(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

The main block to beginners using any kind of Linux is the baffling directory tree. It uses incomprehensible very short names, and hides drives away in secret locations.

Why do not people modify Linux so that it has a simple directory tree like windows, and uses proper english words rather than baffling TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) for directories? And hides away all the Linux stuff in a directory called Linux (because its like having a car with the engine inside the passenger compartment).

Then Windows users would give up using windows and use NewLinux instead.

Is it impossible to simplify the directory tree?


Thanks

Yep, Gobolinux is trying that.

But even in our own Puppies, ROX-Filer offers a little-known but easy way to access any part of the tree. I've included 2 pictures and the file.

As you can see from the list, by doing a few edits, you can give human-comprehensible names to the folders. See the "Fontes TTF" and the "lxp-icewm" entries, for example.

I hope this will make your life easier!

(Sorry for the b&w pics, but they take less space on the forum.)

BFN.

recycler99uk wrote:Then Windows users would give up using windows and use NewLinux instead.

If you logged an average Windows user into an account on an Ubuntu machine, they wouldn't see any of that weird Linux directory structure.

All they would see is a home directory that looks a lot like Windows. They would launch applications from Windows-like menus and desktop icons.

What they would NOT see are their familiar C: and D: drives. But they still wouldn't need to go near the /mnt folder.

My current favourite distro is a frugal install of Ubuntu 10.10 on a flash drive with persistent storage. It's about as close to XP as you can get in a Linux. And it never gets buggered up.

If a Windows user still was uncomfortable using it, cleaning up the underlying filesystem wouldn't make any difference.

rcrsn51 wrote:My current favourite distro is a frugal install of Ubuntu 10.10 on a flash drive with persistent storage. It's about as close to XP as you can get in a Linux.

Exactly how you do it? Is it for sharing?

Exactly how you do it?

It's the Nooby-approved procedure here.

rcrsn51 wrote:

Exactly how you do it?

It's the Nooby-approved procedure here.

Haha!

My friendly neighbor is past 80 years old.
He almost get no English at all. I gave Linux Mint
to him and Puppy on a CD okay two DVD rather.

He complained about language but managed to find
Tabloids and Sport mags and Boat and Mobile Home mags
and News Media and TV and Radio on his own but in the end
he still bought a real Win XP that talked Swedish because the
genealogy program that he use only works in WinXP and not
on any other than WinVista or Win7 or on any Linux even with
Wine did not work either it lacked the Borland DataBase program.

So if he could use it then not only would Nooby use it
but anybody would.

But the difficult thing with sda and sdb and such is
when you do partitioning to really be sure it is the Flash
you format and not the internal HD

I don't trust one can lure people into linux or even to puppy linux.

One old workmate that is very good at computers. He saw me use
Linux as early as 2006 and he still fail to get motivated to even try it.
Another former workmate is even better at computers. He has two OS
on his Windows Smartphone. The original and a patched Android.

He did not get motivated to use Linux either. I gave some 4 different
linux on DVD to him. Nope no chance.
A friendly lady two years older than me she has used WinXP
and then used Ubuntu and now she is about to by Apple OS
she don't want to go back to Linux. Firgure out that one if you can

Thank you. I never know you can use Ubuntu that way. One more lesson learnt!

cheers!

Glad to help. Because a flash drive setup is a bit slower, I found that Ubuntu's default double-click UI didn't work well. So I changed it to single-click.

Look in Places > Computer > Edit > Preferences > Behaviour.

Here is a neat trick. I wanted to clone my current Ubuntu flash drive setup to a different drive. So I manually built the system partition using the Grub4Dos method. I then copied the casper-rw partition using egnoclone.

Unlike some OS's, Ubuntu was perfectly happy to run on the new hardware.