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CNN Installs Linux
Almost everybody seems to have submitted this CNN "Ignorant journalist has a tough time installing Linux" story. I'm a little tired of this theme, but decided to run it not only because so many of you submitted it, but also out of nostalgia; I wrote something similar myself back when Slashdot was so fresh and new that "getting slashdotted" meant maybe 200 e-mails max, and now I'm a full-time Linux user. So please be kind to this poor overworked journalist. Everybody (even you) started out ignorant and had to learn, right? ;-)
2) articles are written about nongeeks having difficulty using (incl install) linux.
3a) developers are encouraged to make linux even more nongeek-friendly versus other os'es.
3b) some (ok, maybe lotsa) people are (still) scared out off tryin linux.
remark: the magnitude of 3a) and 3b) is directly proportional to the 'magnitude' of 2)
4a) ...developers goin about their stuff with even more determination... ...nongeeks' patience with winboxes everything but increasing, desire to get better stuff probably increasing... :-)
4b)
remark: apology to the mac-folks for jumping over them in this slight oversimplification of things
5) hey, linux just got relatively more user-friendly today!
6) somehow, the word gets out on 5) (perhaps an article on cnn.com?).
7) more people are tempted into trying out linux (again). [they are able to do so at little or no cost coz it runs on everything and is free.] some stick with it, others don't. this ratio is directly proportional to linux's relative user-friendliness.
8) go back to 1)
conclusion:
- for the developers: keep doin what yer good at.
- for the non-developers, relax.
pretty soon (within 2-3 years?), linux could be the easiest os to install and use in our solar system (chances are aliens have even better stuff).
(the above also applies to functionality etc)
Flippo from Flanders (Europe).
My first linux installation was maybe a year ago. I created a root and a swap partition on my second HD and installed RedHat 5.0 in 30 minutes with the help of a Sams Learn Linux in 24 Hours book I got for $15.
I'm not a pimped-out software developer like a lot of people who post, but I still got it to work. In fact, for about a month, whenever I had a problem it was always faster and easier to reinstall the OS than to try to fix the problem (yes I was a real dumbass). Maybe he should have tried OpenLinux 2.3, Red Hat, or Mandrake.
Take care,
Steve
Let's settle for inexperienced but intelligent newbies. As to your math and science majors, perhaps they, like so many others, fail to RTFM.
I've been working with small computers since 1975, and have written in C, C++, Pascal, assembler, and even Forth. I've designed embedded processor systems and designed and written serial protocols.
In spite of my experience, I have suffered tremendous frustration with Linux. Also, as one who writes user docs, I do RTFM. The source of the problems is as follows:
1) Linux docs are, to be kind, less than wonderful. They make too many assumptions about the background of the reader. I have yet to find a good presentation of disk partitioning strategies, for example.
2) Distros which use the RPM installation offer only one safe option: Install Everything. Selective package installation leads to things which don't work, boots which stall for many minutes, and a grand variety of other mysteries.
3) Red Hat, in particular, has an installation process which is easily fouled by the user making an unexpected response. Why would the user do that? Because the instructions and/or prompts are inadequate.
4) X server installation and setup is a very interesting source of problems. My video cards and monitors are capable of 1600x1200, but Caldera is the only distro to have correctly set up that configuration on my machines. And talk about user-hostile: tweaking in Hz, KHz, and microseconds is definitely not for newbies. I'm a hardware designer with a lot of experience with deflection systems, and I still don't want to go there.
5) Sending a newbie to the HOWTOs is a great way to send someone postal. The HOWTOs I have attempted to use have not been very well written, some have been horribly out of date, and for the most part, I was left (after an hour or more) with no solution to the problem they were supposed to help me resolve.
Now before the flaming begins, I freely grant that Windows docs suck. That is irrelevant. the subject is Linux, and Linux docs suck, too. The difference between Linux and Windows at installation time is that Windows (mostly) does a better job of handling the routine setup issues.
I've used Windows since 2.0 (which only stayed on my system for a few hours), and routinely install and manage NT installations. I'm getting better with Linux, but only after having invested nearly full time activity for several weeks, and am not by any means ready to commit my company to using Linux in product.
With all respect to everyone here, the proliferation of Linux will soon be limited by precisely these issues: documentation and setup.
Caldera has it mostly right, and I will soon install their 2.3, which will likely be still better. Let the others look to their model.
Documentation is my biggest issue. All the Linux users insist that it's anywhere from adequate to great, but those of us who didn't cut our teeth on *nix know it just ain't so. Until the Linux cognoscenti come out of denial on this, things won't improve.
My complaints are usually greeted with suggestions that I write some HOWTOs. Hello? I've already stated that I have problems in need of answers. How does that qualify me to write instruction for others? The people who need to write HOWTOs are the Linux gurus who insist there is no need. See the problem?
I live in hope, but I can only work with reality, so for now, Linux is only a dream.
--- Bill
Being a Linux user myself I have a
hard time saying this but here goes...
This post has convinced me that
Linux users are as much mindless
snobs as their BSD counterparts.
NOTHING is ever obvious, else you
do not need a user.
Win98 and NT,
.cab files to the hard drive and then run setup. much quicker and cleaner installs for some odd reason,
Always copu the
Sorry, but I agree with the first guy: if one doesn't want to use the command line but has to anyway, the software is flawed. Grep may be fast, but it's not intuitive. If you already know how to use it and need to search a huge file quickly, that shortcoming is irrelevant. If you've never seen grep before, though, that shortcoming is real. Yes, you can overcome the software's shortcoming by spending time to learn how to use it, but that's just a workaround, not a true solution (like solving NT's stability problem by rebooting every night). For the occasional user who doesn't use it enough to justify studying it, an intuitive interface is the superior solution.
They may be kinda sticky, but they DO help if you have no idea what you are doing. But by using one you are in no way a computer expert.
It may be instructive to compare the easy of install and maintenance of the PC with Linux to something other than a PC with Windoze.
;) ). I have to assume that application writers and hardware designers feel the same way.
I work as a game programmer, and in these discussion I see another perspective that often gets left out. When talking just about games, the console games sell many more copies than PC games ever do. There are many factors that contribute to the situation. I'm fairly convinced however that one of the top reasons is the ease of install and maintenance of the hardware and softare. To play a Playstation game, pop the cd in and turn the thing on (and take both steps by pressing these large inviting round buttons). But how often to people critize Sony for producing hardware or software for idiots? How often do "power" users scoff at Playstations because the hardware and software is for the simple minded?
To play a PC game (on Windoze), you must go through potentially several cycles of checking the hardware requirements, looking for the latest DirectX distribution, looking for the latest drivers for your specific hardware, clearing out disk space, installing the game, and installing patches.
My point is to say that designing hardware (and system software: the OS) to be as simple to use as possible is not a bad thing (TM). Designing the OS to be more useable more quickly and with less research and knowledge of the hardware is not a bad thing.
Linux advocates scoff when windoze people complain of Linux's complexities, but I question the motivation to dismiss these criticisms out of hand. If Windoze were even less complex than it currently is (and I consider it less complex to use than Linux), potentially I could program games for the PC such that people could pop the CD in the drive and play I'd be happier and less stressed in my job (and probably more successful
Oxryly
COL 2.2 does, in fact, do video card autoprobing for any card supported by the VGA or SVGA servers.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I'd have to disagree. I've installed Windows 95 twice, and upgrade 95 to 98 once, and all these installations were much easier than my installation of Linux (and subsequent problems getting X to actually start). Windows 95/98 auto-detected my video card and monitor and chose a default resolution that worked, auto-detected my modem, network card, and USB scanner, and set those up properly, and auto-detected my non-IDE proprietary Panasonic CD-ROM drive (an old 2x one). PPP setup took about 2 minutes.
Linux (Slackware 3.0), on the other hand, didn't auto-detect anything, and my USB scanner never did work. I had to create a special boot disk (sbpcd.i) to work with my CD-ROM drive, had to look up detailed specifications of the resolutions/refresh rates supported by my video card and monitor (XF86Setup apparently can't choose any reasonable defaults), and PPP was *really* annoying to get working properly.
Now some of these problems are the fault of device manufacturers for proprietary interfaces and drivers, but a newbie can be forgiven for not knowing that it's not *really* the OS's fault - to the newbie, one OS works with his scanner, while the other doesn't. Whether this is the OS's fault or somebody else's fault is somewhat irrelevant.
Some of the problems really are the fault of the OS and the windowing system, however. XF86Setup could be a lot more friendly with auto-detection. X could start with some decent VESA defaults (like Windows does), so somebody could start X for the first time without even needing to run XF86Setup at all. PPP configuration could be nicer, and (for laptops) PCMCIA support could be built in, rather than having to be added separately.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Mentioning how x86 is old outdated hardware, that is one reason I love linux. The only reason we have stuck with x86 for absolutly so long is because of microsoft. Everybody wants to remain compatible, that makes sence. But if linux can truly take off, people will be able to migrate from x86 to alpha to PPC to whatever easily. As you would mainting the same operating system and be able to aquire the same look, feel, and programs available. We could get some real work done in the hardware architecture buisness. Instead of spending all our time on legacy support. I mean seriously when someone buys a new computer, nothing usually gets transfered over but a few datafile. Have a common tranfer interface, and or network backup available. And we can start to move into the next generation. And transmeta will help us all along :) Thanx Linus
Can someone clearly explain to me how RedHat is so "user friendly" and "easy"? I tried RH6 (twice in fact) and I can't beleive that this is the distribution that is the flagship of the Linux "World Domination Tour" I prefer back to basics like Stampede and Slackware myself, and have a better time understanding the install process as well. As far as the article that this thread is for, if the guy doesnt know what a kernel is, or what linux is even for, why is he even installing it?
I hate when people trash the command line. What do you use in real life...... words? Do you talk to people using a complicated syntax with all kinds of rules? OR Do you use pantomime? Walking around pointing to things to communicate.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
The story was basically an unfair contest:
... Well at least Win98 on a system running Linux already.
Journalist: I tried something I was unqualified to do and had a hard time.
To be fair he should also have tried installing
Win98, BeOS, Bsd, Os2, Plan 9,
Granted the installation should be easier for the general user but this was not a comparison story.
How many general users install their OS? Was that mentioned?
Did he mention: The computer was supplied with Windows and he never had to install windows?
Did he mention: You can order computers with Linux preinstalled just like winTel boxen?
I would call it a slightly unfair article.
Would you consider a story about a fast food employee attempting to repair a car for the first time and finding it hard a fair story?
but i have a feeling that the author knows more about computers than he lets on, but by acting the way he does accomplishes two things:
/. have vastly different target audiences).
1) Prevents the alienation of Lo-Tek readers (remember: CNN and
2) Squirts in a dose of humor for the more well-informed.
i just think it's something to consider...
Yes, autodetection is your friend. If it can be optionally bypassed, I don't see what's wrong with adding it in.
I find it fairly pathetic that X can't even run with some decent defaults. You have to run XF86Setup before starting X, or else X won't start *at all*. It should at least start at 640x480x16, as you mentioned, and then inform the user to run XF86Setup if he wants to configure his display beyond what the defaults have set.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I just find it amazing that someone who used to program is actually that ignorant of his computer that he had to check what kind of mouse he has.
... that's like saying... I wanna check out that internet thing so I'm getting MSIE 2.0!
I am also upset that he is using Caldera 1.3 and not 2.3 if he's checking out the Linux scene using Caldera 1.3
Afterward I can hear them complain... ugh! the internet stinks... it keeps crashing!
[signature]
He'd have better luck is he tried Redhats install after going thru the kickstart on the web (www.fezbox.com) or trying demolinux (www.demolinux.org)..wouldbe been a lot simpler. This guy did it the hard way though..im impressed.
Well sure, no one's born knowing Unix, or any other OS, but in the olden days, learning how to use Unix was a separate task from learning how to install and maintain Unix. Your college would have machines running Unix with everything already set up for you. A quick intro to a couple of commands (man, ls, vi or emacs, how to start X if you had X terminals, etc.) and you're on your way. No need to set up networking, printing, X, or any of the other systems that are needed. It was all done for you.
As you use the system, you're bound to start picking up on how some of the configuration is done. So that by the time Linux was available and you decided you wanted to run it, you already knew a whole lot about Unix.
In my own case, it was Unix at school (SunOS and NeXT), and an Amiga at home, with GCC and an accompanying suite of Unix utils (including a nice port of csh) that helped me learn Unix. I used Unix for years before I ever had to worry about being my own sysadmin.
So yeah, sure, everyone starts ignorant. But not everyone had to go from Unix novice to Linux expert overnight. That's gotta be rough, I feel for everyone in that position.
