The increasing frequency of 'help help help' messages from new users who
arrive at a command line console and don't know what to do next is a
good sign: more people moving from doze to Linux, more moving from
fedora and suze to debian. But there is a real danger of scaring them
off -- and I think their plight is a sign that debian should offer a
little extra help for them. What do others here think?
What I have in mind is that the new installer could rewrite the welcome
text to say something like
This is a new install of
Debian GNU/Linux stable thisbox tty1
If you expected to get a graphic logon and desktop,
please login as root and run "makemegraphic"
Otherwise, run "installdone" to get rid of this message.
thisbox login: _
With, obviously, a couple of scripts to either revert to the normal
situation or install kde and kdm (easiest, IMHO, for beginners -- but
gnome and gdm would do too, or perhaps the two alternatives could be
offered by the script, with a brief description of pros and cons).
I'm guessing this would be a trivial exercise, but I think it would make
for a much sweeter experience for many of the growing numbers of Debian
newbies.
Improvements? Disagreement? Consensus?