Graham Percival wrote:
>
> Millions of electrons died to bring me this message. Was it worth it,
> Warren Doney?
> > This is a good idea, things that seem simple to us can baffle
> > beginners. I recall, for instance, when asked to "specify the mount
> > point of the root partition" I repeatedly tried "root" instead of
> > "/" :o)
>
Oh nostalgia - on my first Linux install (RH 5.2) I just hit keys until
something happened.
>
> I'm a bit puzzled by all these cries for easier installs. OK, some hardware
> is not detected automatically (be it USB printers, ISA network cards, $400
> mice, whatever). Better hardware detection is *always* being worked on.
> Complaining that Mandrake doesn't detect card X doesn't help the situation,
> unless you provide a really detailed bug report or code to do the detection.
People who say Linux is hard to install generally have not tried
installing Windows. Having installed Windows and Linux on a few
different machines, I have found that Linux (and in particular Mandrake,
crawl, crawl) is much better at detecting hardware.
> Another big complaint is the partitioning. But I don't think that there *is*
> an easy way to handle this, unless you assume that it's ok to wipe a HD. But
> partitioning an existing system is going to be complicated and varies
> depending on the computer, so no automatic system will be possible.
Very true. We penguinistas suffer from having the tolerant attitude that
a user may want to install more than one OS on their computer, and so
provide helpful (if sometimes confusing) advice on the dark art of disk
partitioning. Ever tried using Windows fdisk to run multiple OS's? I
hope not.
>
> Apart from hardware support and partitioning, what newbie-unfriendliness is
> there?
None.
>
> > I bet it would be easy to get volunteers for this job, as it would be
> > an excellent way to meet women :)
>
> *grin*
I don't think so. At the risk of overgeneralisation, any woman who is
prepared to install Linux is also familiar with system administration,
C++ and all the the rest.
Robin
