On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 12:46:39AM +0200, Ari Makela wrote:
> 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.
Ever installed on an older laptop? I spent 3 days trying to install on my
laptop because it didn't have a CDROM, so i had to get base off of the
network(and i know that i could put it all on floppies, but i have a really
hard time finding 1 good one to boot off of, and I know i'm not alone).
>
> 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;}
Erik Bernhardson
journey@jps.net
--
It is better to remain silent and be considered a fool, than to speak and
remove all doubt.
-- Mark Twain
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