Slashdot Mirror
Install Linux in 4 Minutes
Bill Clarke wrote to us about WholeLinux system they unveiled at LinuxWorld. From a "cheap" CD-ROM even, they can install Red Hat Linux in 4 minutes, plus another 2 for things like Apache, Sendmail etc. Heh-run around with one of these things at your office/school. See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*
We just got a copy of Red Hat 6 and it's rocks! We loaded several applications on it, and we don't have to worry about filesystem corruption! No reboots, either. That is awesome. Can't beat that.
But seriously, I don't see why auto-repair of files would be desired for Linux. With today's hard drives you don't in general worry about corruption at the hardware level, and Linux just doesn't suffer from this, especially not to the degree that NT does. I'll take a system that doesn't screw up in the first place (Linux) over the one that repairs itself automagically (NT5) any day.
You said it. Lord knows how many NT admins aren't even aware that it's possible to use a DOS boot disk with their machines. (And with Linux Samba servers, btw.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
There's something to your rant. The other day I popped into comp.os.windows-nt.advocacy (for the first time since the good ol' OS/2 days in '94 + '95), and the on-going Linux/NT was a hellava more intelligent and cordial than a typical Windows NT thread on slashdot. Amazingly, less ads too.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Bad words about NT might have something to do with the years of abuse and mind games it inflicts upon my time. Just this morning, I had to deal with an NT machine that peed all over itself and "lost" a whole directory of files. How does a computer just lose files? And I had to reboot another NT machine, not once, but twice to get it working. What's up with that? No, these are not desktop machines that people use, but ones locked in a cabinet used to control *shudder* equipment. Nothing like downtime and scrap, let me tell you.
I have only been working with Linux for a little over a year and I love it. What I find interesting is that I now find it less cumbersome to install any version of Linux than Windows NT or 98. Although I have never gotten Linux to install in 4 Minutes, the 20 Minute install does me just fine and I have everything that I need. That is a FAR cry from the 68 Minutes it takes Windows 98 to install. That just drove me insane. I've primarily worked in Mac shops most of my carrer and intsalling Mac OS 8.5 take only 15 minutes off of the CD, pure and Simple. Just pop the CD in and install. No Problem. Because I'm a Mac guy, booting off the CD is commonplace. But do that with Windows, no way. But Linux on the other hand, I can just pop the CD in and off it goes. The installer Finds my hardware and it's off and running in under 20 minutes. I'm no Linux pro or New-Newbie for that matter. I have had my share of Linux Exposure, but I will say that Linux is now easier to install that ANY version of Windows.
This isn't for file level corruption, it is for programs that try to corrupt NT. This *should* in theory help stabalize mature installs of NT5 (DLL version problems are one of the biggest reasons why NT installs go bad). When you try to install something with older DLL's (like Office 97) NT5 detects that, and won't allow it to happen. If you try to delete system files from winnt (assuming you have the permissions) it will detect that, and replace those files.
Should be www, not wwww....
What's your damage, Heather?
The 4-minute install time is, of course, valid only for people so experienced, they could do it in their sleep. What really counts is the install time for clueless novices, or slightly clueful novices. That is the true measure of ease-of-install.
Joe
See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*
Less time than you'd think. I admin NT for a living and we have a super quick method of getting NT onto any system.
1. Chalk out a inverse pentagram inside a circle on the floor.
2. Place a lit candle at each point of the pentagram.
3. Place the computer in question in the center of the pentagram with the case off.
4. Chant "Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin." while sprinkling the blood of a freshly slain rooster on the motherboard.
This works in under 5 minutes for intel hardware. I once managed to get NT onto a VAX 780 this way as well, but it took a few hours.
--Shoeboy
We just got a copy of NT 5 server edition and it rocks. We loaded several applications on it and then we did a lot of things to corrupt over 85% of the system and application files and the system did what is called self-repairing. The application binaries were repaired from the corrupted state. We used HEX editors to screw up binaries all over the system and as soon as we would screw on up the system would detect the screwed up file/binary and it would repair it. That is awesome. Can't beat that.
To install service pack 5 the correct deity is Shub Niggurath, Yog Sothoth only provides the NT 4 golden bits.
--Shoeboy
See this morning's (Monday's) FoxTrot comic strip (the website is at http://www.foxtrot.com/, but it's a week behind the newspapers).
They used that where I was working too... My question is, why can't you make and write an image with dd, and make that one floppy a free linux boot disk? I don't see what ghost does that's so special...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I was at RedHat last week for training. A Custom install with no changes on a 6GB drive took 6 minutes, not counting formatting and whatnot.
If you used kickstart, you could probably do it within 8-10 minutes.
The reason I'm awake right now is because a flaky NT server stopped responding, and I got paged at 5:20 AM. Rrrr.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, NT *does* suck?
P.S. Thanks to VNC, I didn't have to drive downtown, and sit at the console to recover. Why didn't Microsoft think of that?
