Re: debian

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 07:10, Aryan Ameri wrote:
> On Friday 20 June 2003 07:08, Bijan Soleymani wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 21:50, Joyce, Matthew wrote:
> > > I have been using Debian for about 18 months now.
> > > I like it and prefer it to other dristos I have tried.
> > >
> > > Today I had to install Redhat 9 on a system.
> > > It detected everything.  A totally good experience installing this
> > > os.
> > >
> > > I'm not saying I will be moving from Debian to redhat, but I do
> > > wish Debian would address the install procedure.
> > >
> > > Clearly it is possible to have comprehensive hardware detection, so
> > > presumably somewhere someoene is choosing not to address this
> > > issue.
> > >
> > > What is the reason debian does not install like other OSs ?
> >
> > Try Knoppix it is based on Debian and does all that detection.
> >
> > There's no good reason why Debian doesn't.
> 
> Oh, really? 
> 
> Please come back, when you have a working KNOPPIX running on MIPS or 
> Sparc, and then we will talk.

There's no reason to get sarcastic.

I run Debian on sparc and other architectures. Debian on each
architecture is slightly different. For example on sparc there are
images to boot off the network. I don't know if there are similar images
for i386, but they would be useless anyways. This isn't a reason not to
have them.

As I said in another message, on sparc there is barely any hardware (2
sound cards, 2-3 network cards, some scsi cards) and most of it just
works because it is included in the kernel. On i386 there's a gazillion
different pieces of hardware.

I don't see how adding hardware detection to i386 hurts any of the other
architectures.

P.S. Red Hat and Suse support other architectures too. I don't like Red
Hat, and I certainly don't like Suse, but I mention it to show that
hardware detection is compatible with portability.

Just my two cents,
Bijan