But in the meantime he shouldn't be writing articles about it.
It would be like SportsCenter doing a segment on Astronomy.... they would have NO idea what they are talking about.
Tino,
If you system hard drive has no partitions on it and if your computer can boot directly from a CD-ROM drive (either ATAPI 1.2 compatible IDE or SCSI connected to Adaptec host adapter), you can literally install the full or OEM installation version of Windows 98 directly from a CD-ROM boot. Try THAT with Linux.
I think the BEST thing about Windows 98 is the fact Microsoft _has_ heard the complaints about Windows 95 installation and has done something about it. On most modern computers, I can have Windows 98 installed and running in about 45 minutes. If you're not used to UNIX, installing Linux will take at least twice as long.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
They are obviously "power users" since they are installing win98 on a dual slocket celeron system, with that second cpu doubling as a space heater.
Sometimes when you think back to the silly things you did when you were first learning.. :)
My advice is to install it and play with it till you seriously break it. Then you have a pretty good idea of how it works.
it's not just the bleeding edge hardware, either - i re-installed win98se about a week ago with a STB Velocity 4400 AGP (nvidia riva TNT) and a Diamond Monster MX300 PCI sound card. this supposedly 'new' version of windows couldn't find the drivers for EITHER card.
luckily i had downloaded the latest drivers a few weeks before and was able to get things straightened out. but these are NOT new items! the nvidia GeForce is soon to come, and the MX300 is at least 6 months to a year old!
der dee der.
A user looking at a graphical search program, on the other hand, will understand instantly what input it needs. Click on the icon for the file you want to search, or type its name in the box. Type your search string in the other box. Click on "search."
Grep is more powerful, of course, and a user who needs that power will find learning how to use it to be well worth the time. But that does the new user no good when he doesn't need that power. He would spend more time reading the man page than it would take for him to just run the point-and-click application and find what he's looking for. And ultimately, the program that allows the user to finish the job sooner is better suited to the task.
As roblimo mentioned, it is an old theme.. and most of the stories share something in common.. the author hasn't even tried installing Windows before, much less linux. They've never installed an operating system before yet they feel qualified to say "Linux is hard to install". Hard to install compared to what?
This same guy would probably have a hard time doing a windows 98 upgrade. NT would probably take all day, just like linux. Linux is (depending on the distro) often easier to install than NT, so it's not fair to say that linux is harder to install.
Saturday, 11:10 a.m. This is when most computer savvy people get to work, right? Are you kidding?!?! I try not to even get out of BED before 2 on a Saturday!!!
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
I'm reading something along the lines of, "Ok, it's supposedly installed. Now what?"
Perhaps there needs to be a tutorial of sorts, to point out what tools are available? (Problem: they may or may not have been installed...). A novice, after all, isn't necessarily going to have a clue what he or she has just installed, how to start it, or so forth, and handing 'em a pointer to the HOWTOs and LDP guides may be just a tad too overwhelming in terms of reading material.
So, what do y'all think? Is it better that they be encouraged (just) to read, possibly driving people away; or should they instead be shown a demo, featuring the various apps and so forth?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
This was an incredibly simple and clean installation! The user interface is very nice and the installer automatically figured out the various devices and cards that were installed. The only glitch (and one pointed out by Caldera) is that I had to manually tell the installer how much video memory I had. BTW, I did a complete installation (not customized) to see what is available. Tomorrow, I will do a customized installation on another system. Right now, the RedHat installer looks rather feeble compared to this one. I can't wait to see what the Caldera customized installation looks like.
As far as I'm concerned, this CNN review is totally bogus and pathetically out of date. The 2.3 version is extremely clean and fairly idiot-proof. Somebody should send this person the newer package (it only costs around $30 with an additional $10 rebate offer). Then they could see how far Linux has progressed. Finally, I should also point out that I violated the RTFM doctrine. This was a blind-trust installation.
like, take a box that you dont know what hardware is in it, and tell me you dont swear a few times. someone send this guy a redhat cd, quickly.
Nah.
I'm a veteran of at least two dozen Linux installs on various configurations. The _ONLY_ time that I've run into difficulties is when hardware problems arose: once, a bad cache RAM chip kept crashing the system, and another time, the CD-ROM drive failed in the middle of the install.
I've also installed Win95 over half a dozen times -- each time on the same machine, I might add, because it keeps screwing itself up.
The most recent install went without a hitch. You could have knocked me over with a feather duster -- this is the first time that this ever happened.
All of my previous installs were beset by a host of silly problems that Microsoft could easily have fixed if they cared one iota about their operating system.
What's more, there were no HOWTOs to contact, and the install manual was totally useless. I searched the Internet (from my Linux box, which I had previously set up without any difficulties) in vain for any documentation that might help.
In the end, I got it to work, no thanks to Microsoft.
Windows installs are just plain TOO DIFFICULT. My personal guess is that it will take at least two years before Windows has a user-experience (from install, to GUI, to maintenance) that rivals Linux/BeOS/MacOS.
My big question, and I am sure someone else has asked this... is why is he installing Caldera 1.2?
I am not familiar with Caldera, I'm a mandrake/redhat user, but... I do know they're on version 2.3 and that 2.3 is supposed to be really easy to install. Hell, version 1.3 of Caldera has been out for a while!
I realize that we all went through the painful install process at some time back way when. Back when I was using pre1.0 beta of slackware on and off.
Most people at least know to use the latest release version if they're doing something new.. even if they have no clue to what they're doing.
All I can think of is that this is some sort of cruel joke. I admit it would be funny to give a guy a P90 with a weird no name video card and a Red Hat 3.0 CD. In fact, I think I might just do that.......
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
Call it "economy of scale".
If you have a Hot New Product (be it software or hardware) being introduced into the Home and Buisness computing marketplace, it will support Windows. Why? Everybody and their grandmother uses it. Most likely your potential customers do too.
It would be nice if that situation changed. If every other person and their grandmother used Linux, Hot New Products will most likely support Linux too. If it doesn't, there's a good bet that a competative product will. We, as Linux users, get more choices. Choice is good.
We as professional IT workers could bennifit also. I would love to make my living off supporting Linux platforms. Right now I support Solaris and HPUX systems. My organization's IT budget is amazingly slim. Linux could help us augment our existing environment at a price we could afford. However, the apps we use aren't available in Linux... yet. The developer for our primary app has made some noise about doing a Linux port. Why? Everybody and their boss is interested in it.
"World Domination" is good for Linux. And one key aspect about Linux' version of Domination lies in its configurability; if you don't like the features that lead to "World Domination", don't use them. Its all about choices. Its all good.
Everybody seems to think the writer is a guy.
It seems to me, Robin Lloyd is female.
Well put. When I started experimenting with Linux about 2 years ago, I didn't even know what .tar.gz was. As I tried to ask others about basic *nix tools, I was told RTFM. Its by these experiences that we learn the most.
RTFM is obviously a topic that attracts the trolls from the caves as well as any other topic. But Im willing to bet that 99% of those that complain about the RTFM principle, when asked seperately would agree that being told all the answers all the time doesn't help anyone in the long run.
And for those who complain that the manuals are so cryptic that you need to read the manuals just to understand the manuals, there are endless amounts of information from other sources out there. Be it newgroups, or mailing list archives, I can assure you, that you will find someone, somewhere that has had your problem....and solved it.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
First off. It is totally unfair to call this guy ignorant in a derogatory sense. I'm willing to bet that most of you don't know how a nuclear reactor work, yet you use it's products all the time. Does that make you stupid and ignorant? No. You shouldn't have to know how a nuclear reactor works. Computers should be the same way but unlike nuclear engineers, computer scientists seems to think that everybody should understand how computers work. This poor journalists experience is one of the major problems with computers today. In this respect M$ windows is much much better than linux. People hate microsoft so much these days they are blinded to the good that is in microsoft software. I can hack linux as good as the rest and find it easy. But when I tried out win2k beta was I ever impressed that it automatically found and configured every peice of hardware that had a win2k driver. Linux should be moving in this direction as well. Userfriendlness is nowhere near where it should be. Linux is nowhere near surpassing windows until it equals or betters it in the user interface area. In my opinion this will require major coding effort. So don't look at this article and think how dumb the poor guy is. Think how smart you should try and make linux. Let linux take care of linux and computer stuff. Let it's users worry about things that they care about. And don't go telling me to go hack the source code because I have other things to do like learn and earn money to pay bills.
Maybe you had unsupported hardware. Seriously, if your hardware is fully supported, you shouldn't have to do anything more than throw the CD in and click "OK" several times. It's not the distributor's fault that your hardware vendor doesn't want you to use linux.
accustomed to (you know, crazy things like browsing my file system).
Try "man ls". If that fails, all the recent distributions come with KDE.
Ok, this isn't directly on topic. So sue me.
This guy tried to install Linux. So did I, about 2 months ago. He knew very little about his computer equipment and was somewhat unprepared. I, on the other hand, was intimately familiar with everything in my system and was extremely prepared. At the end of the day, both of us were in the same place... at the ugly prompt. Sure, being ugly isn't a sin, but being useless IS. At that particular junction, I was forced to boot back into Win98 to read e-mail/burn CDs/web surf/type documents/play games. I can do all of those in Windows, but after 2 months I still cannot do all of those things in Linux. (the read email and web surf things were solved when I got PPP to work in Linux - but I just never knew where to look for getting anything else to happen)
Linux is not hard to install. It's actually quite simple if you're well prepared. But it's not nice to learn how to be a Linux power user.
Here's why: In the computer world, there's two kinds of software/UI design: software that's designed by programmers, and software that's designed by professional designers. Linux is the former, Windows is the latter. Windows is much better to look at and deal with, which makes it SEEM easier. Also, everything's easy to find if you know how to look, and in Windows since looking is universally better, finding is also universally better. Finally, there's better tools in Windows for that kind of stuff, tools which are easy and obvious to find. Even though the tools are there in Linux and they are comprehendable, they are damn hard to find and still not entirely as easy to use as their Windows counterparts. Although intelligent programmers who spend hours and hours learning (no one learns how to be a Linux guru in 60 min or even 60 days) are able to get around, most of the humans on the planet don't have the willpower, patience, time, blood, sweat, and tears to put into Linux like the real wizards do. And that's assuming that all humans are as highly intelligent as those big programming brains, which they're unfortunately not. Oh, and anywhere from 5-50 years of intense experience with computers does give some of the linux guys an edge over others.
Naturally, I knew how to change directories, run certain programs, get around X-Windows, etc. But that was all. God knows I had thousands of programs before me in myriad subdirectories, but as I was walking through the directories I felt like a lost child in a store who kept walking into rooms I wasn't supposed to be in. My biggest problem, however, was the lack of a nice centralized place to go to when I needed to do something and wanted to look through the available programs for something to help me.
For example: I had to set up PPP. Didn't know how. Read the HOWTO, but it confused the hell out of me (and I have an exteral modem, so configuring it SHOULD have been trivial). Finally a week later, I heard someone mention linuxconf. Then I used that to get PPP to work, so I downloaded Seti@Home. Didn't know how to unzip/untar/un-rpm it.(I didn't know the specific command, and didn't know where I could find it) That took a week to find out too. Then I did, and couldn't figure out how to run it properly. Another two weeks to figure out it needed a chmod. This is for an easily configured program that runs from the prompt! Imagine what it would be like to try and write CDs? Or if I downloaded source that needed compiling or a kernel patch?
My point? If you show me how to do it, I can figure it out easily. If you don't show me, then I'm not dumb for not knowing. There's too many of you elitist swine out there who think everyone who says they are having a hard time with Linux are against Linux and are the "enemy". I nor the author of the article are the "enemy", yet you damn well treat us like it just because we don't have 50 years to scour our hard drives and man entries for simple commands. Yes, I still want to know how to use it. No, I don't want 50 replies with "go to freshmeat and there's cd writing programs there". Yea there are programs like that on freashmeat. I just don't know which one is best for me. Until I can figure out this stuff easier (not easily, cause a lot of it is a bitch in Windows too) I won't use Linux until I feel comfortable using everything that I need to use that works fine for me in Windows.
This guy who tried to install Linux is ultimately on our side. He wants to learn. You think that he's dumb because he needs help to learn. But he's not. In the end, if he can never get Linux to work like you can, then he at least can probably write better news articles than you can.
But I digress... he represents the next big wave of Linux users. They are going to be OKAY installing it (not without pain, but neither is Windows) but clueless on how to get around in it. RTFM is a useless strategy here because:
1. It's the system that's hard to use and understand (and it does have SERIOUS room for improvement), and RTFM just helps you learn specific things. It doesn't let you "poke around". Well designed tools and tips will help the situation, but it's Unix. It's hard to begin with. Even for geniuses, it takes a while to sink in.
