7 Excellent Linux Apps You May Not Know About

Not really. But the instructions for glabel are typical of a certain mentality, to explain in inordinate detail things which are obvious, while not explaining things that need it.

So what I cannot figure out, and yes this is totally ridiculous, is how you are supposed to type the ${1} stuff on the label layout when doing a merge. Nothing seems to work. You can click away, try to type, it is simply not possible. The help tutorial just shows you a label filled with stuff without giving you any clues on how to actually get this stuff into the label.

After 15 minutes of increasing irritation, I gave up. They are trying so hard not to make anything difficult for you that they won't get down and tell you how to use the dammned thing!

I'll probably feel very stupid when the answer presents itself.

OK, yes, I am stupid. What you have to do is click several times on a left facing arrow, which at first does nothing, but then brings up a text box tab where you can edit the contents of the text box. Now why couldn't they say that? Or better still, when you do the text box, automatically have the tab showing the edit function come up. After all you are unlikely to want your address labels to read TEXT! Oh well. Probably my own stuff provokes the same reaction in lots of users, and it seems so obvious to me.

do you have an especially narrow screen?

This is, for the most part, a system wide problem. Either the instructions are as you state or in order to get the "right" information it is often necessary to know how to access a man page.

Unacceptable if the goal is to bring in new users.

I install from 7 to 20 new linux users a week and provide them support for as long as they need it. The problems are not learning the system...it is the quirks such as you mention. Yeah, and you know what they say first thing out of the box...

"Well, in Windows it wasn't this hard"

The difference? Someone's job demands they make it easy for the end user, most cases anyway. In Free Software, if it's good enough for the author, then that's about as good as it's gonna get until someone opens it and fixes it. Most people who are in Linux totally learn to live with the quirks...the new people write it off as a bad experiment and go back to indentured servitude.

h