[Glastonbury] Newbie to Glastonbury LUG

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 07:00:27AM +0100, Sean Miller wrote:
> That was a bit moody wasn't it? Blame it on the time of night.

That's OK. Rants are interesting :) [Oracle Apps server is at 11 by the 
way :) ]

> 
> Sorry about that, Andy. I am just sick of "Debian this, Debian that..." and
> people supposedly gloating when any distros other than Debian appear to be
> either changing or disappearing... can't you all see that in reality Debian
> is a distro that is never going to make Linux what it should be, because it
> makes no attempt to appeal to the mass market, to take on Bill Gates head-on
That isn't the whole point of Linux.  Progeny / Lindows / Libranet / 
Mepis all produced/produce "user friendly" distributions. So do Mandrake 
/ SUSE (new - now in capitals!) / RedHat.  Slackware and Debian aren't 
initially user-friendly. Gentoo and LFS are downright newbie-hostile :)

All of the Lindows / Libranet / Mandrake / SUSE / RH could appeal to the 
mass market - but the mass market is not necessarily computer literate.

There are millions of computers out there running Windows.  Many people
have trouble setting up an internet connection even when it's a case
of putting in an install disk.  Should a virus trash their disk, they're
lost.  PC World charges more than £25 per hour for service - and coins 
it in. More than 90% of all Windows systems are preinstalled and I 
suspect many are never updated with security patches / anti virus 
software because it feels hard to do.
  
Installing Windows (of any description) is _hard_ and _scary_ for most 
people.  I could make a small fortune from friends and family for simple
tech support if I charged them commercial rates :)

In this scenario, the "mass market" won't move easily.  It'll take a 
couple of years more of viruses or of real software price rises that 
hurt before many people would consider moving at all. Businesses, on the
other hand, may move quickly especially if licence costs are expensive.
[Why bother with Oracle when you can have MySQL / postgresql?]

> ? It is, in effect, the Linux equivilent of RISC-OS on the Acorn Archimedes,
> an operating system that might have all sorts of good things about it but
> demands significant time and effort in training before you can do something
> as simple as install it on a laptop....

Laptops aren't simple :(  Laptop hardware is sometimes proprietary.  
That said, new computers of any sort are often hard.  I spent the morning 
installing RH 9.0 on a computer for a colleague.  RH 8.0 had detected the 
chipset and LCD screen - and overdriven the display leaving it useless.  
RH _requires_ a working graphics subsystem to a greater extent than
Debian, or so it seems if you want to use the config tools.

RH 9.0 was better but still not foolproof on a new 120GB disk: it 
wouldn't boot until we put a boot partition at the front of the disk.
RH minimum for this: 100 MB :(  Mandrake/SUSE/RH are on a par with 
hardware detection: sometimes one point release betters the others for 
a while - but only on an Intel/AMD architecture and on 586 or better :(

> 
> ....compare my easy installation of RedHat9 a few weeks back with the
> nightmare evening at the LUGOG trying to install Debian, followed by about
> 90 minutes at Martin's house on the phone to somebody, and still only a very
> limited OS resulting (though the man on the end of the phone seemed to think
> it a personal triumph that by the end we had a 640x480 black and white X
> running).... this isn't the way to get Linux onto the PCs of the world...

See above and mailing list archives passim.  RH is (relatively) easy to 
install but not necessarily quite so straightforward to upgrade.  Horses 
for courses - there are choices in distributions :)  Upgrading via the 
RH Network could cost at one stage, at least for more than one machine: 
I'm not sure where the updates may come from now.

> Knoppix (a distro that is allegedly Debian but is clearly too embarrassed to
> admit it in case somebody suggests the mainstream Debian distro comes into
> the 20th century too) is heading in the right direction... still isn't up to
> the standards of RedHat imho, but it's heading in the right direction.
> Nicely able to detect hardware, but the fact you have to type "knoppix
> noscsi" to get it to boot (because, I believe, it thinks the IDE on mine and
> Martin's laptops are SCSCI cards and crashes) shows that (like its parent)
> it fails at the first fence when it comes to being accessible to "the
> general public"... they're not going to know to do that!!

They can hit F2 with the best of us :)  Knoppix is intended as a demo 
disk and as a sysadmins rescue disk. Klaus originally built it for 
himself. It's not quite as self contained as the Debian distributions it
draws on and mixes testing and unstable packages.  Within its 
limitations - again Intel only - its good as far as it goes.  I tend to 
carry a copy to sort out hardware - but you need to be aware, for 
example, that its using the latest/greatest XFree86.  It updates once or
twice a month so would probably not be ideal to base your life on :)

> 
> > In other words,  no coherence in life. Struggling to find something you
> > like, and throwing it away with a pinch because you just can't find
> utopia.

The fox said - "The grapes are sour" :)

> > We have Linux as a concept that doesn't need to be branded, that has many
> > vendors, many evangelists and many many many nooks and crannies to be
> > found...

I run my Linux distribution on an Alpha, a SPARC and assorted Intels. I 
run an older version on a 386 with 4M laptop that will barely boot DOS.  
I have a work colleague who is building his own remote sensing 
magnetometers - and will run them on Linux using a custom built board he's 
designed.  Linux is good for publishing/web serving/databases - and rendering 
Pixar films - and may run your TV digibox, mobile phone and mp3 player. It's
becoming as ubiquitous as you care to make it.

> 
> It was almost Midnight -- I get frustrated when people start belittling my
> opinions and fight back. Apologies, your experience is clearly massive and I
> should not belittle it -- unfortunately the fact that you feel this is a
> "credentials" issue proves my point... my argument is that to use Linux you
> should not *need* to have spent 20 hours a day for 20 years installing
> stuff... *anybody* should be able to do it quickly, intuitively, and should
> end up with a stable implementation that will last.
> 

No arguments here.  My first Linux install took about a week and wasn't 
intuitive.  My latest took about two hours - and still wasn't intuitive 
:)

> > > > This is LUGOG (Linux User Group Of Glastonbury) *NOT* DUGOG (Debian
> User
> > > > Group of Glastonbury) -- PLEASE bear that in mind.
> 
> That was my most sensible statement last night... I am sick of seeing people
> enthusing about this "apt-get" functionality and taking every opportunity to
> slag off tarballs, source code compilations and rpm.  Diversity is what
> Linux is all about... let's keep our eye on that fact and we won't go far
> wrong.

No arguments here.  Package management can get in the way.  However, you 
may have noticed that the .rpm based distributions are moving to ports 
of apt :)  Source code compilation has its place but is not necessarily 
easy / newbie friendly. Each to their own: what matters is consistency
and ease of use, as much as anything else - everybody has/should have a 
Linux distribution that is within their personal "comfort zone".  Quasi 
religous zealotry and bigotry/FUD doesn't actually help anyone 
necessarily.

 > 
> Debian sucks! That's all there is to it... but many of you like it, and that
> is your perogative. I had not realised that there was this "panel of
> protectors" that spent years evaluating any software that is released to
> ensure that it is "stable" and will not corrupt the finely tuned Debian
> installations of their disciples. My mistake.
> 
This level of advocacy is perhaps inappropriate here or on any public 
list and is not what I would have expected from you.  See you on 
Wednesday at the Expo :)

All the best to all the list,

Andy