On 03 May 2002 22:39:00 +0100 Michel Alexandre Salim <salimma1@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On Thu, 2002-05-02 at 22:55, Jean Francois Martinez wrote: > > I am getting tired of the asssimilation "easy distribution" with > > "distro for newbies". It has also as a side effect some people > > believe that chnaging to a difficult distribution will maek them > > as elite. To begin with difficult distribution provide little or > > nothing more when you are an advanced user: they would be better > > described as distributions who are crippled for newbies than as > > distros for advanced users. Second: if you are a REAL top notch > > person then your time is valuable and should be put to better use > > than struggling with printers and X configurations. One of those > > top notch people is a such Linus who is a notorious user of "distros > > for beginners". > I would tend to agree. It is not really for advanced users - would be a > nice experience for someone who is learning the innards of Unix, to > configure a more bare-bones distribution at least once. > First of all there is nothing who prevents you from doing the things from scractch on whatever distro. Second As a fomer system administrator (mainframes) I am unimpressed by system administrators so I am strongly against the idea that you are not a real man until you have configured everything from scratch, what imprsesses me are the people who put their machine to good use even if the thing they do is fire their word processor and write good poetry. Thus a distro should allow persons to concentrate on their job and if someone wants to configure the things by hand this is his problem. But now you find that the macho Unixers will win that their little brains are unable to decypzer the scripts who configure the network in RedHat or Mandrake and that is why they want a bare bones distro. > > Holy ghost. From your description they are behind what RedHat and others > > were shipping in late 1994 for configuring X. Not to mention that on PCI boxes > > the installer does not need to ask questions about video card since all the > > answers are in /proc/pci. Not to mention that with EDD the installer can > > query the monitor about its capabilities. And since there are GPL programs > > handling all this the only reason for not taking advantage of EDD and > > /proc/pci is Not_Invented_Here and arrogance. > > To be fair to Debian, it's probably their insistence that all their > platforms are equal, hindering the more advanced platforms in terms of > such niceties as automatic hardware probing. 11 supported > distributions... ouch. They should just maintain the Progeny installer > for x86, IMHO, until their 'next-generation installer' - the one that > supposedly will be modular and can have both TUI and GUI (hmm... > anaconda?) is ready. > What I have heard about the Progeny installer is that it was teeming with bugs, for instance their printer config was not determnistic according to linuxprinting.org. Here we have another example of arrogance in action: the impressive Caldera installer has been GPLed years ago, in fact it was the basis for Corel's installer, Corel even copied the bugs. But the Debian people wanted to be a breed apart (from their ads). > Of course, their other problem is 'but apt-get dist-upgrade works, why > should I work my ass off on an installer?' > That is something someone says when he has had a nice teacher spoon feeding him Unix and a nice system administrator pulling him out of trouble. When you have had to care for yourself from first day you really apreciate the value of a nice installer. When you care abkout other people and about the future of the Linux movement then you apreciate the vcalue of a nice installer in spreading Linux. And nowadays Mandrake 8.2 has as good or better upgrade capabilities than Debian (it warns you of security holes) AND a far better installer and config tools. > Is EDD the French term for DDC? > > Regards, > > -- > Michel Alexandre Salim > GPG public key at http://salimma.freeshell.org > > > _________________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > Redhat-devel-list mailing list > Redhat-devel-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-devel-list > _______________________________________________ Redhat-devel-list mailing list Redhat-devel-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-devel-list
