[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Sean Miller]

> > the smile on his face at the end of 5
> > hours of grind at getting a 16-colour X-Window to open was something to
> > behold...
>
> Nice story, unfortunately pure invention.  You walked out in a fit of
> impatience without ever waiting to see the X installation properly
> terminated, remember?

Wasn't quite like that... I'd agreed (at the meeting) around 7pm that you
could try to install Debian (which was going to be "painless")... at 12.30am
after lots of calls from your house to somebody (Andrew Cater? or was it
your friend Hereward? I forget) I had to give up as I had work in the
morning...

The description "the smile on his face..." was meant to be
tongue-in-cheek... I suspect that one of the things that attract many people
to Debian is the fact that it is such a "challenge" to get things working,
and I can see that it would be very satisfying to do so if one had the
time.. unfortunately my world centres around productivity, and the truth is
that other distros do appear to be much better at installing themselves
within minutes (eg. SuSE 8.2 took 18 minutes to install on my machine the
other day) leaving much more time to do the productive things with
applications etc. rather than fighting the OS to try to make it work.

> [Your system was running Debian GNU/Linux within half-an-hour btw
> -- can't
> help it if in your world the command-line interface doesn't
> exist, and you

You know as well as I do, Martin, that when I demonstrated mysql etc. to
LUGOG and used the command-line interface you went totally white and said
"Why aren't you using phpMyAdmin??"... I have been using Unix shell for 15
years now, and tend to do *everything* from shell where I can, once the OS
is installed. I do, however, expect the installer to at least give me a
desktop.... in this case, however, it was not you and I trying to sort the
problem.. you had got somebody on the end of the phone involved, and the
time was going by very rapidly and we were not getting anywhere...

> don't consider a system to be running Linux unless it provides you
> immediately ("Right now! This very instant!") with a whiz-bang flashy
> colour interface.  Toshiba Satellites have a video setup that wasn't
> recognised at the time by standard Debian.  But Knoppix Debian did.
> Have you ever ruminated why it only ever seems to be you that encounters
> problems like this?]

If it were only me then we might actually have more Linux users than Windows
ones in the world... this is one of the things holding Linux back, and it is
why I have so much time for distros that make it easy. I do admit that
Knoppix is pretty impressive, as is DeMUDI, so why is it that when one tries
to install either to the hard disk (rather than LiveCD) they both turn into
a nightmare that seems to need an in-depth knowledge of Linux internals to
get to work?!?!?!!? (this was my experience with DeMUDI anyway) -- if you
really want to impress get DeMUDI working on my laptop in hard disc mode
within a couple of hours... then I'd be converted! I never managed it...

> > knowing that I could get a *mature* Linux setup back soon...
>
>   ... sorry to urinate all over your pyrotechnics, but Debian's been
> around longer than Suse.

I was talking about the maturity of the way the distribution was packaged,
rather than the age of the branch... Debian may have been older, but SuSE
didn't ask all those difficult questions on install... neither did Red Hat
or Mandrake...

You sold me SuSE, btw, if you recall... perhaps it would have been better to
have pointed me in the Debian direction from the start if you did not wish
me to make comparisons about the relative merits of the two... bit like
giving somebody a Ferrari and then taking it away a few months later and
trying to get a Skoda to work for them, smiling and saying "we're almost
there" when the car finally starts but will not actually get out of first
gear....

> > Hopefully Debian has improved since then...
>
> Whether Debian has or not is immaterial; your attitude definitely hasn't.
> But Wheeler certainly has.  The first signs of prima donna behaviour from
> a client get them banned from the workspace, illico.

I don't see that I am being in any way a "prima donna"... I am simply
putting forward an alternative viewpoint to your own that Steve should
immediately be migrating a stable Mandrake setup to Debian, just because
Debian seems to be the "be all and end all" for yourself...

> > and then 5 years to learn how to get it to run KDE with more than 5
> > colours.
>
> But Sean -- that's only if you're a member of Mensa!  The rest of us can
> do it in under half-an-hour.

Hmmm... as I said, 5.5 hours we spent on that LUGOG night and it didn't
happen... and that was you, I, the fella on the phone, Tim for a while and
probably others (I forget)....

It sounds like Debian may have improved, in terms of installation.  I am not
an idiot... I can see the relative merits of Debian, if you have the time to
get it to work... I can see that there are benefits in having a totally Open
Source operating system that does not have any commercial agenda (like Red
Hat and SuSE now both have), and I can see that your beloved "apt-get" does
appear to be pretty good... I can also see that the way that Debian operates
on so many platforms is also great, and if I were trying to get Linux to run
on that hp9000 box in my garage I guess it would be Debian that would make
it happen... I just don't see why every time somebody installs something
else yourself, Tim and Andy seem to jump on them and say "you should be
using Debian"... the joy of Linux is its many flavours, and (at least 12
months ago) Debian seems the one for the folks who want to really get down
"under the bonnet", whereas something like Red Hat is more "out of the
box"...

> Shall I put the obligatoty smiley in here?
> Nah -- sod it.
> I'm feeling gwellish tonight.

I am worried now that I've really upset you Martin... wasn't intended...
the comments about 12 months ago (or whenever it was) were designed to be
tongue-in-cheek... the reservations about Debian are real.

Sean