I have done multiple websites for myself in the past and one of the major lessons I’ve learned, is that planning ahead is really important. That’s why I’ve created a new page for upcoming articles, which lists all the future subjects I’m going to touch on this page and when.
Introduction
When doing documents using general-purpose word-processing software like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you are capable of doing just about every formatting you’d feel like and add just the type of content you would like, where you like. These editors are fine for most purposes and they are indeed often quite powerful yet easy to use. Also doing math and physics in such editors is surely fine, because these applications are for most uses very easy and intuitive and also rather fast to work with. With all this freedom, people tend to format documents, sometimes a lot, even though it’s just basic content, instead of relying on the default settings because, hey, they’re just dull. Having to even consider how to format a document, is what LyX is all not about!
LyX calls itself a WYSIWYM-editor (What You See Is What You Mean) which will get explained further below, while OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word are WYSIWYG-editors (What You See Is What You Get).
The thing is that most documents do not need all this styling and formatting. In fact, wouldn’t it be nice to always just get right to the content? Wouldn’t it be right if the default styling and formatting were just plain and beauty, and wouldn’t it be nice with an editor built for equations and formulas? LyX is giving the powerful LaTeX-suite a user friendly and intuitive interface.
Matthias Ettrich, the computer-scientist who founded the KDE-project which today is one of the major desktop-environments for Linux and Unix in general, started developing what eventually became LyX back in 1995. It is released under the GPL-license.
Expectations
Knowing that this application is using the mighty powers of LaTeX and knowing it has a 10+ year history, and also knowing who’s behind is also behind one of the most user friendly desktop-suites for Linux and Unix in general, I expect this application to be very user friendly (perhaps even a bit too much, like too many wizards?). I expect the resulting documents to be of a very high quality due to the LaTeX underneath and I expect it to be rock-solid stable.
First impression
LyX starts really fast (in less than 2 seconds), compared to what I’m used to from OpenOffice.org which takes around 30 seconds to start (can be reduced to maybe 5 seconds with the sys tray-quick starter which in return eats quite a piece of RAM while just sitting there) is nothing.
The first time you start LyX you will be greeted with an introduction to the program, explaining the major differences between it and other word-processing software. This page highly recommends you go read the documentation, which I must agree with - you will see that this program is not intuitive at first, but actually takes a little while to get used to. If you don’t feel like reading a few pages of tutorial, you might as well not start at all.
Well, I guess I should just start by digging right into it, starting with the “New document”-button. Read the rest of this entry »
What is Linux?
Linux is a free UNIX-like operating system. Linux is free like in free speech, which means that anybody can get it for free and anybody can modify it to suit their needs. It’s been used for servers for years and has recently started to emerge on the desktop-computer market as a free alternative to Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS, with the major differences being that most of the software available for Linux, is available for free. All development is also done on a voluntary basis, often supported and encouraged by donations.
All this freedom has sparked a wealth of various Linux-variants, referred to as Linux-distributions, which is the Linux-kernel bundled with various applications, tailored to the individual projects goals, which means that there’s now literally thousands of Linux-distributions, all tailored for some specific or generic purpose.
The problem
Some Linux-projects die while new emerge all the time. The cool thing is that there’s probably a distribution out there that just fits your needs, bundled with just the right applications. The sad thing though is to navigate through all the distributions and applications and end up with what you want.
The purpose of the blog
I hear about new applications and distributions all the time. When I find something cool I’ll review it. I emphasize on the friendliness of what I review. The more user friendly it is, the better. If I ever need to start a console to do what I want, that’s gonna be judged hard and if a user-interface is unintuitive, lacking important features, is unstable although it’s marked to be stable, all that will count the negative way in my judgement.
In short, the purpose with this blog is to find the most user-friendly and complete Linux-distribution and Linux-applications.
When does it all start?
The first article is in the cooker and I expect it to be done by the middle of next week at latest.
Updates
Once a month I will publish a review of a Linux-distribution, which I have been testing by doing actual work with it for circa a month, ending with a summing up of all the good and bad things I experienced during that month.
Once a week I expect to do a post on some Linux-application.
Stay tuned!