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Useful or not, 4 minutes is pretty impressive. It took me 5 minutes to get the cd out of the plastic wrapper. Maybe we could make this an Olympic sport? The 100m Linux Installation. Then again, maybe not.
Ok it seems that /. has started a wave of bad information. No I don't mean it bad. I mean it horrible. In three days we get a desinformation, a hoax and now a bit of yellow advertisement. To be precise:
Life is 2.7
US Government considering charging E-mail
Linux can be installed in 4 minutes
I make part of my living by installing Linux boxes. Specially for users who wouldn't never had dreamed to work on it. And I can say one thing for sure. Presently no average desktop workstation/server can be installed with such speed. If you do it you'll just get the same M$ LemonSoft out-of-the-box or even worse.
The reality is that Linux is hard to configure. At least to create an environment for a typical M$ user I and several people take A MONTH to do it.
Looks strange? Under my experince no. An advanced *NIX user or an experienced computer user may have the luck to get such things in a few hours. For some maybe even an hour is enough. On servers things may run up to a week or two. However the ill-doomed average user is unable to work on such stations.
For such users the installation, configuration, tuning can turn into a long wait. However I can say that after such headaches they can use such stations. It may take a month for them to get acquainted with several features that are natural to *NIX. At first time they usually hang in the usual conditionalisms brought from M$ world. But in a few monthes they start making a few steps into a more *NIX world. But I can say they Linux is a painful thing to learn. A few thousands users I forced into *NIX can testify for it.
Anyway I can say one thing for sure. It takes two weeks for them to forget the "back to M$!" mood. And in a month or two the vast majority becomes Linux partisan. Yes there are some conservators that wish that things would go back. But not even they criticize the move. Most argumentation goes around "M$ still rules" and the dangers of running out of it.
There is one thing I would like to state clear. No average user, today, can make a good Linux station out of the box. Only a good expert can do such thing now. And it is not an easy work. One have to take into account a lot of things:
User psychology
Level of computer knowledge
Linking console and X applications into a more friendly environment, while preserving the traditional independence they possess
Constraints based on hardware and work environment
Bug-fixing, feature-fixing.
Doing all this and keeping Linux stable and high-preforming
Now anyone can do this in 4 minutes? I take a month doing this on each station release. Truly, after it, I rarely take more than 4 minutes hanging on each problem that comes up.
Of course. This is "News for teenage nerds. Linux stuff that matters." after all.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
P.S. Thanks to VNC, I didn't have to drive downtown, and sit at the console to recover. Why didn't Microsoft think of that?
They did, It's called SMS. I'm not going to tell you the summoning ritual to get that onto your server though, some things are too horrible to be unleashed upon the mortal world.
--Shoeboy
Okay, yes, laugh at the fool. At the time, my video card was incapable of running X so I had no way to use the "configurator". So I edited /etc/hostname like you do under any reasonable unix like thing. That didn't work, when I rebooted it automagically reset /etc/hostname to "localhost.localdomain". So I found the place in the rc directories where it was being changed. And I removed the line where it was blowing away my changes. That still didn't work. There were a few other bits doing similar things, like removing the changes I had made to the startup scripts!
After nearly endless frustration, I started X in 320x200 (thats how much the Diamond Stealth 32 sucked in those days) and ran the configurator, thinking to myself the whole time how odd it was that I had to use a GUI, complete with checkboxes and menus and pop-up windows asking "are you sure" when the lack of those little gui (in)conveniences was just exactly what made me prefer other Linuxen to Windows. Oh, and Fvwm-95 didn't help much either.
Yup. Two weeks. And of course, setting the hostname should be considered part of an installation. And that says nothing of how long it took me to figure out why /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin had been left out of root's path.
Nowadays I use Debian, which usually takes around 5-6 hours to download everything over ftp. Off the CD, picking packages alone typically takes me 30 minutes. (after all, there are 2500+ to choose from)
Hmmmm.. I thought that Slashdot was the special linux site for kids. ;) This is a linux-centric site that also has other news. I like it that way and it seems that I have millions of friends that like it too. Please do go and start your own Yahoo chat group for people that think NT dosen't deserve ridicule and say hello to all the MS employees while you are there.
I just had a lovely 4 hours sleep after dealing with NT4ws barfing repeatedly with a PFN_List_Corrupt bsod. According to MS, this is "Caused by corrupting I/O driver structures. If the kernel debugger is available, get a stack trace". The cause? A corrupted dos filesystem from a previous crash a few minutes before. NT couldn't fix the filesystem errors it caused and trashed because a filesystem was corrupt. The result? More corruption on another dos filesystem. When you claim that people "take shots at NT for no good reason", remember that many of them are made by people with years of experience with NT that are disgusted with the flaws. My problems are with a fresh installation of NT4ws with sp5. My Linux system is running nicely and dosen't do random things that cost me time and hair for no reason. I have been running NT since 3.51 which is longer than I've been using Linux. I know which I prefer and why I prefer it.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain