[Lancaster] Re: Install Fest

[Ken Hough]

Matt S Trout wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 05:22:04PM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> 
>>>Right. Hence why I'm advocating one that (1) has lots of packages, (2) an
>>>active user community, (3) can install RPM,SLP,DEB and TGZ packages out of
>>>the box, and (4) actually runs nicely on old hardware. Fedora Core and its
>>>ilk fail on (3) and (4), and IMO fail on (1) if you expect the packages to
>>>actually work - and the Fedora "community" tends to mostly be a bunch of
>>>idiots; the people with clue tend to migrate to a useful distro as fast
>>>as their fdisk can carry them ...
>>
>>I come back to my point about sticking to mainstream stuff for this 
>>event. Maybe I've got my head stuck in the sand, but I hadn't heard much 
>>about of 'VectorLinux'. What chance a 'newbie' trying to find help?
> 
> 
> Erm. Assuming you teach a newbie to use google, not bad. Plus if it's
> Slack-based, it'll behave like unix. This means that general unix-y solutions
> to problems will often work. My SO got her start on Linux using Slackware,
> and has been using it happily all the way along. Her only problem was asking
> questions and getting twelve "use SuSE/FC/whatever, it's easier and you get
> a GUI" answers when she actually wanted the real solution.

I haven't used Slackware beyond a couple of trial installs. Based on 
that experience, I have to go along with the the almost universal 
comments that Slackware is not easy and not the best start for a 
beginner. Sorry.

> 
> Newbies are only scared of command lines because people teach them to be
> scared of them. My gran can't make head nor tail of a windows desktop but
> I was able to explain what
> 
> ps ax | grep foo | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill
> 
> meant in about ten minutes.
>

You must be joking!

I cut my teeth back in the days of DOS, so am not frightened of the 
command line and do use it alongside and within a GUI, but at the 
moment, I do not understand the command line above.

The majority of people today have got used to using a GUI and hence the 
command line is alien to them. Fact! We are not going to change that in 
the space of a couple of hours.

> 
>>Too many offbeat/esoteric packages could be counterproductive.
> 
> 
> But the ability to install RPMs means they can still access the host of
> RPM-based software out there.

Yes, but I still maintain that too much too soon will be 
counterproductive and quite possibly a turn off.

> 
> 
>>Given that most people will want to run a GUI, then the hardware must 
>>have a bit of clout. True, most (GUI) things can be made to run on old 
>>hardware (eg 486's), but not at a sensibly fast rate. Not even with 
>>lightweight windows managers like 'icewm'. I have experimented along 
>>these lines. Realistically, we are talking Pentiums or better and with 
>>at least 128MB RAM.
>>
>>It's time that I dropped in another plug for SUSE. It does work and it 
>>seems that a good proportion of recent articles in the mags refer to 
>>SuSE. This would be very helpful for 'newbies'. YAST must now be by far 
>>the best integrated and user friendly installation/configuration/on-line 
>>update tool available! (That's bound to get up the noses of Debian users).
> 
> 
> YaST is good. YaST is very good. If you're going to go with an RPM-based
> distro, SuSE is IMO probably the best choice.
>

BTW, SuSE includes a utility to allow use of DEB packages.

> 
>>>See http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=4966 for a review. The
>>>important bit here is that it runs *fast* and *pretty* on old hardware,
>>>which at the very least makes it a candidate for older machines. And nobody
>>>objected to Ubuntu, which hasn't been around nearly as long and I suspect
>>>still isn't as efficient.
>>
>>Here's one who's not over impressed with UBUNTU.
> 
> 
> *shrug* I haven't tried it myself.
> 

Let's get real. What can we achieve in a couple of hours?

Ken Hough