A stupid newbie question

John Hinsley jhinsley at telinco.co.uk
Mon Oct 8 18:57:46 UTC 2001


Gary McGovern wrote:

> >
> Dear Alan,
> This may all be all right for some people, and idealistic, but are you
> considering new people. I see some new people to computing who have a really
> hard time just using a web browser or email client. Using Squeak on Windows
> deviates from the HCI principle of familiarity, dragging an image over an
> exe isn't normal for Windows. Installing Squeak on Linux is a complex
> operation in  itself. I'd question any user, task and situation analysis
> that have been done.


Well, Alan can fight his own corner, but as I see it, we either give in
to old and pretty dreadful metaphors, or we try and do something better.
To be sure, the Squeak interface isn't the same as the Windows one, it's
light years in advance! (Microsoft is now so short of ideas it's
actively pinching them from Kde! -- which may well have pinched them
from someplace else....)

What's this "dragging an image over an exe"? It's easy enough for anyone
using Windows to simply set up a shortcut to squeak.exe. 

To be sure, setting up Squeak on Linux isn't trivial. But given that you
have the correct stuff installed (compilers and libraries, make,
autoconf and the dreaded kernel stuff) it's not *that* difficult. And,
with the possible exception of the kernel stuff, all this is required to
build just about anything from source. This isn't Squeak's fault, if,
indeed, fault it is, but Linux's. On the other hand, rpms should just
install:

rpm -i (whatever the full name of the file is.rpm)

given that they were built for a standards compliant Linux.

Cheers

John


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