On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 07:50:51AM -0300, D G Teed wrote: > > I spent all of last summer trying to educate the managers. I've given > up. They won't read or listen. They have heard that Linux users tend to > be emotional fans of their particular distro and can present any > information to back up their favorite. One particular person has the > personality of Captain Kirk. But he is one that won't listen to his Spock. > > It is pointless to say something like "it is straightforward if you know > how", when the there is nothing hinted within the installer to tell > that user of the alternates as they smash into the problem. > (Hint: put a message into the installer scenario where there is no > hard drive to install onto). My manager didn't want any hand holding to > evaluate Debian. He installed it on a notebook, had problems and > thought it proved what he had read about Debian being old. > It sounds like your manager is not a very good manager. The role of a manager is to listen to the recommendations of the technical experts who are subordinate to him. Another role of the manager is to give his people the tools and shielding from upper-level politics they need to do their jobs. If your manager insisted on trying it himself in order to perform the evaluation himself, then it seems that he still fancies himself a techie and not a manager. I mean, is he going to be the one doing the new installs on the servers? Are the servers IBM thinkpads (or whatever notebook he has)? Seems liken evaluation that was designed to fail. Perhaps he just likes the status quo and does not want to see it change. > You are wrong about Redhat not updating the kernel. We had a new 64bit > Intel machine come in a few months back. A techie tried to install his > standard RH 4 on it and no go. He got the "update 4" version of the > installer from Redhat, and away he went. > > For the sake of the discussion, the hardware is not uniform and the servers > are uniquely roled (cyrus, tomcat, custom web apps, MX, postgres DB, etc.). > Tools like system imager can still be used in this case. > The first step to solving a problem is recognition that there is one, but > I don't think we are getting that far in these exchanges. I feel that > Debian has more resources than any commercial distribution. The number > of supported platforms is one evidence of that. The number of developers and > users (including downstream distros) is another. It is just a matter of > making > things a priority and deciding how and where to make this happen. I'm also > hinting strongly here, that fixing this issue would go a long way to > improving > Debian's adoption in heavy IT centres where management has too many > thumbs in the pie. It might even cut out the losses from people going to > Ubuntu and the like. > To be perfectly honest, even if Debian fixes every problem for which it is criticized, I don't think that it will do that much to spur adoption. People who are intent on finding ways of using something else or preventing the adoption of Debian, will find a way one way or another. I guess that attitude is a bit fatalistic, but I think it is an accurate reflection of reality in a lot of places. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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