2. How can you RTFM if you can't FTFM? (Find The Fucking Manual)
So, a better way of helping people explore will need to be created. That way, people can look around and figure out what they want (or need) to use rather than need help every time a different situation comes up. Until then, if you want Linux to grow past being a tech fad, then you'll cut out the shitty attitude toward anyone who's not the level of Linux Guru that you are.
If you harbor no malcontent toward those who are seemingly clueless about computers, my apologies for this article... it doesn't apply to you.
I definitely have to disagree with your statements. You learn MORE by reading the documentation and working it out on your own. If you were to ask me something, say, "how do I get the files out of this .tar.gz file", I could just say tar zxf filename.tar.gz. And you could do what you're trying to do. But, if I instead just told you to read the tar manpage, you'd learn why the z, x, and f are there. By knowing that z means to treat it as a compressed file, x means to extract files, and f means to read the data from a file rather than a device, you will probably actually REMEMBER it the next time instead of having to ask me or someone else again.
As far as "information irrelevant to you at the time", this is actually a good thing about reading the documentation yourself. To go back to the tar example, let's say you read the man page and found what options you needed for the task at hand. 2 weeks later, you need to make a tar file. There's a good chance that even if you don't remember the exact syntax to create a tar file, you'll know whereabouts to look in the man page. It's a progressive process...the more documentation you read, the more little bits of knowledge you'll build up without even realizing it. You'll be looking at manpages less and less and using your system better and faster.
Don't cheat yourself by depending on the minds and skills of others. RTFM, for your own sake.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
This sounds like a network configuration problem, combined with a setup that requires a network connection running ( maybe you're running sendmaild ). The best way around this is for the machine not to run services out of the box. I believe if you choose the Redhat workstation install, it probably wont run sendmaild in the default setting. If you choose a custom install -- well, try to know what you are doing.
This is actually a good thing. A year ago he could not do it at all or ever heard of linux...
This kind: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/28/crab.nebula/
Here, here. I fully agree. For Linux to become the Microsoft killer that a lot of people want it to be means it has to get beyond the server market and on to the desktop in significant numbers. How does that happen? Ease of use, of course. That means hardware autodetection, default drivers, plain english instructions for set up, and other "hand holding" features that will walk the average computer user through the installation process.
If you want to bypass all the ease of use stuff, have an "expert setup" that will allow you to customize the kernel to your heart's delight, create modules and so on (one of the real strengths of open source software), without all the little help features along the way. That way we can have the best of both worlds.
Until Linux can address the ease of use issue, it's not going to dominate the world.
I have. It works. Has worked for some time with RedHat, at least.
I think the BEST thing about Windows 98 is the fact Microsoft _has_ heard the complaints about Windows 95 installation and has done something about it. On most modern computers, I can have Windows 98 installed and running in about 45 minutes. If you're not used to UNIX, installing Linux will take at least twice as long.
The only difficult steps in installing RedHat Linux (other distributions can vary in difficulty) are: partitioning the disk (still difficult with Windows) and selecting the video adapter (can also be a pain in Windows if your adapter is not auto-detected, which seems to be about half the time). If you do know your video adapter, RedHat will ask you if you want to automatically start X. If you do, it will set up xdm to run at startup, so you never even see a command prompt.
My last Linux install took about 45 min...but that was because I was doing an remote FTP install from ftp.varesearch.com...try THAT with Windows. :-D
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Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
.to screw in a lightbulb. Answer: they'd have to live in the dark because noone could give anyone else any advice on how to fix it, therefore noone would ever learn how to change the lightbulb. The attitude expressed by some of the posters in this situation amazes me to no end. Constantly belittling these people. At least the reported tried to install the operating system. As a new user to Linux it amazes me that older users would have such a pompus attitude to a person in this situation...for any reason. I've installed NT, 98, 95, 3.1 etc, etc., and must admit that with minor bumps I found my first full Linux install pretty easy, just different. If I were to have had a problem though I would like to think that there are people out there that would help and not look at my email client or my browser info or whatever else and reject me because the only computer that's currently hooked up has win98 on it. Look around people, Linux is something special as in it's an old concept reborn in new technology. If y'all can't grow up and learn to be supportive and helpful of someone who at least tries for whatever reason, ya might as well go find someother operating system to worship because Linux won't survive much less grow.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
Ok.. I don't think this guy is in any place to say "Linux is hard to install" he doesn't know crap about computers (it's not that hard to figure out that the card the monitor is pluged into is the video card) and from my understanding has never installed any other os. I'm 15 years old.. and i had no problem installing Linux on sevral difrent Computers.. . I will admit that to the "webUser" (users who only use a computer for word processing/email/web) Linux can seem dificult.. But what about win98? the only Reason it was easyer for them is because it came PREINSTALLED. these people are the type of people who want to run linux to make themselfs look like a hacker or a computer wiz.. . well, right now.. linux is not the right os for those people.. . linux is a powerful network/server os w/ alot of featurs and stabelity.. . not some AOL style user interface.. made for only email and web browsing.. . althoue companies like RedHat and SuSE are makeing Linux much easyer to install and configure.. there's still the fact that people just don't want to see a prompt and type 'startx' to get into a gui.. these are the type of people who would be beter off w/ an imac.. Linux is not some "fad" it's an os that was designed to offer the power of the unix os for the pc.. and it's exceeded that expectation.. Linux is getting more user freindly.. but do we really want it to be? when it gets to the point that we need to click throw 20 questions to delete a file or hear a cute little message whenever we have new mail.. or even see a nice little animation when copying files.. then it becomes annoying.. and loses some of it speed and power.. people were forced to learn how to use a mouse and how to use windows.. why cant they learn linux and like it for what it is.. if they want a "computer game" of an os they can stick with windows and suffer the countless lockup's and data loss's.. or they can do a little work and learn a bit about there computer and linux and be rewarded with a much more powerful os.. if i can learn it they can as well.. i spent a grate deal of time learning linux.. and most of them spent even more learning windows.. they just want a free windows.. thats what it all comes down to. anyone with a little common sence and a bit of knolage can install linux. i love linux the way it is.. i admit.. there are somethings that i would want to change.. or add.. but thats reserved for the years when i decide to make myself my own distro ;) for now.. my hat goes off to SuSE for provideing one of the Best overall distro's of linux i've seen.
Today, imagine the guy at home who wants to go out and buy a computer. He doesn't know much about it, but he wishes to connect to the net, get an e-mail address, surf the web, pay his bills, etc. The easiest way is probably some brand like compaq. The machine is pre-configured for everything he needs. It does wun windows.
Now we all know that linux is more stable, reliable, faster, blah blah blah... Why should linux stay at the level of those who know how to install an OS (whichever one it is)? If he could get a pre-installed linux box with all the multimedia stuff working and a nice gui, it would be great for him, and for linux in its goal of achieving world domination.
You're looking at the situation from the perspective of a knowledgeable computer user. That CNN reporter would just like a working computer. And if linux does a better job than windows, then he should use it. But the os of choice for this kind of user should be friendly. And linux can do it with say a well configured kde like mandrake. But he has to overcome the step of installing it.
This is one of the areas which needs a lot of work and which is, indeed, being worked on. But with people like you who make fun of the kind of user that he is, that's never going to happen. And if you'd like to see linux grow in the desktop market, you should understand that.
Maan
I believe *Robin Lloyd* is female, but I take issue with your characterization of Robin as a "girl's name." My wife is *not* a lesbian. ;-)
The LDP docs are written by volunteers. If you want better documentation, buy a book.
2) Distros which use the RPM installation offer only one safe option: Install Everything. Selective package installation leads to things which don't work, boots which stall for many minutes, and a grand variety of other mysteries.
Firstly, the Redhat install has a "workstation" option. Secondly, the "components" you can choose are all self contained. Your hanging at boot is probably caused by the fact that you are trying to run some daemon which expects you to have a permanent connection. ie you chose custom install and picked daemons that you shouldn't be running.
4) X server installation and setup is a very interesting source of problems. My video cards and monitors are capable of 1600x1200,
Very few users use this resolution
5) Sending a newbie to the HOWTOs is a great way to send someone postal.
Buy a book.
Documentation is my biggest issue.
No one is obliged to write you docs for free. Buy a book. There are a ton of linux books available.
Multisync monitors already are supported. All of them. You can feed practically any modeline into a monitor provided that you are staying inside your video card and monitors limitations. It's the video cards that ar the problem.
"Someone with no experience with Windows will take about as long with it as he took with Linux."
And the only time I've had to restart a LINUX install more than once on the same machine, it was because the CD-ROM I was installing from across the network kept crapping out. I've often had to restart a Win95 install four or five times, just to get through the 'Detecting your hardware.' phase.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
I beg to differ.
I've installed Win95 a half dozen times, Win98 more then a few times, several MacOS installs, and several linux installs.
The difference is that the linux install only had to be done once on any computer to which it was done.
And linux (debian/2.0 at the time) had _no_ trouble autodetecting and auto-configuring my pcmicia devices (3com 3c589b and UsRobotics something-or-other, the latter of which was both a modem and a network card in one - linux had no trouble handling this). Its no mistake that I use linux now, I'm not a brain-washed anti-microsoft heretic. I used Windows for a while, was frustrated that hacking up the system often resulted in the words "Error in explorer.exe.\Reinstall Windows\[OK]". The hacks were mostly minor and should not have caused that.
Windows installs its own idea of what everything should be instead of what things should be. On my system, it was absolutely convinced that, since I had a serial cable client-server link with a 386 at the time of install, that it should never leave. The OS every succeeding time spent well over a minute searching for these "removeable" drives, with the mouse slowly bouncing up the screen and BSODing when the mouse reached the top-right corner.
The install for (debian) linux, using the rescue floppy is nearly flawless, fast (I installed linux on my laptop in two hours over network, largely hampered by quake games and other bandwidth eating programmes *ahem* netbios or netbeui *ahem*) , and needn't be redone.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I attempted to install Mandrake Linux 6.0 on my PC at home that has Win98 & Win2K beta dual boot. The first try went very poorly. I had to get a 3rd party program I had to fixup my hard disk & then restore all of the Windows software from tape. The 2nd try worked great although I have to boot Linux from a floppy. I is fun playing around with KDE & Gnome, StarOffice works great. I wish there was drivers for the strange Island sound card that Dell put in my PC. Even Win2K doesn't know how to use it and Dell only has Win98 drivers. Beware of Dell pcs, they often come with "non-standard" devices that it is hard to find drivers for.
... Jim Ellingsen
Cheers
*sigh* I've been reading so many posts about how linux has a bad install.. and your post even goes as far to say Linus and Alan should be taking a deep breath instead of focusing on the kernel. OK. Linus and Alan work on the _kernel_ they don't work on installers. If they wanted to make installers I'm sure they would have no problem finding a line of employment in that area. If the installation is hard, it's typically the distros fault because typically they make the installer. Linux is a kernel. That's it. A kernel. Not a distro. If a kernel includes a graphical install that also setups the gui, and auto-detects everything, then you get bloatware. You need the kernel to sit there and do it's job of being stable, and you need installers to setup guis, and auto-detect everything. The people who make the installers should take a deep breath, and they now they are taking a deep breath, look at the strides linux installers have made.
Ian zink
If you don't know what a video card looks like then you're sure as hell not going to know what a BIOS is let alone that you should hit DEL (or some other key) whilst the computer is booting, delve into the settings and change the boot order to have ATAPI go first (which they will obviously correlate with a CD-ROM drive) and then save the settings before rebooting to initiate the proceedure. Assuming he didn't inadvertantly change the processor voltage and blow his system up the machine should start the Win98 installation ... and that's only step one.
Goes to show you just how awful BIOS disk access routines really are.
Many people posting to this thread have said "this guy..." in reference to the author of the story.
:)
The byline says "By Robin Lloyd", which could be either a guy or a woman. Not that it's relevant to the story, but it kind of bugs me to see assumptions about gender like that.
Just like there are plenty of male nurses, I'm sure there are also plenty of female tech journalists who have problems installing really, really old versions of OpenLinux
OK, you may now flame me for being nitpicky and go back to debating the finer points of autoprobing vs. editing init files with vi. I personally am going to sleep now.
