On Wed, 30 Jul 1997, Jim Pick wrote: > Red Hat Software is a company, so they have to turn a profit. That > means they have to have a plan for what they do. An agenda, if you > will. Part of their plan is to build an excellent distribution for > newbies.
There are five kinds of users that will be installing a linux distribution at any given time and their needs are different. One thing that you need to pay attention to is which group is predominant in installation for your distribution at a particular point in time and then you taylor it to make it is pleasant as possible for that group. These kinds of installations are: 1. Experianced people upgrading from a previous version. 2. Experianced people converting from another Linux distribution. 3. Inexperianced people installing Linux for the very first time. 4. People with experiance in other flavors of *nix installing Linux for the first time. 5. Experianced people installing on an additional system. If you can determine what the breakdown of installations are, you can gauge where to focus your energy in "cleaning up" the installation process to impact the most number of users. Newbies (catagory 3) are very important because if they fail, they are likely to go back to their old newsgroups and tell folks that they tried linux and it sucks. I started with Slackware and then tried RedHat after about a year. Their cnews package sucked, UUCP sucked, and they did not even have nntpd. I tried Debian and it all worked "out of the box". The problem with Debian for a newbie is that there are SO MANY different programs to choose from. Also, if you want to change something, it can be confusing (ever tried to de-install smail and install exim as a newbie?). Maybe Debian should make a "Debian-Lite" with a subset of the full distribution ... a default news server (suggest cnews) default mail server (suggest smail) that a user can install and have a full-featured, albeit with limited choices, system. THEN if they want to add/change things they can go to the full distribution and play around and tweak. Most newbies get in trouble from installing TOO MUCH stuff on the first pass through dselect. One of my projects on my todo list is a subset of debian and some local stuff to make an sbay.org linux distribution for sbay.org that will install and work with a minimum number of choices given to the user. Once it is installed, the user will be informed about debian and the additional software available for their system from debian.org. George Bonser Why is it that the same people that tell us that manned space flight is a waste of money also tell us that we have been visited by aliens? -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .