWrite or something. VIM is perfect the way it is, in fact it is a work of art. Don't touch it or I'll switch back to Microsoft. :) Actually you can run VIM and GVIM on Windows as well. And when I used to do lot of Windows work I used VIM.

Its funny how Open Office takes 15 seconds to open on my 200 mhz machine with 64mb of RAM, I never considered that slow. Installing programs is a breeze with Apt, now all we need is a pretty graphical front end for apt rpm. Maybe one already exists, perhaps the people at Red Hat should create one. Funny how there are hundreds of graphical programs that make changing the configuration of a linux computer much easier than using VIM at times. For file sharing we have E Donkey and Limewire. Also try WineX for those pesky windows games.

A true linux lover never gives up hope of having everything they look for in a computer system with linux. You dont see mac lovers keeping old win 98 boxes around.

Fair comments Void, I have installed OO on various machines, I have a system that is a K6 111 450, and OO opens in a few seconds, on this machine it runs faster than M$ Windows and Word ever did together. But my comments were meant to be general. And most people seem to have an issue with the startup speed of OO, and hopefully it will be cured, because this is an issue for general users. My comment was really that I think there is something different when it is used on AMD systems verses Intel systems. And a lot of people have this issue with OO, in fact damn near everyone I have recommened it to, there is a bug there, but no-one seems to be able to quite pin-point it, which I think is being shown in this here thread.

I like VI, what I meant was peoples perceptions. Some people want their text editor to act like a mini wordprocessor, and that is what notepad does, so people expect that. So the advice given was to use Gedit, kwrite, etc. and that would remove their funny looks. I agree with this. Let them use the user-friendly [sic] tools, then when they get into system admin and need a more powerful tool introduce them to VI. I was merely trying to clarify what I see as the reason people unfamiliar with real computing shiver when they see Vim.

Hey preacher, have you tried synaptic, because that is a nice GUI front end for apt-get for RH. See voids must have how-to - Which I have to say I recently installed (like three or four days) and it is proving to be excellent. I believe 'apt-get synaptic' will suffice.

You guys covered pretty much everything I might have added, so I'm just going to testify my experience with OOo. I never considered OOo to be slow at startup, especially since I used to use StarOffice until version 5.2. Now, StarOffice was SLOOW and compared to that OOo is fast. I also experience this splash screen appearance delay myself, but it's really nothing to get desperate about.

apt-get install synaptic