Yes, you have the machine up in 5 minutes, due to the fact that you use... Novell! Software distribution with Novell is insanely simple and IMO, the best thing that I've used. It kills SMS and SMS 2.0. (SMS 2 is nice, but can it verify that the machines installed correctly? is the message informative if not? no and no.) If we want to be accurate about the install time, please also include the time neccessary for the home user to setup a lan, and install and configure novell properly. I think even Slackware 1.0 wins for ease of use there :)
:)
As for me, my average Linux install time is about 20 minutes, FreeBSD is about 20 minutes as well, NT is about an hour, and 98 was about three hours on my last machine, due perhaps to the fact that it was on bleeding edge hardware which win98 second edition didn't support out of the box. (Note: windows 98 comes with USB mouse support only AFTER the installation is finished)
For machines with SMP and RAID, I stick to Linux and NT though seeing as 9x is a bit... bass ackwards in that arena. I wish 9x supported dual processors well, my NT machine runs nicely on a dual celeron 468mhz system.
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it isn't -- with all OSes, with different mixes of hardware, etc. I've had Windows NT install with no tears (okay, with few tears), and I've spent days struggling to get Linux installations working worth a damn. On different occasions, I've had the opposite experience. My current theory is that it's the phase of the moon.
We should try to get a major news organization to attempt installing Windows NT on a machine that has Linux pre-installed. Send 'em the machine and a shrinkwrapped copy of NT Workstation. I'll even volunteer to provide the machine and the copy of Windows to CNN if they promise to try to return them safely.
The reality is that despite the efforts of various Linux vendors to change this, no operating system is simple to install for someone with little or no computer knowledge, and that it's more confusing still for them to install an OS over another, pre-existing one. It's about time that that fact gets reported in the press, rather than just that "Linux is hard to install".
I'd just like to say it would be almost impossible for me to agree more.
Autoprobing is like gambling. Take any game where you bet a certain amount of money, and get back twice what you bet, if you win, or nothing, if you lose.
On Linux, it's like betting a fixed amount of money. You might win, you might lose, but it shouldn't take too long to recover your losses if you do lose.
On Windows 9x it's like the "doubling" gambling system, where you keep betting twice what you lost in the last round until you win. You'll probably end up a little bit ahead, but you just might hit that one in 2^x chance and lose everything.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
RPM is a very good installer. I've heard the Debian installer is good too. RPM are actually better than Installshield because they you always have to explicitly tell it to overwrite existing files. RPM keeps a database of what package each file belongs to.
/usr/bin/X11R6 not to /usr/local/bin !
RPM is good if you only use RPM (or DEB for Debian) and never compile anything yourself. I messed my SuSE (which I think is as userfriendly as RH) with a self-compiled version of Imlib. I had Imlib installed correctly, but since it was not out of an RPM, it was not in the RPM-Database and therefore other RPMs depending on it would not install! Of course I could have forced them to install, but then I'd be forcing every package soon.
You could go along with RPM pretty well. But think: not every program is available as an RPM. Far worse is that RPM for RH often don't quite work with SuSE (and vice-versa).
And then is the fact, that I want to have X-applications installed to
Now I changed to Slackware and have WindowMaker, ETerm and all that stuff self-compiled. GTK takes forever to compile, but it works. =:-)
What I also like about Slackware is that the scripts are not that cluttered (as are in SuSE). From that point of view, Slackware is far more userfriendly.
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
I'm baffled because I didn't buy or build this computer, on loan from CNN Interactive.
get your own machine !!
I wrote a similar article, i'm going to go find it, check my other posts. I was a communication major (like most of these journalists) I just happen to have found a clue box. It sits on my desk....
+&x
He attempted to install OpenLinux 1.3? That was silly. That version is what, 2 years old?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The reason we need to focus on world domination is that the world is full of people who would choose a free product over a grossly overpriced one...
iff they could use it as easily as or with only slightly more difficulty than Windows.
Why would anyone pay $1.50 for a quarter-pound hamburger when you can get almost 4 times that amount of meat and bread at the store and make hamburgers for yourself and three friends, exactly the way you wanted them?
Some folks will answer, "I won't pay that much. If I want a hamburger, I'll make one, regardless of hassle, just so I can get extra onions and no mayo without having to say 'extra onions and NO mayo' to the counter clerk four times." These are Linux users at heart.
Others will say, "I don't want to dine: I want to eat, and fast, so I can get to the movies!" These are Windows users.
Now, if you (warm-hearted open-sourcer that you are) made burgers, and recalling the adage that two can use a kernel as cheaply as one, invited your friend to drop by on his way to the movies, and have a burger with you...
He'd take the free burger(install Linux), because it was cheap and easy.
Don't get me wrong--this is not a free beer/free speech mix-up... just an analogy to explain why we need to work on ease-of-use.
b.t.w., I'm a Windows user who recently uninstalled Linux because I didn't have time to spend maintaining it. I re-installed Windows in just under three hours. Hate me, but I'll re-install when Linux is easy like Windows.
Looks like what he's actually doing is installing pre-configured Windows98 disk images, so if his systems are all bleeding edge in exactly the same way, it should all fit fine.
D
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I thought that was:
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A PC without windows is like chocolate cake with no mustard.
Maybe you should do that now?
The prompt is beautiful.
Back in 1984 I resored an old PDP8. Careful hardware installation of various cards into the backplane. Cables to the console. Playing with the toggle switches. Probing the memory 12bits! of magnetic core!! A 12x12 bit multiply hardware extension.
Paged memory access: are we destined to repeat past mistakes.
Connect the disk drives RT11. Dig out some old 8" floppies. Toggle in a boot loader. The OS loads and runs. OS9 (? I think) it did not accept a date after some time in 197[4-6] (talk about a Y2K problem). Playing HANOI on a VT52 was heaven. Booting off of floppies with pin holes was cool.
The prompt is beautiful.
Sorry for the nostalga. All inaccuracies due to failing memory.
I just wish I had completed my display project using the core memory, some sheets of glass and iron filings.
What I see is somebody who doesn't know what he is doing and hasn't taken the time to even consult references whining in the public press when he has difficulties installing Linux.
Look...we are supposed to know how our car works, how to replace a tire, how to open the hood, what liquids to put in and filters to replace. How difficult is it to make yourself aware of the few components of your computer (um, monitor, hard drive(s), memory, video card, sound card...5 items). You just paid >$1000 for it right? Maybe you should know what is in it? And maybe you should read the manual that comes with it? I'm amazed at the number of people who are totally dumbstruck and desperate for help, which have never even taken 15 minutes to read the intro in their computer manual.
But I am not denying those people exist. It simply can't be the fault of the computer, or the hardware, or the software, that the user does not take a minimal amount of effort to make themselves familiar with something they just purchased. This "journalist" has been very irresponsible, in my opinion, by airing his gripes originating from ignorance and carelessness, to people who might be scared away because of it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I concur 100%. Yes, I know what kind of scsi controller, video card, etc, i have. But I'd really prefer an installation that says 'Detected a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra with a NEC multi-sync 90 monitor, is this correct?' or if you're in dummy mode perhaps just decrement the 'time remaining' clock and don't say anything at all.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about a good OS to hack on, and one that can be userfriendly. I just want to make sure it's not JUST userfriendly, I appreciate the ability to twiddle the bits when neccessary.
I actually like them. I hate it when a manual for, say, a word processor, starts out by talking about the mouse and menus, like I have never used a computer before. What a waste of space that could be devoted to better covering the product I purchased.
They make too many assumptions about the background of the reader.
This is, perhaps, true. While I think manuals should avoid duplication of effort, I think they should also state what you are expected to know already, and point you in the right direction if you do not. Linux HOWTOs sometimes do this, but often do not. Point.
I have yet to find a good presentation of disk partitioning strategies, for example.
Linux does have a "Partition" mini-HOWTO, which does a good job of explaining it all, but it is not for the faint-of-heart. Most new users will need to read through it twice (at least).
Unfortunately, if you want to setup your own partitions (required to dual-boot), there is no magic bullet that will make your life easier. This is a fact of life, and there is nothing Linux can do about it.
Distros which use the RPM installation offer only one safe option: Install Everything.
Incorrect. One of the key design goals of RPM is dependency management. If package A depends on package B being installed, and you attempt to install just A, the installer will not move on unless you agree to install the dependencies.
Red Hat, in particular, has an installation process which is easily fouled by the user making an unexpected response.
I have never had this problem, but I have no doubt that you have. Installing an OS is generally rather a difficult process. Sometimes things go wrong which break the auto-install. Red Hat usually falls back to a menu at that point, at least. Windoze locks up the machine.
X server installation and setup is a very interesting source of problems.
I think that it is universally agreed that configuring X is about the least fun thing you can do on Linux, with the possible exception of writing your own sendmail.cf file.
Plug-N-Play monitors are starting to be supported, but the fact of the matter is, you pretty much need OEM support for video setup to be easy, be it Linux or Windoze.
For example: It took me about 10 seconds to get my Samsung SyncMaster 900p 19" monitor working under Linux. Why so quick? Because Samsung posted mode-lines for XFree86 on their website, bless 'em.
The difference between Linux and Windows at installation time is that Windows (mostly) does a better job of handling the routine setup issues.
I disagree completely. What Windoze has that Linux does not is OEM support. If every computer company under the sun committed to supporting Linux the way they do Microsoft, then your problems would be solved. Since they do not, however, you are limited to the small set of hardware which has been figured out by third-parties.
Documentation is my biggest issue. All the Linux users insist that it's anywhere from adequate to great, but those of us who didn't cut our teeth on *nix know it just ain't so.
I really have to disagree here, as well. Have you ever looked at what comes in the box of Windows9X for docs? A 60 page booklet that explains how to use the mouse! Please! Linux's documentation may suck, but Windows' is much worse!
It is not documentation, online help, auto-installers, or other stuff that makes Windows easy and/or Linux hard. It is OEM support:
If the OEMs did all that for Linux, Linux would install much smoother. I know; I was careful to pick supported hardware when building my system, and Linux installed like a dream.
Windows98 will not boot at all. Despite weeks of hacking, it appears to be a fundamental conflict with the OS. Microsoft agrees.
In the end, it all comes down to OEM support.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a
penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said
something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar
video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy."
Well, nobody working on the linux project has really made it a priority to make that person happy, except you, and I don't think you're working on it, just grousing about it.
If it's a worthwhile task to make an installer,
and after all we're talking about an XFree86 Installer, and maybe an OSS (sound) installer.
NOT a linux installer, that automatically comes
up on certain hardware combinations, then somebody do it. But nobody has claimed to be doing any such thing. RedHat expects you to read the manual, and to understand what the hell you're doing.
So where are people getting the impression that we promised them anything would be easy?
I need a journalist to come over and get SILO working on my ultrapenguin. furrfu.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
'Scuse me?
What happens when Win98 doesn't know what hardware it is? Say for example you have a video card that doesn't have built in support in 98. Like oh, a SiS 6326 chipset AGP card. (Speaking from personal experience here) Win98 will detect it as a "PCI VGA Video Device" or somesuch. How does that help in linux?
There should NOT be an "Idiot Distro" for linux. You can't get an insurance quote on your car if you don't know the VIN number/Engine Type and other related Data. Why should your computer be some appliance that any moron can sit down at and use?
When you dumb it down, you kill it. The idiot proof measures take up finite resources that end up not getting used for functionality.
If you don't know how to find out what video card or network card you have, maybe you should be installing ANY OS.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The author of this article didn't even give the installation of a new OS as much attention as most people give to washing their cars. It's no wonder that he found it so difficult.
He kicks around for a while and wonders off to eat some soup. He fiddles for a while and goes to check his e-mail.
If he'd sit the hell down and actually concentrate on what he's doing maybe it wouldn't be "Sooooooo Hard."
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Why can't the linux installer automatically find your hardware? Answer: it does. The RedHat 6 installation autodetects most hardware as long as it isn't newer than the CD.
Does the Windows NT installer autodetect your hardware? Nope. For examplem, good luck getting Windows NT 4.0 to autodetect any sort of SCSI card, video card, or sound card.
Can you install redhat without X? Not easily. Valid point. But can you install NT without the graphical interface? Not at all! How, then, is NT ahead of linux in this regard?
Can you install Redhat with ftp/http and no X? Probably not easily. Can you install NT that way? Not. (You can't even install ftp/http servers with NT workstation.)
In Redhat at least you can select packages individually, and the installer keeps track of dependencies. I'd like to see you do that in the NT installation!
Want to add a user in Redhat 6 that can do foo? Yes, you're right, it takes some documentation hunting. But how in the world do you add a user that can do foo in Windows NT? I bet you need some doc hunting.
If you want to knock the Redhat installation for valid limitations, fine. But don't go saying that NT is all over Linux in this category. The Windows NT 4.0 installation is not anywhere near as easy, smooth, or customizable as the Redhat Linux 6.0 installation.
