On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 13:45, Alex Malinovich wrote: > On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 11:40, Hal Vaughan wrote: > > I wonder -- are the people that start with Debian people who are new to Linux, > > but used to Unix or sys admin/programming on other systems, or are they just > > at the "user" (or just above) level? > > I did my first ever install of a Linux distro 13 months ago (almost to > the day as a matter of fact), which happened to be Debian Potato. Before > that I'd used Windows, Windows, and more Windows. I started up the OS/2 > installer once. That was about as far as I got with it though. :) The > only real unix-type experience that I'd had before that was using Cygwin > (before the days of X support) for about 5 months. That got me > comfortable with ls, grep, less, and emacs. > My first "install" was a TRS-80 Model I - connect the cables, figure out what was where, plug it in and switch it on - ROM does have some nominal advantages ;) I did also install Windows - all the way from 1.0 to 98r2 for myself with the earlier versions and for others with the later ones. They've been ugly over the years. But the ugliest install for the longest time was OS/2 - particularly in the days when the system was just EISA and thus there was no hardware detection to speak of. The drivers weren't necessarily there, but unlike with Windows where there might be a driver diskette with the device, OS/2 didn't necessarily have one. Diskettes that had been used for a stretch and then removed during installation would get called back, and the information showing was not for the installer, but someone debugging the installation program. When you consider that it took three floppies to boot the installation process (disks Install, 1 and 2, to make it more confusing,) and midway through, it decided it needed to reboot, needing to go back to the original boot disks, it became "a tad irksome." > Other than that, I was an absolute newbie. I thought mounting was what > you did with a horse and ext2 was the 2nd extended partition on my HD. > :) And, worst of all, I didn't discover debian-user until AFTER I got > the system fully installed. :) > > Now, 13 months later, I run Sid with some experimental packages on my > desktop machine and laptop, a mailserver running Sid with relatively old > packages that I know work right. (Testing is a bit TOO old for me. :) > And a webserver/Sid mirror running, you guessed it, Sid. :) > > I also tried installing Mandrake about a month ago to see what it was > like and found one of the best installers I've ever seen. I now carry > the 1st Mandrake install CD around with my laptop anytime I need an > emergency boot disk for someone. (Primarily because of the partitioning > tool.) However, I can't stand the distro from the user standpoint. The > default setup with no VTs is absolutely horrid, and having to use a > wizard for just about everything is a nightmare. I'm going to give > Gentoo a shot as soon as I get enough HD space freed up, but in the > meantime, I'm a diehard Debian supporter. :) > > -Alex Debian's installation, when I've done it, is clearer than my experience with Slackware. I've never needed to do Mandrake or S.U.S.E., but I have done Red Hat on some places, and it was actually easier than Windows. It was substantively less complete than Debian, but it ran a framebuffer on an NVidia card for the install, and edged around problems I've seen on this list numerous times. The result was a functional system the first try on those sites. It gets me in and out of clients' systems quicker, and far less likely to need to spend hours tuning and getting "other services" to run, but I can tell as I see it run that it is missing stuff I would want, because of Debian's HUGE collection of software - particularly the different scaling of software. (How many average users need to run AOL Server, for example?) Maybe that is where some of the problem comes for some people - being expected to install an o/s, plus all of the servers (particularly when a new-to-Linux user has no clue about the difference between them, and possibly what some of them do,) plus all of the user software. M$ splits the software installation into a separate group of tasks. My first time installing Linux, I remember trying to install *both* INN and CNews, for instance. I'm not sure that sorting the installation of both Gnome and KDE, along with X11 would have made sense if I didn't know about them in advance, and I get plenty of blank stares when I try to explain them to others. But this all comes to a reflection on what is Debian: it is a massive library of well-maintained software packages, kept up-to-date by volunteers, that runs on a large variety of hardware platforms and increasingly also a wide variety of o/s platforms that are also part of this library. It has developed many wonderful tools (and reportedly a couple clunkers, including in the installation process) that work throughout these multitudinous environments, and many back-office tools that have become deeply respected (such as the BTS.) It isn't a company marketing an o/s solution, but rather a multitude of hackers and enthusiasts, leveraging technology, knowledge, and hopes for obtaining the most appropriate power as needed from computing equipment. It isn't "elite", it is just significantly different priorities from the commercial distributions. Those priorities don't place the installer at "Absolutely Essential #1 first exposure must be totally impressive" aspect, at least at present, for a sufficient number of Debian's hackers to have quite caught up to these other ones yet. But guess what: most, if not all, of the commercial installers are GPL'd iirc. If you (generic you - whoever reads this) don't like the fact that the use of DSelect and other similar considerations is rather complex, may I suggest porting one of those others to support Debian's collections? You will find that it may be more complex than the original distribution's implementation as it will need to deal with many more package options and hardware platforms, even if it is kept to only Linux for now, but it can probably be done. My understanding of the current work on an updated installer is in fact drawing on the one developed by Progeny. Debian covers a good number of niches, but thus far, for the core of the distribution, commercial is not such a niche, and by the nature of SPI and The Debian Project, that won't likely be. As that has been a significant priority in the commercial field, relative to the non-commercial side, it is to be expected that the attention to such would have been there. I doubt that I'd want to pay for a distribution that was more difficult to install than Debian ;) -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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