On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 14:50, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 13:45, Mark Roach wrote: > > On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 13:42, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > > > > > What about a Box that says: > > > "Do you want me to AutoDetect your hardware? > > > Yes or No" > > > > I'm not saying that I think autodetection is a bad idea, just that I > > don't particularly need/want it, and I don't imagine the people who > > write the debian installer particularly need/want it either, and that > > that is probably why it hasn't happened. It's that whole itch scratching > > thing that open source people are always talking about :-) RedHat et al > > have that particular itch because they want to make money, debian folks > > are doing it for themselves in most cases > > Knoppix does it and is based on Debian. > > Everyone deservers Free Software even people who aren't particularly > itchy :) > > Bijan That about sums things up - these were the design decisions that Klaus Knopper made for his edition, built with a very select collection of software and targetted for one CPU family. Apparently, we can point this out until we are blue in the face and it won't matter, but Debian is aimed to a substantively larger collection of processors, system architectures, functions, languages and even window managers than Knoppix is, and so the simple scale of the task of hardware detection is vastly greater than it is in the Knoppix environment. Anytime I've run Knoppix, I've needed at least one of the cheatcodes to get it working correctly with most of the hardware, so I personally don't experience the autodetection the way so many proclaim (just my bad luck,) while my three installs of Woody generally found everything, although the boot-floppies installation didn't pass that on to specifically choose the correct modules (I did that on my own.) That said, the times I've installed Red Hat, it has always shortchanged me on screen resolution. Annoying, even if the autodetection was *reasonable* :( -- 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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