Re: Debian and Red Hat and Slackware prevalence
On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Jim Pick wrote:
> Red Hat Software is a company, so they have to turn a profit. That
> means they have to have a plan for what they do. An agenda, if you
> will. Part of their plan is to build an excellent distribution for
> newbies.
There are five kinds of users that will be installing a linux distribution
at any given time and their needs are different. One thing that you need
to pay attention to is which group is predominant in installation for your
distribution at a particular point in time and then you taylor it to make
it is pleasant as possible for that group. These kinds of installations
are:
1. Experianced people upgrading from a previous version.
2. Experianced people converting from another Linux distribution.
3. Inexperianced people installing Linux for the very first time.
4. People with experiance in other flavors of *nix installing Linux for
the first time.
5. Experianced people installing on an additional system.
If you can determine what the breakdown of installations are, you can
gauge where to focus your energy in "cleaning up" the installation process
to impact the most number of users. Newbies (catagory 3) are very
important because if they fail, they are likely to go back to their old
newsgroups and tell folks that they tried linux and it sucks.
I started with Slackware and then tried RedHat after about a year. Their
cnews package sucked, UUCP sucked, and they did not even have nntpd. I
tried Debian and it all worked "out of the box". The problem with Debian
for a newbie is that there are SO MANY different programs to choose from.
Also, if you want to change something, it can be confusing (ever tried to
de-install smail and install exim as a newbie?).
Maybe Debian should make a "Debian-Lite" with a subset of the full
distribution ... a default news server (suggest cnews) default mail server
(suggest smail) that a user can install and have a full-featured, albeit
with limited choices, system. THEN if they want to add/change things they
can go to the full distribution and play around and tweak.
Most newbies get in trouble from installing TOO MUCH stuff on the first
pass through dselect. One of my projects on my todo list is a subset of
debian and some local stuff to make an sbay.org linux distribution for
sbay.org that will install and work with a minimum number of choices given
to the user. Once it is installed, the user will be informed about debian
and the additional software available for their system from debian.org.
George Bonser
Why is it that the same people that tell us that manned space flight
is a waste of money also tell us that we have been visited by aliens?
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: