On 3/19/07, Greg Folkert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Of course, you could point out that about 60% of existing popular distributions are originally derived and modified from Debian.
I spent all of last summer trying to educate the managers. I've given up. They won't read or listen. They have heard that Linux users tend to be emotional fans of their particular distro and can present any information to back up their favorite. One particular person has the personality of Captain Kirk. But he is one that won't listen to his Spock. It is pointless to say something like "it is straightforward if you know how", when the there is nothing hinted within the installer to tell that user of the alternates as they smash into the problem. (Hint: put a message into the installer scenario where there is no hard drive to install onto). My manager didn't want any hand holding to evaluate Debian. He installed it on a notebook, had problems and thought it proved what he had read about Debian being old. You are wrong about Redhat not updating the kernel. We had a new 64bit Intel machine come in a few months back. A techie tried to install his standard RH 4 on it and no go. He got the "update 4" version of the installer from Redhat, and away he went. For the sake of the discussion, the hardware is not uniform and the servers are uniquely roled (cyrus, tomcat, custom web apps, MX, postgres DB, etc.). The first step to solving a problem is recognition that there is one, but I don't think we are getting that far in these exchanges. I feel that Debian has more resources than any commercial distribution. The number of supported platforms is one evidence of that. The number of developers and users (including downstream distros) is another. It is just a matter of making things a priority and deciding how and where to make this happen. I'm also hinting strongly here, that fixing this issue would go a long way to improving Debian's adoption in heavy IT centres where management has too many thumbs in the pie. It might even cut out the losses from people going to Ubuntu and the like. --Donald
