Just a thought, but keep in mind how much easier things have become. I'm not sure how many "old-timers" are on the list, but it used to be that in order to do just about anything, you had to compile it yourself. My first experience was with Slackware 3.x, and believe me, it was many times more difficult to get that box setup than nearly any setup I've done since.
In Slackware 3.x, the kernel did not come compiled with networking enabled. We had to recompile the kernel for that (and since it was a P90, we had to wait 5 hours for it to finish compiling). Need to add modules to apache? Guess what, you'll have to recompile that too (unless you trust someone else's binary to work with your setup). Want a desktop environment? We had to compile that too... For that matter, the install program didn't even offer to "partition automatically" -- you had to know linux fdisk to set up all the partitions. Installation now is very nearly a painless process -- you pretty much select what packages you want to install, and then get guided through the configuration steps one by one. If you want to add more, well there are several GUI based front-ends for rpm installation purposes. For updates, you can download and install red-carpet, freely available from Ximian, Inc. for virtually every distribution. Linux has made great strides to become useable for the average user, and it will continue to do so. Regardless, for virtually every windows program, there is some piece of equivalent software in some phase of development that is free. Michael -- Michael Viron Systems Administration Team Simple End User Linux <snip> >>>> I think that's where someone should step in and make it usable to the average non-computer literate person. It took my awhile to learn how to do things. I think that could be solved with a little more automation and not painstakingly doing everything. urpmi(sp?) is great, but what about someone that doesn't know about it? Windows update if good because it says: "Here's a list of crap that we think will make your computer better". Even if it doesn't help. Of course, i'm saying this from experiance, so i'm most likly wrong. How many of you that have had wives that didn't know how to use the thing? PS: Sorry about spelling. <snip>
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