[Lancaster] Re: Install Fest

Sun Sep 4 11:39:18 BST 2005

On Saturday 03 Sep 2005 17:49, 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.
>
> 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.
>

What happens if they haven't got Broadband yet?
It's all well and good saying you can google for this or that, but that can 
get quite expensive, let alone time consuming, for some one whos not sure of 
the correct terminology for what they want to do.
Besides, so of the solutions you can end up with after googling, whilst they 
will work, aren't always the best way to solve the problem in the users 
specific distribution or version of distribution. 

Some people want to know more about the system, others don't - we need to try 
and ascertain that before offering solutions. Looks like your experience is 
with people with, or who want, technical skills in Linux. For those whom 
don't want to know how Linux ticks, just how to use it, suggesting people use 
a commercial distribution with lots of helpfull GUI front ends is a valid 
response.

Many people seem "scared" of the command line. Though it's more like many 
people do not want to invest the time and energy in working out how to use 
it, even if it does allow things to be done in a more efficient manner. These 
people need nicely polished desktops with nicely polished GUI installers,if 
they even need to know about the installer at all. In a large number of cases 
- and this is where I will return to my comment about whether they want to 
know more about their system or not - a machine pre-installed with a 
openoffice, a mail reader, a web browser and a set of games will suffice. A 
nice HTML help page can be included as the default page for the browser, as a 
link on the desktop and as a bookmark suggesting if they want more then they 
get in touch with the LUG - we have bi-monthly meetings and a mailing list. I 
they are more knowledgeable then suggest that they get on the LUG mailing 
list straight away/ show them how to install from the package manager.

For the scope of the installfest we should not be telling people about RPM, 
DEB or whatever, unless they are technically proficient. We should be telling 
them to install stuff through the package manager or not at all. What is 
important it that when they go away they have something to play with and have 
a few rules that stop them from breaking it as soon as they get home. If they 
need help we will be there for them in the future.

> > 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.
>

As I have stated above, if they are new to Linux then they probably shouldn't 
be downloading and installing RPMs. In my experience that is the best way to 
end up with a system full of packages that don't work properly (because the 
RPM was packaged for a different distribution/version). Linux distros have 
nice package managers which should take care of that for them, if they can't 
find what they want there then often thought should be given before just 
downloading and installing a random RPM.

> > 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.
>

My experience if with Mandrake, though my limited exposure to SuSE tells me 
that YaST is good. Though I happy with the mandrake GUIs.

> > >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.

As far as distros are concerned I'm in favour of sticking to the following 
ones (unless someone asks specifically for something else) for beginners, in 
alphabetical order :-):

Mandrake
SuSE
Ubuntu 

I have other distributions lying around, but since we as a LUG will probably 
end up a the first port of call to answer problems, then it doesn't make 
sense to install distributions we are not familiar with.

I'd just like to add that we will only have a few hours - so there is no point 
in trying to install anything on old hardware that needs a lot of manual 
configuration...

Martyn

-- 
Martyn Welch (welchm at comp.lancs.ac.uk)

PGP Key : http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/~martyn/pgpkey/
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