Remember that at least he had the guts to try and install linux. Most just dismiss it as "geek only" and are done with it. Granted there were a *few* mistakes in his article, but he isn't a computer genious. And most of his install problems could have been subverted with a knowledgable friend poking their head over the cubicle wall, but hey, the best way to learn is by doing.
K]ÏMWý©±Îï$ [½5>VÎG Û 1 ر/M îåMA$ÚT
...until the entire OS becomes usable by the average Joe. I don't know any non-technical person using Linux. Linux GUIs don't manage the machine for the user. Ever seen a non-technical person try and install a piece of software on a Linux machine? I haven't - they didn't even get that far.
Every non-technical person I know that decided to jump on the bandwagon and try to install Linux had trouble. It never goes smoothly. The installs ask questions that novices don't understand. And those that make it through (usually with help from me or another engineer-type) give up a couple of days later. So I say try and head them off at the pass, keep the install difficult, so that they don't waste a week more of their time getting more frustrated and learning to hate Linux!
I love Linux - because it rewards my technical abilities with power. The fact that it is not Micros~1 Windows has much less to do with it.
That's what I tried to do waaay back. Now THAT was a challenge. With no documentation, and like 100 odd floppies. I learned how to use fdisk and mount, got it up and running, and was then baffled for an hour, looking how to start XWindows (XDM? Is that it?)
Of course, I'd like to think I've progressed past that stage today. Now all my downtime is related to hardware problems (says sadly as newly fried 8.5 GB HD sits on desk uselessly).
I wrote a story like the one mentioned here. check it out, but excuse the rest of the the place, its' und^H^H^Hnot done.
Go here
+&x
Anyone got contact info for him? I think he'd :)
benefit from a pointer to the fact that Caldera
2.2 and even 2.3 are now available, and supposedly
easier.
Also, gotta point out my Mom Runs NetBSD story:
http://InsideDenver.com/seebach/0418seeba.shtml
And yes, she's still using NetBSD at home, and
she's still happy with it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Apparently the concept of satire is quite over your head.
quick FYI... 8+gb drives that are IDE require SP4 or higher to work under NT4. New atapi.sys which supports that particular IBM drive standard.
-witz
Go easy on this writer. Ho or She made an honest go at doing an install and lets not forget how much fun we have had with all the other Linux newbies who did just that and got slashdoted with _ADVICE_ and very little if any pure flames.
;).
I.e. RobLimo started this way and I was one of the people holding his hand from 4,000 miles away. He has graduated to Slashdot host now. As has Katz. An interesting tidbit is that RobLimo had pretty much this attitude when he did his 1st butched install and I thought he was a kid ( 19/20 ) and said as much ( in a nice way
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
..here's a link to paper I wrote about a day I decided to install a couple of OSes. Please excuse the rest of the site, revolution in progress.
+&x
Question: have you ever seen a computer documentation that details your computer components? If you buy a PC at dell or wherever, they never have appropriate documentation that says that you have grpahic card x with x mb of ram and network card y ... (come to think of it...maybe you can have a look at your bill).
But still, computer manufacturers are not making it easy for users...and you have a point too: users don't use their documentation enough.
They guy's story is actually rather positive. Though he seems to know next to nothing about computers (he had to ask someone if he had a video card), he still managed to get Linux installed.
I used to predict a certain doom for Linux because of the mentality of the loudest Linux users. Of course there are still many RTFM people out there, but I am reading more posts from people who agree with my belief that in order to truly love Linux one needs to be able to criticize its faults. This is a great step for Linux. I am glad random flames get a 0 score sending the message against elitism.
/. which is a big success for Linux. Now perhaps I'll be able to suggest a solution for the bug in Linux known as the sound architecture (or the lack thereof). :)
As to the article itself, I thought it was an interesting read, but the comments made are deprecated due to an older version of COL. It would be like criticizing Win 3.1; What's the point? I am just annoyed that such a misleading article was published on CNN.
But even with such a blatant mistake as using a terribly old OS, they got it running, and the flames haven't flooded
My view is it's not in Linux becouse it's not reliable. Thats really a running theam with Linux, not supporting unreliable technology. Linux dosn't do FS compression while Windows dose becouse it's not safe but it is neat.
Of course thats also why Windows and Linux are for two totally diffrent users, Linux users stress reliability Windows users want neat toys.
On a PC autodetection is more of a "neat toy" than a useful and reliable technology sence it dosn't work a lot of the time.
There are horror storys of people fighting Windows over trying to get a sound card driver installed. I find adding new hardware to Linux much more fun than installing hardware on Windows becouse Linux dosn't try to do it automaticly. Linux dosn't go "Ohhh you have ABC multifunction data transport card" when you have a "ZXY soda machine addapter".
To be fair Microsoft is TRYING to make Windows user friendly and "Plug and play" is part of that but the PC wasn't originally a plug and play system and the PC plug and play support is a joke.
To do this right the system has to be designed for it from the start like TIs Explorer and the Mac II line where plug and play ment the driver was built into the card.. not that you couldn't use an optomised driver but if you were a clueless newbe you didn't have to.
In short it's just one of those legacy issues. Any PC OS is "Hard to install" excluding maybe PC/MS-Dos before hard disk support was added and CP/M 86 again before HD support. After that it all heads down hill.
I don't actually exist.
He should consider himself lucky that he didn't try to install a Microsoft O/S. That would have been utterly beyond him, and vastly more frustrating too because of the multiple reboots.
People forget that installing Microsoft is "easy" only because they don't have to do so as it's almost always preinstalled. In reality it's a bloody nightmare.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hey,
:-)
This article isn't that bad, and I even think that the author did a fair job. Really.
The guy is a newbie. Fine. While wondering if his computer has a video card may seem a bit silly to all of us geeks, the average Joe Schmoe thinks of his computer as a magical black box - not much can be done to change that. It's a very, very good thing that the guy at least admits he's a newbie, and needs help.
And another point in this guy's favor - he's not afraid of the dreaded DOCUMENTATION! I've seen many a [l]user on linux IRC channels that blatantly refuse to read instruction manuals, HOWTOs, or manpages. They just expect everything to work without any effort on their part - this guy at least tries, which IMO is commendable.
Last thing - the guy is truthful. He doesn't attempt to hide his lack of knowledge about computers, or the fact that Linux isn't ready for him yet. He says what is currently right - Linux, especially the install, is NOT for the average person. However, as the article points out, someone who's mucked around with UNIX, or maybe some UNIX and DOS, might even enjoy it.
I hope I'm not repeating too much of what others have said, I didn't read too carefully through the comments
Hmmm.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
I think that was the one I tried installing on my ThinkPad about a year ago. It was horrible.
But it was also prehistoric - according to their web site, Caldera 2.3 is the latest version, and I remember reading a review here saying installation was wonderfully easy.
I can only conclude that someone at CNN made a dumb mistake in issuing him a mouldy old copy of the software.
D
----
On top of that we need to start packaging source code in seperate packages, and have packages default with auto-installers and setup wizards like Windows. Having people compile everything is NOT what the majority of users want out of an OS.
The distributions that are most popular with consumers use RPM, and do not involve compiling anything. I installed Mandrake last weekend and found out why it's a best seller. It's really easy to install and is very well configured.
RPM is a very good installer. I've heard the Debian installer is good too. RPM are actually better than Installshield because they you always have to explicitly tell it to overwrite existing files. RPM keeps a database of what package each file belongs to. That's a lot easier than buying third-party utilities to try to figure it out later why the registry is out of control and DLLs are conflicting.
But these utilities still require a system administrator to run, but only because of the permissions required to install the package. Allowing non-privileged users to install system software is one of the reasons Windows has so many problems.
I have only installed Solaris, and all I had to do was click.
But when it came to setting it up, I had to call people over, for I am no expert in such matters. It seems that the only real way to learn is for other people to tell you how to do while you are actually installing and setting it up.
A (one-time?) class on this would be nice... like something at a Comm. College or of that sort, but there don't appear to be any.
Oh well.
Rather than demonstrating that Windows was as difficult to install as Linux, I rather meant to demonstrate the sheer absurdity of someone who can't find their video card trying to install an operating system without as much as asking for advice.
I'll happily admit that Windows is easier to install than any version of Linux I've played with as of yet (I haven't tried the new version of Caldera).
In reality, the post a bit lower down concerning the person trying to pilot an early Ford automobile while running over various and sundry items close by is closer to what I was attempting to achieve.
Exactly. That poster did imply that the author found linux easier to install, and if that were so then we rabid linux advocates should break some china or something.
Besides, in the CNN article the author did say (to paraphrase), Linux is too hard to install, I will stick with my warm cuddly Windows.
To which I reply, Windows is easy to install from scratch? Not.
Windows NT installation is truly hell, though -- and face it, NT is the real parallel to Linux -- even when everything goes perfectly. Go have lunch while DOS sloooowly copies just abour everything off the CD onto the hard drive (don't have DOS handy or a disk partition that DOS can read? Sorry!) and then actually begins to install the OS. Oh, and it waits for you to say "OK" several times while doing this, so you'd better eat lunch at your desk.
In fairness, NT 4.0 *is* getting long in the tooth, and it appears that Windows 2000 is a lot better about this.
'How to setup X without setting your video card on fire'.
Does anybody else remember this? and I remember being thrilled at something that would allow me to sit with a calculator and figure out my modelines.
That, in a nutshell, is why I like things that make *nices easy to use. I want to code, I want to solve new problems. I don't want to spend all day trying to solve previously solved problems.
Learn to program.
Then compare COBOL to C.
Now tell me, which would you rather have to code that oh-so-complex data-mining application - "arcane soundbite" (C) or "plain English" (COBOL)?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There are bout 19 or so web servers at CNN in Atlanta and some more in Europe and in Japan... If you ever have problems with speed, try linking to a specific server:
www1.cnn.com
www2.cnn.com
www3.cnn.com
www4.cnn.com
I might add that all content servers are running some from of UNIX... with a few inside servers running linux...
Don't just assume that Robin is male....
>>Windows installs are just plain TOO DIFFICULT. My
/WILL/ HAVE PROBLEMS - whether its installing the OS of your choice or changing the oil in your car (something which mine goes back to the garage for, btw:)
huh? come on now, i support & install NT/98 in work and use linux et al, at home.
i can personally install most mainstream OSs in my sleep almost.
anyone who can't install win9x in under 45min probably takes most of that extra time finding out where to put that little plastic square with the three pins sticking out of it....
if after 10+ installs you have only succeeded 1st time once then you are doing something MAJORLY wrong or you have MAJORLY fucked-up kit.
if you are using unsupported/non-standard/broken hardware then you *will* get problems, and you damn well deserve them for not looking up the HCL.
in conclusion, IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING THEN YOU
Exactly why did he try installing Caldera 1.3, when the current version is 2.3, I wonder. Yes, we all had a hard time installing linux the first time, but we didn't write articles on CNN about it. Total newbies can go for a preinstalled system, the way they do with windows. Even here in India I know dealers who preinstall linux.
I think it's just as naive to jump all over the
poor author for saying it was hard to install as
it was for him to try installing it without
knowing what he was doing. I'm probably beating a dead horse here, but to those of you that are
part of the development process, it would behoove
you to not dismiss people like this guy out of hand. Yeah, yeah, I know, elitism this and we
don't want the morons that, but if you plan on
World Domination, you have to learn to convince
the unwashed masses. And sometimes even smart people aren't adept at computer use. Imagine that!
Different kinds of intelligence! Anyway, just think twice before you jump down some Linux
newbie's throat. We all had to begin somewhere. Let the moderation as 'Redundant' begin!
-cp
This kind of articles are extremely good. We all should learn from them. This is because the world is moving towards information society. And this means that everybody should have a computer. But we can't expect that everybody knows what is inside their computers. The point is that we should actively develop simpler solutions for soft/hardware.
Majority of all replies in Slashdot are saying things like:
"he should has tried to use a newer version of the distribution"
or
"why not use RedHat?"
or
"he's stupid because he doesn't know what is inside of his computer"
And this is all wrong.
The problem isn't the user, the problem is that computers should be like kitchenware. User uses the hardware (and the software) but doesn't know what is inside of it. And he doesn't even want to know.
(It is possible that I didn't make my point clear or I lost it but who cares...)
Let's assume that we want Linux to achieve World Domination(tm). In effect, we want to displace Microsoft.
How do we do this? By making the best software? Hah. Pull the other one. The best does not always win, especially when the mediocre has a stranglehold on the market.
