Re: debian

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

On Sat, 2003-06-21 at 13:41, Paul Johnson wrote:
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> On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 11:08:22AM -0400, Bijan Soleymani wrote:
> > My mother needs to access her email. I installled Debian on the
> > computer. She has no problems using Debian. However, I had to do the
> > install because she has no clue about settings in XFree86. With knoppix
> > she just has to press the power button and she gets logged into KDE.
> 
> Yes, but see, this still holds true that the difficulty of the
> installer doesn't matter.  Debian trades off one bitch of
> an installer for the ability to run on very little maintenance (which, if
> you script it, you could have her box send you an email every time it
> dialed up, or serve the dialup for her yourself, and do it yourself
> for her every once in a while) for extremely long periods of time, and
> extremely customizable to your mom's needs and what hardware you've
> got to do it with.
Difficulty still matters. I don't see how X is easier to setup than in
Knoppix.

> Knoppix, on the other hand, trades off a lot of usability and pretty
> much the entire need for a packaging system but lets you cram the same
> OS on almost any semi-recent (like at least a Pentium) hardware with
> the reasonable expectation that most, if not everything, gets
> autodetected correctly.
True.

> > I got X to work. It wasn't so tough (I can even run the gimp). You just
> > have to remember to mount your mouse :)
> 
> Umm, you can only mount block devices...character devices like mice
> can't be mounted...
In the hurd you can add almost anything to the filesystem I call it
mounting. You can even "mount" ftp sites (even as a normal user).

> > the command is something like
> > settrans /dev/mouse IMPS/2 /dev/psaux
> > and you tell X to use /dev/mouse and osmouse.
> 
> OK, that's telling X about your mouse, not mounting it.
In the hurd you "mount" everything. I call it mounting because you are
adding it to the filesystem. Actually what happens is that you run a
server (read "set a translator") with settrans that provides the
service. Then any program can probe that file or directory and the
server you set will respond.

Kind of like running gpm and having X read /dev/gpmdata

Bijan