See, now there’s the problem.
It takes 3 seconds for you to say “update your video driver... yada yada yada”
Then the person listening decides he’d spend a half an hour or so and it should be EASY to upgrade the driver.
And then after he’s four days into the project and still doesn’t have it done, he’s pretty frosted. And I do not blame him at all. Linux is INCREDIBLY difficult to tweak.
I installed Knoppix on one of my laptops to boot from the hard drive. It would not recognize my wireless. I found all I had to do was make a simple change to one of the init parms,
But it WOULD NOT let me edit it! I had to create a copy, edit the copy, then try to copy it back.
But you can’t say COPY X Y, you have to use MOVE...
Now, I’m not a rookie either. I was my first computer about 1973 and have been working with them ever since. I’ve written a LOT of assembler code, and worked with Univacs, IBM’s, others.
I am a z/OS systems engineer now.
In all my years, the only thing I’ve seen as cryptic as Linux is some of the C derivatives.
With the latest Ubuntu, I was able to update my video driver from the desktop (once I figured out how to find the relocated system functions).
I hate the new desktop, but it did its job in this case.
First, it would be helpful to learn the way that file permissions work on Unix systems. It's usually not a good idea to be logged on as root (administrator), so "sudo" is your friend. Second, the copy command is "cp source_file target_file". So typically that would be "sudo cp source_file target_file" and then authenticate as root. To move a file, the command is "mv source target". I hope this information is helpful.
These commands are standard on any Unix system, so it doesn't matter whether you are using Linux, Solaris, Free BSD, HP-UX, Mac OS X, or any other version of Unix. It all works the same.