[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 06:55:28AM -0000, Sean Miller wrote:
> 
> I don't actually like SuSE much, to be honest... far happier with Red
> Hat/Fedora these days... it does have a good installer normally, though...
> why would it not install? Was it searching for non-existent contiguous space
> or something? Or was it NTFS? That would make it harder, that's for sure...
> 
There was an 8G Windows XP NTFS partition and then 32G of (old) Linux
that could be written over. Eventually cfdisk from command line allowed
me to delete the old partitions and start again :(
> > The machine has ended up relatively up to date - but only has one
> > user.
> Hmmm... you're saying that the default install didn't allow you to add
> users, either from KDE or the command line? I do not think I shall be using
> SuSE 9.1 in that case...
No, not quite.  It meant that after 2 1/2 hours I had a system up and
running - but I hadn't done any useful work and still only had one user. I'm
used to setting up users almost immediately and actually being able to
_do_ something - like read my mail from the rest of my network - while
the background tasks are going on.
> 
> I didn't say that Debian was total rubbish... I said that it was not for
> everybody... I struggle myself to get things working, like wireless network
> cards and sound on DeMUDI etc.... and I am happy to keep experimenting with
> such things... but at least with other distros one seems to be able to get
> the machine 90% correct "out of the box", whereas with Debian my experience
> with the one attempt to do it is that you get a machine 50% correct "out of
> the box", and then have to learn in-depth Linux config principles to move it
> further forward... you only have to look at what a Linux guru Tim Hall has
> become having used Debian for a while to see that it is a distro that
> teaches you a great deal about internals, and appears to require that
> knowledge to get the best out of it... I bet he would not have the knowledge
> he does if he'd used Red Hat 9 from the start... this is great for Tim, but
> I don't have the time to do it... and others are the same... hence the
> frustration at this attitude that moving to Debian would be great for
> everybody... I am not sure it would, though it may be that the product has
> now become better in this respect....
> 
The initial install is now shorter. After one reboot, you have a basic
system - _including_ vim/vi :) I'm not sure that you have to become a
guru to install Debian - but it helps :)  The in-depth Linux stuff is
largely hidden from you with a default SuSE/Mandrake/Fedora install -
superficially that's great unless/until something goes wrong. The
knowledge you gain on almost any Linux should transfer. I'd almost
advocate that everyone should use Mandrake/Novell/(some sort of Linux 
distribution) for six months and then re-evaluate their initial choice - the
completely new user needs one Linux, the moderately experienced possibly
can do with another.
> 
> I was not the person who effectively told Steve that his Mandrake setup was
> rubbish and should be replaced... I had not even contributed to the thread
> when that particular bit of "zealot" activity started...
There was a smiley there IIRC. As it turns out, I gave some reasons why
it might be useful. I also learnt how locked down the system is: that's
very annoying if you actually need to change something in a hurry/patch
for security and it must be fairly frustrating to use day-to-day.
> 
> > There is always a choice: you can be smart and learn, or you can be
> > dumb, arrogant and self confident in the extreme.  Generally, the second
> > choice leads to lots more (unforeseen) opportunities to try out the
> > first choice :)
> 
This was not specifically directed at anyone on (or off) this mailing
list :) It would apply equally well to me - I certainly know this well
enough from my experience at work :)

All the best,

Andy