Re: r44961 - people/rmh/win32-loader
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 03:28:27AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Robert Millan wrote:
> > > places, like when you log in, and at the bash prompt. My experience is
> > > that users care about the hostnames of linux machines, and not of
> > > windows systems.
> >
> > I think you mean to say experienced and non-experienced users here. The only
> > problem is that we lack a lot of non-experienced users in our side, which
> > makes the comparison difficult.
>
> No, I'm talking about regular users. For example, a 17 year old who wanted
> dual-boot linux on his computer because it was cool. The first thing he
> had to do was come up with a name for his computer. In general, any user
> for whom installing linux is an act of actually taking ownership of and
> personalising their computer for the first time. Most of the people I've
> seen go through the "oh, I get the *name* my computer now?" process were
> completly inexperienced users.
Why is that so important ? Our user will most likely never see the hostname
she has chosen reflected in the system. That is, unless they learn a bit about
it, but then they'll have figured out how to change hostname anyway.
OTOH, there are users (and I know some) that are bothered by having to figure
out things like hostname, username, etc. They don't want to learn about these
things. They just want to browse the web and stuff like that.
If we want to be attractive to this kind of users, we need to provide something
simple for them. Young users seeking the "cool factor" will unavoidably end
up "in our hands" anyway (as long as they don't suffer from the "I need to run
$WIN32_GAME and wine doesn't support it" syndrome).
> > Doesn't this problem belong somewhere else? Changing the hostname should be
> > easy.
>
> Until it is, it remains up to d-i to not force bad guesses down
> users' throats to painfully deal with later.
Uhm actualy, it doesn't seem so hard. Just launch the network-admin setup
tool, and switch to "General" tab.
About propagation, it doesn't seem like a big problem either. Basicaly, it
propagates to hosts (handled by network-admin), motd (dynamicaly generated on
boot) and mailname (not a problem for the average desktop system).
--
Robert Millan
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