Re: woody installation
Brian Murphy wrote:
>
> Not trying to start a flame war, but I have a legitimate question that has
> been kicked around a little, but not to my satisfaction :). What are the
> chances that the installation procedure will improve in woody versus what is
> currently in the potatoe distribution?
probably not very likely.
> it is the best right? True, but why can't the install routine be improved?
> It shouldn't be an obstacle course to the newbie...
I do not believe that debian would be used by newbies. it has virtually no
commercial advertising, virtually nothing on store shelves to sell to the
average "newbie", and does not have a brand that newbies would be famillar
with.
> I have installed
> literally hundreds of servers (I work at a large ISP) and I even had a
> little trouble with the install. It found my network card but didn't
> install the dhcp client for some reason.
I find potato's install quite easy. it does prompt me everytime i install
if i want to use DHCP, and if i do it probes the network for a DHCP server
and installs the dhcp client. you say its hard.. well i guess you haven't
tried many of the harder systems. i've successfully installed solaris 2.5,
7, 8, HPUX 10.20, AIX 4.2.0, IRIX 6.2, OpenBSD 2.8, FreeBSD 4.0, Tru64 4.0,
Debian 2.0/2.1/2.2, slackware 3.2/3.4, corel 1.0, redhat 5.2, 6.2, stampede
0.99..and probably 8 other distirbutions of linux. IMO openbsd was the most
obscure(especially when partitioning a drive). potato was/is quite easy.
Tru64, and IRIX are also high on the list of difficult to install(even with
instructions). there are companies that provide a user friendly frontend to
debian for the newbie, corel's spinoff(?) is one and there is another..forget
the name though i dont think its out of beta. ease of installation is the
last thing im interested in, afterall you usually only install it once. and
never see it again.(i can't remember the last time i used deselect either)
Most "newbies" can't even get by in installing a basic version of win9x or
NT or win2k.
> I had to manually do that to get
> things running. Can't imagine what a first time user would say..other than
> something to the effect of "Stupid bleeepin linux..guess I will just keep
> using Windoze". Just because they can't do the install. It simply
> shouldn't be that way, and you can't expect them to be "smart" enough to use
> the mailing list and resources on the Internet.
depends on the user. when i was a newbie i specifically chose slackware as
my OS of choice because i was told i had to do everything manually. its a
great
way to learn. i remember spending weeks trying to get X working and ended up
getting AcceleratedX instead. upgrading libc5 manually, upgrading kernels
and the stuff that goes with them..compiling kde from scratch ..can't tell ya
how much i learned back then from doing that. really helped me able to think
on my feet on new platforms(e.g. AIX, HPUX, IRIX, Solaris) that i had little
exposure to before 6 months ago. I have friends who i have turned onto linux,
i usually reccomend mandrake if they are a newbie and just want to "get to
it".
Or i reccomend slackware if they are more interested in learning. only after
they are used to linux do i reccomend debian as a "reward" for getting the
hard stuff done first(at least in the slackware users). I was suprised how
many people at my last job chose slackware despite my clear warnings that
it was a very manual distribution. and these were people that didn't even
know the word/term/name "Linux" 6 months earlier.
> had to manually select the kernel module for my network card and mess around
> with the XF86Config file to get Xwindows running......why is that?
simple. debian is not a newbie distribution. neither is slackware, nor any
of the BSDs, or most of the unixes(and unix like). most of the people using
the systems should know what they are doing. i for one believe that linux is
no more ready for the desktop then winNT/2k is ready to be a server. it takes
time. if we go too fast bad things could happen(look at the rep win32 gets
for being a server..*cough*)
You can't please everyone. if someone wants an easy to use OS use corel
or mandrake. chances are they won't even understand/care about the power
at the underlying system in debian to be able to take advantage of it anyways.
if that's the case then there is no point to using debian in the first place.
> I have ranted on long enough. I am really interested in hearing what other
> people think about this. Maybe I am really off base here, but I don't think
> so.
> __________________________________________
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netzero..heheh. i remmeber when my friends and i at freeinternet.com used to
talk about when we'd buy them out ..never expected it to be the other way
around :)
i knew i was ready for linux when i got a slackware 3.2 system up and going
in an hour after a bottle of whiskey :)
nate
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