I mean uh, I know I'm an electrical engineer, and most of my buddies are too, but we all picked up Caldera, or RedHat, or Manrake (or Debian for an unlucky few) and just installed it ourselves the first time. It didn't work totally flawlessly (but pretty well) and that's how I ended up here eventually. I guess for mere mortals a guru is needed for the first Linux experience and if the guru likes Debian then more power to him, the newbie won't know the difference after intstall :) Honestly though, if it weren't for some fairly intuitive GUIs from the above mentioned distros, us EE's who think computers should obey us just because we know Ohm's law and Maxwell's Equations would have been totally hopeless.
Bryan On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 09:44, Hans Fugal wrote: > > P.S. Honestly, I do think that is pretty cool that you can do that, and > > I'm sure it would be educational and fun. Just don't recommend > > installing Debian to newbies like Michael Halcrow always half jokingly > > does. I've seen two different first timers get their intro. to Linux > > with Debian and both were turned away. One recovered about a year later > > and now he has redhat on like three computers at home. The other is > > still recovering, and he looks at me with this underserved awe whenever > > I mention that I use Linux. It doesn't have to be that hard man, it > > really doesn't. > Two points. > > One: yes, you're right. The installer is one aspect of debian being > heavily worked on as we speak. > > Two: How many linux users get started installing their own distribution > anyway? A significant number, sure, but not the majority. Usually > someone else installs or at least helps to install. In that situation I > would recommend Debian for newbies simply because although it is not > easy to install it is much easier to admin. Just make sure you get all > the basic major things they need installed and configured (e.g. samba) > before leaving them to it. I've done just this and the people I've set > up with debian have fewer troubles than the ones I set up with redhat. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
