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Re: Installation Party



On Sun, 27 Oct 1996, Jonathan Ben-Avraham wrote:

> On the other hand, I came away from the "Installation Party" with
> the feeling that the problem with Linux is that it needs an
> installation party and a cadre of dedicated volunteers.

we are oversealous, really... Linux is and will always be Unix, and that's
not a system for newbies. in order to use it, you to WANT it bad enough to
read instructions and FAQs.

> Wouldn't it be better if we had an installation program that did
> the following:
> 
> 1. Spoke Hebrew, Arabic, English or whatever your preference is.

and then what? people would automatically expect us to be some
organization that does this all the way? translate ALL the faqs and
howtos? maybe also the usenet feeds next? say thinks it's not all written
in Finnish, and make the Newbies read some English!

> 2. Made a sincere effort to find your distibution medium for you
>  i.e. could deal with any CDROM, IDE/SCSI disk, network card

you will need to write a 100 page booklet and explain to people what is
their IDE interface and how to open their computer without hurting
anything to find out what they have under the hood... so now what? you
send them to by Focus' self-repair PC hardware books?

I have a customer's PC here to install linux on, win95 and NT worked fine
but Linux rebooted all the time at rundom places while installing (RH4,
RH3 and slack96), until I opened up the case, dicovered he had a FAKE
P133, dropped the speed to 100Mhz, and then it all went fine, but it took
me 3 days to get to this after playing with memory timing in the BIOS and
all... how do you expect to have a newbie deal with that?

> 3. Walked you through defrag and repartition giving you two or three
>  reasonable suggestions basedon a calculation of your current
>  disk usage.

and who's gonna sit and write this AI magic? maybe sugest this to RedHat
or Debian, the should both be flexible with adding stuff to installation
processes.

> 4. Presented lilo installation in a way that newbies can understand.

You feed them with a teaspoon, and they want stop crying until you
continue feeding them with a spoon. Nobody said Linux was easy to install,
but it's a one time job and everyone has to do his own installation if he
wants to understand how his system came to be and how to take care of it
from now on. This is not wimp territory, and that's why I hate the fact
that we need to arrange installation parties at all. 

> 5. Configured XF86Config for you after probing your graphic card.
> 
> This is what Window95 does (except for repartition, where it assumes
> that you don't want any other OS), can't we do at least as well?

plug-and-prey, that's what I say. (it will get the kernel stuck all the
time, it will make you eat your words.)


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