[Scribus] Installation Woes

[Gary Chambers]

Hello Scribus List Members,
                                            My name is Gary, and I live 
in Prince Rupert on the northwest coast of Canada just below the Alaska 
panhandle.  I moved here to do some community publishing work, which has 
been my buiness since the early 1970's.  I operate both a Mac and an IBM 
clone machine and I thought I was going to have to buy Quark Express or 
Pagemaker for my page building work.  Then I discovered Scribus.  
Scribus is obviously less costly and reviewers say it's even better than 
the two market leaders.  But I'm having trouble just installing the program.

         I am not a computer scientist or programmer.  My experience 
with computers began in the 1970's on typesetting machines called 
Compugraphics.  I never thought of them as computers, but that's what 
they were.  Later I moved on to Macs and IBM types with MS-Dos.  
Frankly, for years I avoided MS Windows, because I felt I had the real 
and original windows software in the Mac and saw MS Windows as a poor 
copy of the Mac operating system.  I still feel that way, but now I'm 
also using an IBM clone with Windows 98.  I build web sites sometimes 
and I use the IBM to make sure my HTML pages are showing up properly on 
MS Windows machines.  98 is excellent for this, because if a site 
displays correctly on that unstable old saw, then I can be fairly sure 
it will display on any MS Windows computer.

Ultimately I plan  to partition the clone's hard drive and put Linux on 
one of the partitions.  The Mac runs OS X so it should run Scribus 
anyway, without partitioning.  Having just moved, however, I'm still 
unpacking boxes so those changes will have to wait.  Meanwhile, I must 
try to get both computers ready to start serious publishing work right 
after Christmas.  I have downloaded Scribus into the IBM clone, but the 
installation instructions are over my head.  As I said, I'm not a 
computer scientist, programmer or technician.  For that reason, the 
letter below, which I sent to a Linux savvy technician today, will be 
self explanatory.

Gary Chambers
chambers at citytel.net

>               Some time ago you sent my friend some disks with Open 
> Office and some Open Source utilities on them.  He later passed them 
> to me and I still have them somewhere.  Today he informed me that he 
> still owes you $10 for that.  He's between jobs right now and probably 
> short of cash.   I asked him for your contact details and told him I'd 
> pay the $10 plus whatever it costs to have you send me similar disks 
> for the program, Scribus.
>
>     I recently  moved to Prince Rupert to do some publishing up here, 
> and want to use Scribus as my page building software.  But although I 
> have reasonable computer savvy, I find it difficult to download 
> Scribus and install it.  Downloading goes okay, but installing 
> involves instructions that fly a mile over my head.  I operate an IBM 
> clone and a Mac.  The Mac will soon be running on OS X and the IBM 
> currently has 98 in it, but I will be partitioning its drive to add 
> Linux as soon as time permits.   I want to keep 98 to test web pages I 
> have built, to make sure they show up okay on MS Windows machines, but 
> I intend to end up doing most things on the IBM clone using Linux.
>
>     I know there will be a learning curve with Linux and with 
> Scribus.  I'm okay with that, but I don't want to spend weeks just 
> learning how to install the software.  I'm hoping you can supply, or 
> tell me where to get, Scribus on a CD with a more user friendly 
> installer.
>
>      I'll be in the bank after the weekend, and I'll get you a money 
> order then for the $10 mentioned above.  Could you please tell me how 
> much to add to get your help with obtaining a usable copy of Scribus?  
> Thanks for your consideration of this request.


   Being able to install a working copy of Scribus on the IBM clone 
would be a great help to me right now, so I decided to join this list 
and see if anyone here has any tips or links I may have overlooked.  -- Gary