There are at least two ways Linux can inflitrate the desktop market: (1) display Microsoft as the OEM OS, and (2) get people to defect over once they get sick of Windows, or see The Light(tm).
Now, (1) doesn't look very possible. MS will shoot on sight anything that looks like a competitor.
(2) is much more possible, however, and the key to it is simple: **MAKE LINUX EASIER TO INSTALL THAN WINDOWS**. They pop in the $5 CD, Tux waves at them and looks for their hardware, and poof, X is up and running with replacements for all of their Win9x apps.
This is not the current state of events. I'm not a Linux guy, for various reasons. I tried to help a friend install RedHat 6.$latest. He has some duct-taped suped-up video card. X ran at 150x150. I could see the GNOME toolbar and part of a menu. Not fun.
Now, for a couple of computer geeks hanging out after-hours in the local computer store, this wasn't a big deal. Now imagine your mother faced with this problem.
So, in order to make inroads into the desktop market, Linux needs to be the drool-proof choice. It needs to be as easy to install as a small application.
Now, why do we want Linux to take over the desktop market? Because power users should not have to suffer idiots. Hardcore computer people shouldn't have to put up with the closed-source/closed-mind/shortsighted mindset common to most computer companies. If the users change, the companies have to, or they go out of business.
How do you kill bloatware? How do you stop insecure server software? You get people used to fast, lean applications, and robust server apps. Then the crap will stand out like crap in a rose garden, not crap in a shit exhibit.
This doesn't mean dumbing Linux down. This means making the amount of rope variable, from "Enough To Power A Yo-Yo" to "Enough To Hang Yourself From The Empire State Building". Start new users off with Tux The Magical Penguin's Guide To Linux, and they can work their way out of the GUI if needed. Most people won't. Power users could always click on the "skip the bullshit" button and get dropped into the real thing.
But *please* don't keep that elitest "make the users learn" attitude. If you really want people to learn, make it easy for them to learn. If you just want a clubhouse, keep at it.
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
"Windows 98 directly from a CD-ROM boot. Try THAT with Linux."
This sounds a little ignorant! You can install just about any 'grown up' operating system sretraight from CD. I have done several flavours of Linux, Netware and Be myself. I even do it with NT (too often!). Can people list all the other OS that can do this? Can OS2 do it now? I haven't used it for a while. Is it still out there?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I've installed Debian Linux on a P120 with 16Meg in about 15 minutes, booting from the CD. The part that took longest was installation of a large number of software packages that don't even come with Windows (i.e. C/C++ compiler, Web server, databases etc...).
Configuring X was also easy because I just used the SVGA X server.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
let me first say, that i had no intention to flame the journalist.
however, concluding that windows is superior because he had more difficulty installing caldera than windows is nothing short of stupid.
and it -is- your responsibility to be aware of your options. you do not have to use caldera to install linux and you do not have to use a command line to operate it.
even the journalist himself noted that his installation would have been easier if he had chosen a more user friendly package such as redhat.
and further, i have been programming for over 15 years and i do not recall ever admiring microsoft for anything. maybe some people do, but it gives me some serious claustrophobia working within its limited scope and unreliable "conveniences".
perhaps persons like yourself, who have no motivation to find out for themselves what is available out there, appreciate microsoft because it has been impaled into your cranium several million times and has become an easy name to remember.
just because someone has a larger advertising budget does not mean that they are better. honest. i know that it is anti-american to say so, but even the most successful companies have flaws too.
-abf.
-abf.
If he finds Linux is more difficult to install than Windows, it's not because he's stupid. It's because Windows is superior.
Deal with that. Take a deep breath. If you have trouble doing that, smash some China, then take a deep breath.
Blaming the user for their difficulties setting up a program is like blaming a driver because when their car breaks down on I-5, they don't understand it's due to a dirty spark plug and a frazzled timing belt. "Well, Duh! Obviously your coolant line is leaking, MORON!" Well designed software, like well desinged cars, let you choose your level of abstraction. If you want to work on your OS at the command line level, that's wonderful. But if there are no other choices, then the software is inherently poor.
Anybody still out there who remembers the days when they admired Microsoft for bringing software to the masses? I think I do... dimly. And making the complex simple is and admirable thing. One of the most admirable things, in my mind.
Don't flame this poor man. Fix what sucks about Linux. If there are no things that suck about Linux, then we might as well go home because there is no longer any room for improvement. But we all know that, along with the many wonderful things about a free and community-defined OS, there are also some pitfalls. Wouldn't it be great to impress the world with our response to these concerns?
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
This is offtopic but I don't see any arcane soundbites here. I used MSDOS for four years before I got Linux and somehow Linux from the command line was more intutive.
No choice about MSDOS (School, college), OS of choice Linux@home.
Installing Linux is a piece of cake as compared to Windows 9x and NT anyway. I've done all of those, including for a triple boot machine. Installing Linux on weird configurations is simpler than installing Win9x on the same machine.
Isn't the command line easier than a GUI except for moving files and surfing?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I don't think Caldera would be a very easy distrib. to start with as a novice. I chose SUSE for precisely the reason that I don't know much about insides of PCs - I wanted a machine I could run Apache on, program Perl, use Gimp and build websites. I did it in about 40 mins and most of that was choosing stuff to install with YAST.
There have got to be distributions for all users. Most users don't care and are happy for the set-up to autoprobe all day. Let them. Some users can recite the serial numbers of their components. Let them.
Let's not forget that Journo's will exaggerate to make a better story. If this had been written by a Linux advocate it would have taken him five minutes and then he would have benn making coffee.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As my MCSE friend says: "I'd rather no
To be fair, Windows 98 is certainly easier to install than Linux. For the most part (from what I understand, that is) Win 2000 is a vast improvement over the quite painful NT 4.0 install. Microsoft is improving its products.
It's one thing to make things easy so that a novice user can easily complete useful functions. It's another thing entirely to fool the end user into thinking that he/she is qualified to do something they have no business doing.
I really think there is a message here that many of us aren't really getting. It seems to me that if linux is going to go mainstream, linux is going to have to streamline the installation/administration process. I know unix has a long history and so on, but isn't it possible to build utilities that non-technical users might be able to access without having to even understand what a shell is?
-- Moondog
I'd like, for a change, to see some journalists try to install NT or Win98 on a virgin machine with a fresh, unpartitioned drive and the Microsoft cdrom. I'm not sure that would be a less eventful and tedious experience than Linux installation.
Besides, given the distro/version that this user is installing, I'd also appreciate seeing occasional articles of pisssed off journalist who can't install DOS and Win3.1 on a Linux machine.
Nick Moraitakis
-- say with me: i'm a monkey child
"Face it. You think windows is easy because you buy computers with it already installed." Nah, I install Windows 9x/NT/2000 all the time on machines in various states (brand new, already running some other OS, dual boot, etc). While I have had trouble with some Windows installs, I: a) Can always get it running within a day. b) Have never had as many difficulties as when trying to install Linux. I have plenty of experience with computers (15 years), DOS, Windows, BeOS, and even Irix. I'm a programmer and a CS student. None of this changes the fact that I have started at least 10 different Linux installations on various hardware configurations, and have only gotten it to "work" ONE TIME. And that time was pure hell, trying to get X to work correctly, finding decent programs that do things I've grown accustomed to (you know, crazy things like browsing my file system). Sometimes I think, hey, I've got 500MB free here, why not setup another partition and get Linux running on this thing (along with BeOS and Win2K)? I mean, I'm a CS student, and I do feel a certain amount of "geek peer pressure" to run Linux. But then I think back to all the times I've had to wrestle with getting a good distribution, reading all the HOWTO and INSTALL manuals over and over, trying to decipher prompts and windows written by kernel hacking geeks that wouldn't know a GUI if it double-clicked them in the face, etc. Linux installs are just plain TOO DIFFICULT. My personal guess is that it will take at least two years before any Linux distribution has a user- experience (from install, to GUI, to maintenance) that rivals Win2K/BeOS/MacOS. May the force be with you. -WW
--
Once there was a time when religion ruled the world.
Sorry for posting this twice... the first time
was all fscked up by the default "HTML formatted"
setting on this damn form (WHY??? WHY???? WHY???).
----
"Face it. You think windows is easy because you buy computers with it already installed."
Nah, I install Windows 9x/NT/2000 all the time on
machines in various states (brand new, already
running some other OS, dual boot, etc).
While I have had trouble with some Windows
installs, I:
a) Can always get it running within a day.
b) Have never had as many difficulties as when
trying to install Linux.
I have plenty of experience with computers (15
years), DOS, Windows, BeOS, and even Irix. I'm
a programmer and a CS student.
None of this changes the fact that I have started
at least 10 different Linux installations on
various hardware configurations, and have only
gotten it to "work" ONE TIME. And that time was
pure hell, trying to get X to work correctly,
finding decent programs that do things I've grown
accustomed to (you know, crazy things like
browsing my file system).
Sometimes I think, hey, I've got 500MB free here,
why not setup another partition and get Linux
running on this thing (along with BeOS and Win2K)?
I mean, I'm a CS student, and I do feel a certain
amount of "geek peer pressure" to run Linux.
But then I think back to all the times I've had to
wrestle with getting a good distribution, reading
all the HOWTO and INSTALL manuals over and over,
trying to decipher prompts and windows written by
kernel hacking geeks that wouldn't know a GUI if
it double-clicked them in the face, etc.
Linux installs are just plain TOO DIFFICULT. My
personal guess is that it will take at least two
years before any Linux distribution has a user-
experience (from install, to GUI, to maintenance)
that rivals Win2K/BeOS/MacOS.
May the force be with you.
-WW
--
Once there was a time when religion ruled the world.
I think he'd have trouble installing Win(insert year) too...
A novice computer user should not be trying to install an OS. They should be familiar with it to the point where they are not a novice any more. Get someone else to install the OS, just like a pre-manufactured MS machine.
Number one is untrue and elitist
Don't think so. Give your average (l)user a machine with a partitioned hard disk (this is giving them one point IN THEIR FAVOR) with JUST a DOS boot disk and a Win95/98 install CD. I don't think they'd be able to get a machine bootable (i.e., get the CD-ROM usable) to get to the actual install phase. At least with NT, it has boot disks that automate the device detection/enabling (like the Linux installer disks).
Also, this person (guy?) claims to have "programmed" (?) at some point in the past. Yet this person has no idea what an OS kernel is? I'd think that to program more than 3-4 years ago took a decent grounding in the basics of how the OS and other lowlevel services work. This seems like a lot of bullshit to me.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
1). He knows he is ignorant. No need to point it out.
2). He is like most users, therefore his experience is valuable info.
3). I don't think he really should have known all this stuff. I mean, the guy probably just used his pc for word, email, the web, and maybe a game or two. There is really no need for him to learn all of this stuff.
4). Don't wail about stupid users - you were once like that too. More importantly, you have to realize that most people don't give a rats ass about the insides of their computers, and don't want to. Just cause you like to putz about with arcane stuff doesn't mean others do.
5). This was supposed to be funny - and I think it was hilarious. So those of you planning to roast the guy, get the sticks out of your ass.
This kind of a preemptive strike directed at the very vocal majority who always seem to take these things to heart. I don't mean to offend anyone.
Cheers, Geon
Oh come off it - UNIX cant be that hard to learn, can it?
:-).
I mean, You learned it, I learned it - I bet even BillG could write a shell script if he put his mind to it.
When I first got started in computers, DOS & UNIX were pretty hard for me to get my head around (I was used to my Commodore 64 BASIC shell - whaddaya mean, directory listings?
But I stuck with it & learned how stuff worked. There is absolutely no reason why anyone else couldnt do the same. Sure, you may have some bad habits from using Windows/Mac, but any moderately intelligent person ought to be able to adapt to using a command line, etc. They may not *like* the CLI, but that is where good GUI design comes in - giving you power, but with ease of use.
Congratulations to the journo concerned - She did pretty well considering her self confessed limitations.
-- Stu
These days I can have Linux up and running in 20 minutes with either a RedHat CD (yes you can boot directly to the CD) or a single floppy and a decent network connection (try that with Windows 98).
I'll freely admit that RedHat's install program needs work. For instance I installed on a machine with a 3Com card on it that is supported by the 3c59x driver, but I didn't know that and the menus don't list the supported cards. I also recomend that anyone who thinks 98 is easier to install try it sometime. The last time I tried it it took 3 hours and asked me at least as many questions as RedHat does, the fact that it had a pretty VGA interface didn't change anything, I still had to use text forms to select things.
