Re: software for making a web site......
On Monday 15 January 2007 17:31, Michael Fothergill wrote:
> Dear Debianists,
>
> I have been wondering about making a web site where I could offer
> people help installing Fedora on their PCs.....
There are MANY sites to help people installing any distro of Linux on
their computers. While this is an admirable idea, consider the amount
of effort it would take to create a web site, host it, and maintain it.
Wouldn't it be more effective to use that effort to directly help
others in forums and on mailing lists and on other sites that already
do this?
> I have used RH 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 8.0, Fedora Core 1, 5 and now 6. I
> think I have got used to installing it.
>
> The only somewhat pesky area would be laptops which are supposed be
> awkward where Linux is concerned. I don't laptops much.
This is a longstanding difficulty in working with Linux. Laptops have
devices with proprietary drivers that are hard to duplicate.
> I have noticed web sites that sell CDs with popular Linux
> distributions burned on them. I even bought Fedora Core 5 from one.
You can also get a CD with Ubuntu on it for free. Go to the Ubuntu
website and look around. You can order an Ubuntu live cd/install cd
(all in one) and they'll ship it to you for free. If you have the
bandwidth, it's easier to just download the CD image yourself and burn
it. I can remember at one point, before I had broadband, leaving a
download running on my 2nd phoneline to download CD images for Redhat.
> But I found the CDs had errors on them. They did not do an integrity
> check before selling them.
>
> They did not even understand what the problem was I discovered.
> Their replacement CDs had the same errors on them.
Many of the people selling CDs don't know what they're doing. They see
it as a quick way to make a few bucks and don't pay attention to what
they're doing. It sounds like they had a corrupt image they were using
as a source for their CDs.
>
> None of the web sites seem to offer any installation support that I
> could see. If you go at a company like Red Hat it is expensive.
I can't understand that. Have you checked for help on Google? There
are a plethora of sites to get help from. I remember when I was
starting, I found it easy to find newbie sites on Linux.
> I thought about making a web site to do this.
>
> If I sold CDs they would definitely be error free.
>
> Ubuntu seems to be popular at the moment. I have never used it.
> Maybe there would be some interest there as well.
It's free, either by download or on a CD. Give it a try. Personally,
one big reason I use Debian and other Debian based distros is because
it is much easier to upgrade from one version to the next on Debian
than with an RPM based system and any kind of package management is
much easier.
Today I was talking with a friend that uses Fedora and CentOS. He said
whenever it was time to do an upgrade, he would backup the /home
directories, wipe the drive, and reinstall from scratch. His point was
it was "safer" to do it that way because it kept all the versions and
such in sync. I can't imagine doing that. On Debian and Ubuntu, it's
easier. Just change the pointers in the apt sources file and one
command line will do the upgrade. It may take time, but it's much
easier than dealing with other package management systems.
>
> If I would try to make the web site what software would you guys
> recommend using under Debian to make the web pages and road test
> them?
We're on this list because we use Debian and find it quite useful. How
do you think we'd answer that question? ;-)
Hal
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