Svan,

My comment was not an attack on you or whether you particularly wanted to use Linux. However, you are not the first person who has come up with questions, got frustrated and then started to get annoyed with the situation. It is understandable, but in many cases, it ends up becoming a flame war of opinions.

There's nothing wrong with saying "Look, I thought I could do XYZ, I can't, so I am not going to stick it out." Each person has their own threshold for grief, and yes, changing operating systems can be grief. While I think that *Nix has a better way of doing things, if you don't know that way it makes a simple task difficult.

As you are a technical writer, I would recommend that instead of getting a "For Dummies" book, which will probably teach you just enough to get to a point before you want to be, take a look at RUTE's guide:
<redacted>

It will expand in most browsers and give you a good reference for starting out, though, please realize, it is dated and some information may be old and less useful or even wrong, the basics should be there.

I have had many conversations from people who have been using Windows or another OS for many years, and I myself started that way, and was even a Windows System Admin for several years before really understanding how Unix/Linux can be a more powerful tool. Before Power Shell (still know few people who use it on Windows) there was really only cmd/dos prompt syntax for doing things.

Now, when I was creating users for my network (don't ask, they demand islands of isolation so no central system) I did the following:

for i in <system1> <system2> <system3> <system4>
do
ssh $i "useradd -u <userid> <groupid> <secondary groupid> -m -k /etc/skel -d <home directory> -s <shell> -c <comment> <user>"
done

where the items in the <>s were the info. That made my user on 4 systems without having to do it 4 times

There's a lot of power there and Linux can be VERY user friendly, just not intuitive. Once you understand it, its like the handcuffs come off and you are way more powerful at doing the same jobs.

Yes.

That's because anyone not using a stand-alone or live-cd Linux installation must have a level of sophistication newbies don't have.

Even to install a multi-boot OS is beyond the sophistication of 99% of all Windows users and 50% of all Linux users.

I think the biggest question I have so far is how to know what to install based on the system I have. For example, usermod -G admin Bob won't work on CentOS 5.3 and returns an invalid numeric argument error. So I guess what I need to do is to update shadow-utils. When I google that for RPM packages, one website returns seven pages of links, with about, oh, 10 relative to CentOS and several for RedHat too. This is not perhaps the best example because this page does refer to CentOS 5.3, but in general how do I figure out "what to get" for an application or upgrade package based on "what I have"? We're not in XP Pro anymore and I don't want to go looking for falling houses to stand under....

what are you trying to do with usermod? If you are trying to make Bob part of the admin group you have it backwards


Also, your usernames should, for conventional sake, be lowercase

Also, usermod -G will change the secondary group, so the GID (Group Identifier) for the user never changes.

If you run the "id" command on your user you will see the UID, GID and the groups they are a member of.

As for CentOS you can use yum, the built in downloader/software manager to handle most of what you need. Also look at pirut for doing most of what you want with the packages. It should be installed.

Think of the way Linux distributions manage software now as packages of information that rely on other packages of information. They now use repositories, kind of like a personal "Amazon.com" if you will. Say you want to install xyzfoo.rpm you can do that with yum on CentOS 5 and if xyzfoo.rpm needs abcdoodad.rpm it will grab both, download them, install them and update its own library to show that they are both there.

Bob was just an example but I was following Robhogg's instructions at User not in the sudoers file - LinuxQuestions.org .

The goal was to be able to run sudo. CentOS didn't create an admin group or any admin users (i.e., me) on first install but I'm beyond that problem now having created the group manually and then given it root permissions.

Back to the installer - Isn't what the Add/Remove Software GUI shows me simply the packages that came with the CD download? Or is it looking at the internet to determine what's available? What if I want a program which isn't in the Add/Remove Software GUI though? How do I know which one is right?

I'm closing this thread. Sven, if you have a new question, feel free to start a new thread.