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Time Review of Linux

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the mainstream-media dept.

afniv writes "Time.com as a short article about Linux. The reviewer talks briefly about Linux install troubles and will have future installments. "

5 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Difficulty of installations by Jerky+McNaughty · · Score: 5

    I have never found Linux to be difficult to install, with the exception of XFree86 which can sometimes be a bit difficult.

    I think Linux has a bad reputation for installation because people actually *do* have to install it, unlike Windows---few people actually install Windows because it's preinstalled.

    I certainly hope that the people doing these reviews have actually installed the "competition", because Windows 95/98/NT can be quite difficult to install. I remember having particularly difficult problems getting NT to recognize a mainstream sound card and had a horrible time trying to make it do anything other than 16 colors.

    I'd still like to see the Linux installation process get even better, and I know it will.

  2. The letter I wrote to the editor of time.com by copito · · Score: 5

    I wrote the following letter to the editor of time.com
    I appreciated Josh Quittner's Linux article [http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/personal/19990524/ tech.html]. I have been Unix systems adminstrator for three years and a Linux user for a little under a year. His installation criticisms were valid, but it is worth noting that installing Windows 98 onto a computer with an unformatted hard-drive or one that has non-windows OS on it is a truly daunting proposition which took me a couple of hours to figure out. The formatting and partitioning tools are not a part of the standard installation procedure as they are with any Linux distribution, therefore it is necessary to boot off a diskette and use the command line format and fdisk utilities.

    The perception of easy Windows installations is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of PC's come with Windows pre-installed. Most users are unlikely to ever do more than upgrade their Windows which is a relatively painless proposition. Upgrading a Red Hat system is just as easy. In my estimation, installing a Red Hat system is easier than installing Windows in any case except when the computer has Windows pre-installed and has no unpartioned disk space.

    Overall the article was very informative and made the virtues of Linux clear, including it's open source code, stability and low cost. Your readers may also benefit from knowing that Gnome, while developed with help from Red Hat, is also open source software and is available from www.gnome.com, and that a very viable alternative to Gnome called KDE is available from www.kde.com and is also open source and included in Red Hat 6.0 as well as Caldera, SuSe and other distribution. Finally, it might be noted that an alternative to downloading a distribution or buying a boxed set is to pay a couple of dollars and get the distribution from www.cheapbytes.com which redistributes all of the major distributions sans book documentation and support. I would still recommend that the average user buy a boxed set.

    I hope to see further linux coverage in the future.

    Sincerely,
    Michael Cope
    --

    --
    "L'IT c'est moi!"
  3. Re:Can we be serious for a minute? by tgd · · Score: 5

    Easier? Hardly.

    On two machines at work, I install linux:

    1) Put CD in drive, turn on machine.
    2) Keep accepting defaults

    Voila! Done.

    Same machine, Windows 98:

    1) Put cd in drive, boot machine.
    2) Voila! Linux

    Wait... no Windows installer? NO! Windows 98's install CD isn't bootable.

    3) Search for the box Win98 came in for an hour.
    4) Stop searching, start searching for a DOS boot disc
    5) Disc boots, no CD-Rom driver.
    6) Search for a half hour for the cd-rom drivers
    7) Hack up a new boot disc
    8) Reboot
    9) Oops, there goes Linux, too bad it didn't even ask if I wanted to partition the drives.
    10) Let it chunk away for an half hour
    11) Hard lock? Dammit!
    12) Reboot
    13) Perform step 10 again
    14) Reboot
    15) Nope, still not done installing.
    16) What do you mean, unknown ethernet card?
    17) What do you mean no drivers for the sound card?
    18) Why the FSCK am I only getting 256 colors?
    19) Search for the G200 driver CD
    20) Install video drivers
    21) What? Why the HELL isn't the ethernet working any more?
    22) Oh yeah, never was. Search for ethernet drivers again.
    23) Oops, not online. Go use a linux system to search for drivers.
    24) Woohoo, ethernet, lets install Quake3
    25) Dammit to hell, never found sound drivers
    26) Search net for an hour for sound drivers
    27) Give up for a few days
    28) Found drivers, install them
    29) System's working, three days later. Except now I've got to install software. Lets hope the newer Microsoft applications don't remove any DLLs that are going to keep other stuff from working...

    That's easier?

  4. Installation difficulty by hwestiii · · Score: 5

    I think people who dismiss the difficulty of installing Linux are not being realistic. Even the Red Hat install requires an understanding of both the machine and OS that are far beyond most users.

    Linux is, from both an installation and use view, a real dividing line amoung computer users. If you have no computer experience, Windows is difficult until you get the paradigm at which point it becomes much easier. The paradigm for Linux, if there is one, is much more difficult to get.

    I don't expect that Linux will ever become the favored OS of the casual user, but I also do expect that, due to the pervasiveness of computers and early age at which children are being exposed to them, the average adult user will be head and shoulders more savvy about the machines in another 10 years than they are today. Hopefully the proportion of casual to serious users will decline, and that is where Linux will grow.

  5. Nice article by Jonas+�berg · · Score: 5
    Contrary to some of the regular /. readers, I thought this was a good article. It didn't give me much at all and it never really dealt with any interesting topics. So why was it so good then?


    Well, you have to look at the big picture. You have to consider how this will look to the average user. In many ways, you can deal with the reporter as an average user. Installing Linux might be no picknick, it certainly wasn't when I installed my first GNU/Linux six years ago, but we've come a long way since then, havn't we? The installation tools are practically as good as for Windows. You have to remember that this reporter would probably even need some help installing Windows to get everything right! But he mentions that there are support to get so this kills one of the most common misunderstandings about Linux.


    He never deals with the general system, but he does say that there's something called Gnome that will make things easier. He also mentions the Gnome logo, which kills another misunderstanding about GNU/Linux being all text and no graphics.


    In the end, he gives an impression that he's content with what he sees and that he's interested in learning more about the system and he leaves a little hook for the reader saying that he'll be back with more information.


    This would feel good to read as a user I think, it takes an average guy that probably doesn't know any more about computers than you do, and it explains that he kind of liked GNU/Linux and after having read this article, you'd probably be very curious about the system.


    Mission accomplished.