Also, I take offense to the fact that this CNN guy says that he, now that he is experienced at it, can install 98 in 45 minutes, but his first attempt at an old version of Linux took him much longer. That's bogus. Someone experienced at installing Linux will rarely take more than half an hour. Someone with no experience with Windows will take about as long with it as he took with Linux.
Without the OEM diskette, can't load Window 95 without:
1. Load DOS 3.3 off 5 1/4" floppies (6 or so).
2. Load DOS 5 upgrade off 3 1/2" floppies (5).
3. Load Windows 3.1 off floppies (5 or so).
4. Install Win 95 off CD.
(Eventually, someone points out you can bare install off DOS 5 upgrade).
DOS 5 diskette gets an error. Crap! Finally get a copy of an OEM diskette for another machine from the guy at the computer store. Guess how to get it to work for my computer (shades of Linux X Config). It works!
Somewhat easier than my last Linux install, but that was RH 5.2. Linux ain't so bad if you give it its own drive.
Changes aren't permanent, but change is.
This is flawed. If you hadn't LEARNED english, you couldn't say "search that file and tell me which lines contain this word". You couldn't effectively tell a French or German to search a file for you, because they wouldn't understand what the hell you are saying. Sure, pantomime can help make this easier, but if you don't know the rules of the culture in a foriegn exchange you might accidentally give a hand signal that tells them to do something rather nasty to their mothers, or violate their rules on personal space. Language is language, whether it's spoken, written, or communicated through physical movement. If you don't know the rules, you won't get anywhere.
Likewise if you haven't learned the language and syntax for communicating with your computer, you can't very well give it commands.
I'm dealing right now with teaching technology to inner-city elementary school children to get them up to speed for our new state standards tests. Let me tell you, if you've never seen it before, it's not at all intuitive. You don't know how to instantly use a mouse, or a pointy-clicky GUI. You have to learn!
Have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch on a computer
It's a royal pain in the ass.
Not any more.
I installed Win98 last week on a machine I'd built for a friend from spare parts.
I stuck the CD in, booted the machine, answered a few simple questions (disk formatting, which components etc) and went off to read my email. When I came back it was finished. Totally idiot proof.
Even my father managed to install 98 a little while ago on a new machine (home built, hence no pre-installed OS)
NT is reasonalby easy to install provided the boot disks (or CD) contain drivers for your SCSI/RAID adapters, if they don't (as with new Dell & HP servers) it's a little more complicated, but I still managed to install NT on a new server within 20 minutes last week.
Have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch on a computer
-snip-
It's a royal pain in the ass.
-snip-
Not any more.
I installed Win98 last week on a machine I'd built for a friend from spare parts.
I stuck the CD in, booted the machine, answered a few simple questions (disk formatting, which components etc) and went off to read my email. When I came back it was finished. Totally idiot proof.
Even my father managed to install 98 a little while ago on a new machine (home built, hence no pre-installed OS)
NT is reasonalby easy to install provided the boot disks (or CD) contain drivers for your SCSI/RAID adapters, if they don't (as with new Dell & HP servers) it's a little more complicated, but I still managed to install NT on a new server within 20 minutes last week.
OK, it's true that the Win98 install is easier than it was - for some "ideal" system configurations. But that's not the whole story. I've spent two weeks so far trying to install Win98SE and although I eventually worked out most of the wrinkles in the subsequent driver upgrade and application installation procedures, I am still fighting a losing battle. I thought I had it last night finally. But on rebootin the PC this morning I found my hard disk trashed YET AGAIN. There's nothing for it but another complete format-and-reinstall. This must be about the eighth or ninth attempt now. I may get to the bottom of it in the end or I may not - I never did with Win95/OSR2. From my experience I draw three conclusions: 1) In comparing the ease of installation of Windows vs. that of Linux, you have to include the process of installing any applications since most Linux distributions automate this for you and in the case of Linux there are rarely any problems with this (SuSE Linux is a shining example). 2) Using this criterion, Windows installations are far from easy. I'm a fairly expert technician and the problems I've been facing with this Win98SE installation have been taxing me to the limit of my abilities. 3) Whatever the cause of these problems, be it buggy applications or install routines, or virus infestation, or bugs in the OS, or BIOS/hardware problems, Windows 98 is simply not a stable platform by any useful measure. The architecture is fundamentally flawed in that the OS is ultimately responsible for the ability of any other factor to bring it down.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
But please OPEN YOUR F***ING EYES and enter the current time frame!!! If you want Caldera, use 2.3 which is a very easy install -- very similar to Windows.
Excuse me, but I have no patience for people who not only have no mind but who also post web pages that say "I'M STUPID AND UNCONCIOUS OF THE WORLD AROUND ME!!!".
It just touched a button in my psyche.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
and the thing is, she *didn't* have any errors. none at all.
Aside from the powercut, everything whent acording to plan.
It's great news for Linux, but I don't know about CNNin...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I tried installing red-hat for the first time again, a few weeks ago... Make sure you remember the root password you give it, It's not 'broken' but its not very usefull ether....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I re-installed Windows in just under three hours. Hate me, but I'll re-install when Linux is easy like Windows.
Linux may not be very easy to install, but it's a lot faster. I installed and configured Debian in under an hour, over the 'net, as in, I used no local media other than a boot disk and a file on the HD.
I've also installed NT. It took hours, and that computer *still* doesn't work as it should, mainly because the NT install is less userfriendly than the Linux install. Want to know what that option does? Too bad, cause the NT installer won't tell you. Installing NT (for the first time) was harder than installing Linux (redhat 5.1) for the first time.
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I've installed many versions of linux on my systems since late 1994 and always run into a few problems. The last time, about 2 months ago, I ended up installing RH6 3 times trying to get my cable modem and adaptec 1520 SCSI card working. I got the cable modem running fine, but the SCSI card now sits idle.
The typcal installation documentation sucks for people who are used to the dos/windows filesystems and the standard types of driver installation options they run into.
Many are hailing Linux as the great Microsoft killer and at the same time complaining about clueless newbies. Sorry, wrong number. MS software may crash all the time due to buggy drivers, layer after layer of marketing department-driven needless OS additions, and general bloat, but even a clueless newbie can usually get it installed.
"I open the computer case to look for brand names and memory sizes. I don't even know for sure if I have a graphics card."
uhhhhhh, i got that far and stopped.
im affraid ill piss my pants in laughter if i go further.
I could not stop laughing as I was reading this article. I know I wasn't the only one. Personly, I dont care how hard it is for newbies to install linux. Most couldnt install windows either. Things he said I found incredibly funny. The part where he said he hit alt-f8 furing the install and all this code flew by. I was laughing my ass off. Parts like when the kernels were going by and how he lied to it and it still worked. Did anyone else find it as funny as I did? I felt sorry for the guy I guess, but it is still pretty funny...
That's about how I felt! :)
If you're doing a from-scratch installation of any operating system (e.g., there's no partition defined on a hard drive), the installation of at least a workable Windows 98 installation takes about 40 minutes from start to finish if you boot directly from the OEM or full package Windows 98 CD-ROM disk. About 40% of that time is wasted doing a high-level formatting of the hard drive.
If you know how to create the Windows 98 OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK) setup boot diskette, the from-scratch installation I mentioned above takes about 14 minutes less, because you don't waste your time with a high-level format of the entire hard drive.
Getting RedHat or Caldera Linux onto a hard drive is easy, but configuring the OS so it functions to something resembling Windows 98's graphical interface using Gnome or KDE is going to take quite a bit longer. Given that most graphics cards have Windows 98 drivers, taking advantage of the graphics card's capabilities is pretty easy to do.
In short, my big disappointment with Linux is the fact configuring the OS is still quite complicated unless you have a good working knowledge of UNIX itself. Now we know why Linux Torvalds is working on the Linux 2.4.x kernel, which will have Plug-and-Play like installation of drivers and other hardware support.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Quote:
:)
I open the computer case to look for brand names and memory sizes. I don't even know for sure if I have a graphics card.
Ok. I'm thinking that if this guy didn't know if he even HAD a graphics card, he has no place installing an OS...
Just my opinion....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
to screw in a lightbulb. Answer: they'd have to live in the dark because noone could give anyone else any advice on how to fix it, therefore noone would ever learn how to change the lightbulb. The attitude expressed by some of the posters in this situation amazes me to no end. Well.. i must say that i somewhat agree.. but this is kind of general for all os'es , no? And anyway, i was, until 6 months ago, running suse 5.0 , but got tired and removed the part. It didn't have what i needed (midi/audisoftware) But if i want that software, well i guess it's up to me to write it. Anyway, 1 week ago, i dl:ed Slackware 4.0. First of, i had had a problem with my ftp-client. (had to use the crappy built-in windows version since i didn't give myself the time to dl a working one). Secondly, while installing, the dang ftp-client had skipped some files, in various disksets, so everything was fubar. But i got my ass around to getting a working ftp-client, got all the slakware disksets on my drive, went home, and installed. It was a dang smooth ride. Until i got to ppp section. After 2 hours, it starts smoking from the modem, so i figured it was somewhat broken. Funny thing is: in minicom, when i did ATZ, it said OK, but didn't work with pppd. Anyway, changed modem, et voilà! Set up my Xserver ,no problems, started x. *ummmfff* KDE! Never in my life on my box! So i just shut down x, dl:ed WindowMaker, since that is the wm of my preferences, installed. Configured. and damnit.. still kde, what is this? MicroSoft KDE??? Easy to install, wont uninstall.. hmm.. anyway, i went to #linux on efnet, and i got great help there, actually found out that the .xinitrc was global, not by user. (is this new, or has it always been like that in slackware?) Anyway.. some people are friendly, some are not.
VIDI , VICI, VENI. (Go figure.. )
I don't know if many here use OpenVMS, but OpenVMS addressed several of these things. Most commands worked using parameters that were formatted similarly, and they tended to use something closer to plain English.
Examples (albeit not perfect ones):
UNIX: ls -l
VMS: DIR/FULL (or) DIR/DATE/OWNER/PROTECTION
UNIX: lpr -PPRINTER_1 filename
VMS: PRINT/QUEUE=PRINTER_1 filename
I do miss my regular expressions, though.
I don't think anyone has a right to write about anything that they cannot even correctly read the manual to. She talks about the liscense agreement being in german. Well, it is, in the german section of the manual, it's in english in the english section (I have the Caldera 1.3 manual right here). I don't think one should have to be a hacker dood to figure that out, but yet she writes that in an article, so that she appears the fool for the whole world to see.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Yes! This has been a major headache with Compaq Desktops, switching the Video card and Network cards mid-stream really mess up the image installs (we use Ghost).
/etc/conf.modules. For WinXX, I have to download the different driver... hmm, no network, grab the old Floppies. Sucks.
We can get a batch of 20 PCs (Same exact specs) and 10 will have 1 video, 10 will have another, and about 3 will have different Network cards. (They switched from TLAN to Intel recently). With my Linux images (compressed dd's) I have to rerun Xconfigurator, and change a line in
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
Well, I'm replying late, so probably nobody will read this, but what the heck.
Why do you stipulate that I must be allowed to use only diagrams? Does your keyboard shut off every time you fire up a UI or something? If so, you might want to get your computer looked at....
A GUI allows you to use both hand-waving as well as words, where each one is appropriate, assuming you're using a well-designed GUI. It should not limit your ability to "talk" if you prefer that, but it should allow you to wave your hands around, effectively, to your heart's content as well. Any argument based on the ineffectiveness of hand-waving without any verbal communication is foolish.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
- Add Voodoo Banshee. Install drivers with supplied disk. Throw away S3Virge. Discover half stuff crashes. Download new drivers off web. Most things run better. Except Quake II based stuff. Go off to 3dfx and pickup new 3dfx.dll for Banshee. QII runs better.
- Then I tried to run the same system on linux (thank godness for Partition Magic
:). Banshee drivers _do_ exist for Linux: they're alpha. I managed somehow to get it set up. Then I decide the resolution is too high to actually see. Run XConfigurator. It coredumps. Leave linux alone for a month. Delete partition because I wasn't using it...
I tend to run a policy of periodically buying bleeding edge hardware. Neither Linux nor Windows particularly like this, but Linux does it better. It's way easier to find a web page that says "Linux doesn't support this" than "Ummm.... certain Win32 apps don't really like this card..."Because Linux geeks like new h/ware you can usually find information fast!
... and today's pet project has
How many 486s have you installed Win98 on? I have tried it on two and neither method worked. It also doesn't work very well when you hard-drive is pre-paritioned for other operating systems.
I have installed every version of a Microsoft operating system since DOS 3 more times than I can count. On old hardware or on very large harddrives or with really new hardware Windows often does not install with the ease required for a non-technical person.
