Re: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!

[Ari Makela <hauva@iki.fi>]

John Lapeyre writes:

>    Maybe you find it easy. But you are relatively elite in debian
> knowledge.

I'm not a beginner. I even earn my living as an unix
administrator. But I'm certainly not a unix guru.

>    I got a notebook two months ago.  The video, sound, and pcmcia are
> not supported by slink.   

Are these really a big problem? During the summer same happened to me and
what I did was following:

I installed Slink. I went to a local xfree86-mirror and got SVGA
xserver version 3.3.5 which supports NM2200 chip. I dropped it in
place of the distributed. Yes, that's a wrong way of doing things but
it has always worked for me. I didn't know about <URL:
http://www.debian.org/%7evincent/ > at the time (BTW: this is a
problem, people don't know about these unofficial updates).

Sound support for esssolo-1 came when I compiled 2.2-kernel. There
are instructions what needs to be updated on Debian web site.

PCMCIA is not needed for installation and it can be compiled later. It 
doesn't have to work at first.

I feel that anyone who tinkers with GNU/Linux - or with any unix or
unix clone - should be able to do above things if documentation is
available. Documentation in one place instead of several web pages
which are hard to find. I've not seen such a document. Is it that I
haven't found it or is it non-existent? If latter is true I could
write some kind raw version if others agree with me on this.

>    Maybe people who can't do that are lazy and stupid and don't
>    deserve Debian. 

And you say you don't use sarcasm? :) 

>    People can't ship stable Debian on new machines, but they can ship
> RH and SuSE.

I agree that many users cannot replace the kernel on the rescue disk
like I did. One needs some knowledge and also a Linux system which
most people don't have. But it's not so hard that it might sound,
either. It's enough that it works on one system, it doesn't have to
result a system where every device works.

I feel Athlon is the most important problem. As far as I remember
this is the only case where it has been impossible to install Debian
on an Intel system if we don't count very exotic hardware. 

>   (I don't want to attack with the sarcasm, just to make a strong point).

It seems that I am not able to write what I think so I try again:

I don't deny that there are problems for some users but in most cases
"stable is too old" problems can be solved relatively easily. This
could be made easier for inexperienced people if two things would be
done:

	- if it would be easier to find the unofficial updates for
	xfree and Gnome.
	- as simple and short documenation as possible where it is
	told how Debian is updated.

If the development cycle were faster there might not be enough time to 
test enough. That's what I'm afraid of. The pool system might be a
solution. 

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w -- # Ari Makela, hauva@iki.fi, http://www.iki.fi/hauva/
use strict;my $s='I am just a poor bear with a startling lack of brain.';my $t=
crypt($s,substr($s,0,2));$t=~y#IEK65c4qx AR#J o srtahuet#;$t=~s/hot/not/;my
@v=split(//,$t);push(@v,split(//,reverse('rekcah lreP')));foreach(@v){print;}