Uhm, no. I've had systems install that wouldn't even boot (Not in the past few years, but now I know what to avoid). But since your father did it for years, he already knew all the caviats to avoid, I'm sure. Watching someone experienced install something doesn't prove that it's easy to install. I've seen guys make developing embedded systems look easy, but It's not quite as easy as an expert makes it out to look.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
Sure we shouldn't be nasty about this guy just because he finds installing Linux - I'm sure everyone found it a nightmare the first time (I certainly did) - but come on, he does seem to have been a little stupid with various things. Does he seriously expect us to think 'This is a professional doing a serious investigation' when he manages to switch off his computer fiddling about with it while it's on. I'm surprised he didn't totally destroy his computer if he did that whilst installing an operating system...
- These are administrative functions and my experience with experienced administrators is that they prefer to rtf dox.
I don't mind reading dox as long as they are good dox. Unfortunately there aren't very many good document writers out there, and all too often the documentation is out-of-date.
I know there are some projects that specifically ask for doc writers, which is a very good thing IMHO.
If you can get the cylinders out of the drive undamaged you can string them together and use them as a wind chime. When my 1.3 gig drive died, I hung the cylinders on my wall and when i'm tired of working on a paper or program i stare at them as they spin around and reflect nifty patterns on my wall :-) (they're so much more interesting than writing papers on The Scarlet Letter).
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
An eye-catching topic, but slightly sarcastic one too. :)
With support from friends who know linux and can walk you through the installation, or if you just happen to be a natural-born computer person, linux can be for you. But, it's all in what you want to use linux for and where you want it to take you. Nobody is forcing you to use Linux. If you don't like it, then go back to Windows hell
Yes, Linux is free, and that's great, but it's not something that you should even take as a factor at first in whether or not it's right for you. The fact that it's free makes it a great choice for those who already use it and want to develop for it. You have the power to improve and to contribute, and that, above all, is the main reason that Linux is free.
If you want a great server, Linux is for you. If you want a reliable, mission-critical OS, Linux is for you. If you want to use one of Linux's many tools and applications, or just want to get away from Windows, or develop new software on an open operating system, Linux is for you. If you want to become more productive, put time into learning linux and how to put it's powerful tools to use.
Linux is NOT for you if it's going to make you look cool. Linux is not for you if you can't accept the fact that it's not perfect either. Linux is not for you if you do not want to put forth any work into making it into a more perfect OS. And linux is not for you if your definition of a "contribution to humanity" is yet another bitchsession about how the world doesn't revolve around you.
Actually, the GUI setup has gone fine every time I installed Linux on my own boxes. No problems at all selecting a server, setting bpp and resolution, and getting a window manager/desktop manager up and running.
After installing Mandrake, Linux booted into X w/KDE. After installing RH5.2, Linux booted into X w/Gnome. After installing Debian, Linux booted into X w/fvwm2 (quickly changed to windowmaker).
So while X configuration still has major problems (on other people's boxes it's been icky... but with crap video cards that shouldn't exist [and sometimes don't]), it can go smoothly.
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I quite forgot about the NextStep. I've got an old Next Cube right next to me (use it as a print server). Those were good at configuring....
-- Moondog
As to his inability to identify his video card...
Let's say I'm installing a new widget for my Thingamajig. Knowing nothing about Thingamajigs beyond how to use them, I first read up on them, particularly on the new widget I'm installing. What if I want to know what widget is currently installed, but I don't know enough about my Thingamajig to find out? I could ask a friend who is knowledgeable about Thingamajigs. I could contact the manufacturer or distributor of my Thingamajig and ask. Or, I could throw my hands up in the air, give up, and despair that "Thingamajigs are so hard to use!".
Linux is not drool-proof by any stretch of the imagination. Linus, Caldera, and the like may talk of the desktop market, but outside of IT-supported corporate networks, only users with at least some technical bent will install Linux. Microsoft isn't going to lose their market for a drool-proof OS any time soon. The fact that the users of said family of OSs don't know that with a little bit of effort they wouldn't be so Blue is irrelevant: if they aren't interested, they won't make the effort.
I'll be surprised if Linux ever penetrates the drool-proof market. It's an OS built by its users, for its users. OSS will tend to be designed for the people by which it is designed.
Forget it, non-technical journalist, you aren't going to run Linux well unless you're willing to make some effort; if you aren't, Windows may be better for you.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Funny (or maybe not), but the tone of this article reminded me a lot of the diary of an AOL user.
Ok, so I'm a linux newbie, but I have an extra system at home and a cable modem.
Last week I downloaded iso's of Mandrake 6.1, Caldera's 1.3, and Debian's latest release. I burned them each to CD, and started installs of each on a fresh drive.
I wanted to go with Mandrake and nothing else because I'd successfully installed Redhat 5.2 on a computer at work without any trouble. On my home system I knew everything that was on it, so I didn't think I'd have any trouble.
I started Mandrake. When I got to the x server install, it probed for my graphics card (AGP Banshee card) and couldn't find it. The installer wouldn't progress after that. I couldn't find a banshee card in the listed cards so I quit the Mandrake install, as it was going no where after that step anyway.
A longtime linux user at work told me Debian was the best distro and that if I had probs, he could telnet in and fix things. Well, I got through the install, but no networking because of a lack of DHCP and no x server either because of another failed autoprobing. So I got a command line with no networking so I couldn't search deja news for answers. I was stuck. Since he couldn't telnet to it, I said forget it.
So finally, I plopped in the Caldera disk, rebooted. Fancy wizards walked through everything. The choices were much the same as Redhat/Mandrake's installers, but just looked nicer. DHCP worked fine, and it found my graphics card no prob. Time to go from formatted drive to running Netscape under KDE in Caldera's Linux? 30 minutes.
It was easier than installing Win98 on the same machine (which takes about 45 minutes). No fumbling with a serial number either, that was nice too.
I can have Windows 98 installed and running in about 45 minutes. If you're not used to UNIX, installing Linux will take at least twice as long.
Let me think, how long did my first linux install take, with no help whatsoever? Hmm... I think it was around 45minutes to an hour. How long did your first MS Windows install take you?
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The fact that he installed Caldera 1.3 raises an issue, I hadn't really thought of before. As linux gets more mature there are lots and lots of old versions and distributions lying around that are going to make it difficult for newbies, such as this journalist, to figure out how to get started. Does fragmentation of distributions really improve the OS?
-- Moondog
Tell this to all the new mothers out there who have problems teaching their babies to nurse. (just another viewpoint, yes from firsthand experience)
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
If I were Caldera this article would bother me greatly. After all, he bases the article on an old version of OpenLinux, and then recommends people to use Redhat or stick with Windows.
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
Personally, what scares me is that this guy is a technology journalist... What sort of technology does he cover exactly? farming tools?
-
I'm not trying to flame, but the current version of OpenLinux is 2.3 - was this just a misprint, or was he seriously trying to install an obsolete version? If it was the older one, I wouldn't be surprised that he had trouble. The new COL is one of the simplest linux installs.
-lx
I am tired of this attitude that because people are newbies we need to "forgive" them. The whole point of RTFM is that no one ever does. Im glad I was told RTFM when I was first getting into Linux, because if it weren't for that I would be like all these other saps that pop in linux help channel on IRC and ask "Can I ask a stupid question".
The question is only stupid if you haven't tried to find the answer to it yourself.
I think the reason that Linux has progressed so much, and so quickly is the fact that not many people are told how to do it...but are told rather where to look to figure it out yourself.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
Installing a standard installation of Red Hat or debian (haven't tried any others) or FreeBSD is more or less exactly as difficult (or easy once you've seen it before, or even know what you're doing) as installing Windows NT4 from scratch, which in turn is easier and smoother (imo) than windows 95 (haven't tried '98). The only problem is, windows comes pre-installed and mostly preconfigured, the other OS-es don't. This guy would have had the same trouble and would have had to answer the same questions when installing Windows NT, or windows 95 from scratch.
(side note: my suspicion is, given the drawing, that many are using the wrong pronoun... but anyways...)
* Anybody else notice that the "Related Sites", which include sites that mirror various HOWTO docs, and so forth? I wonder whether they were used.
* It might be nice if the installation, in one of the very first screens, describes what information will be asked (like network foo, video stuff, etc).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
It is not merely a question of whether Linux is easy or Linux is difficult in some ablsolute sense.
As Einstein said: "Things should be made as simple as possible - but not more so."
Bill Gates does very well selling Excel, and I would love to see my mother work that.
The point is: to what extent are we burdening the user with Mickey Mouse issues that advance no real purpose. These are good, if you want to establish and maintain some sort of monopoly of Linux expertise and exclude outsiders. But then, you are no different from Gates, you just want to establish a different sort of monopoly.
Take regular expressions, for example. By their nature, they are complex. Nobody's mother can do them. But do you need a different set of rules for each program that uses them? What purpose does that serve - other than to make life difficult and to create a subsidy for those who have mastered the arcane details?
And why does every command have to be some arcane soundbite? What is wrong with plain English?
It's stuff like this that needs to be gotten rid of.
Try explaining calculus without using any mathematical symbols. You're only allowed to use diagrams. Your explanation will be extremely superficial at best.
You can't use words either, especially "gradient" or "area"....
Also something a little more sophisticated than changing a parabola to a sloping line (and vice versa)
I meant 2.3 instead of 1.3 in my second paragraph
Slashdot needs a system of comment pointers. You should be able to reply to a message with a special pointer to a cid within the same story. Of course, you can always provide that cid link now, but that's at least 5 lines of text for what could be accomplished in 2.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I really enjoyed that - hilarious!
/.) and my kids
Something that this makes apparent, which few
people want to address, is a sort of technological
Darwinism. It happened with the automobile, it
happened with electricity, it happened with
telephones.
There is a technological change which is going to
fundamentally affect society and our everyday
lives. It will create opportunities and
eliminate opportunities (how many buggy-whip
magnates are there today? how many kerosene lamp
companies? how many Pony Express riders?).
In the future the technically illiterate will
be at great risk of being unemployable, not
to mention non-functional. While I believe that
we (on the bleeding end of the cutting edge)
have a responsibility to mainstream technology
as much as possible -- including making
technology easy to use where it interfaces with
the general populace -- those who are completely
unwilling to understand the basics of technology
are going to be bypassed by the multitudes who
will.
Fair? Hardly.
Cruel? Maybe.
Reality? Definitely.
I spend a majority of my time staying abreast
of new and mainstream technologies (as do a
good portion of the readers of
will have a good technical education, regardless
of what walk in life they pursue, because that
is one of the most valuable socializing gifts
that I can give them.
Someone who calls himself a technical journalist
and doesn't know what a video card is has ridden
the wave of nepotism or mismanagement far too
long and his job will be taken by someone more
technically astute in the near future (I have
already mentioned his job to a journalist
acquaintance...). This is pure Darwinism.
While I am glad to know how an idiot feels about
Linux, who can't find that opinion from Aunt
Betty sitting in front of one of your boxen
for half an hour trying to send an email?
This guy should go write about the Spice Girls(tm)
or JFKJr(tm), and leave the Linux articles to
someone with less FUD and more clue.
If you really want to do this sort of thing right,
the writer should be truly technically competent,
and the installers should be technically
illiterate -- in this way the actual difficulties
can be assessed accurately.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
1. I boot to "DOS" and I get this ugly prompt. What to do? I got get breakfast.
2. After breakfast, I come back and call my friend, a MSCE. He tells me to change to the CD-ROM drive. It won't let me. He says I need something called a "driver." But, I don't know what that is. So, he comes over and makes it work.
3. Now I've run this "setup.exe" file and it's doing some weird stuff. It's asking me for some number I don't know. I call Microsoft and sit on hold for 2 hours before I find out where it is--on the "Certificate of Authenticity." What's that?
4. OK, the darn thing froze up while installing. Time to reboot. It takes me only 2 minutes to do what took hours before.
5. I'm all installed up, but it didn't detect my sound card and I can't get my screen to display more than 16 colors! My MSCE friend says it's because I need to get a "video driver" because I've got an "AGP" graphics card, whatever that is. He says to get it off the internet, but I can't get Windows to dial out on my modem. It won't see it.
6. Now it says I've performed an illegal operation! What did I do?
I don't know what I've done and I can't get it to work, but now I feel like a real live major geek! I'm cool!
I chuckled right through it...she sounds like she had a blast installing it...installing linux as an adventure.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
I've had plenty of PCs where I couldn't figure out what video card it had installed. These were mostly crap PCs with everything, video, sound, modem, etc is all "built right in".
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
*sigh* I've been reading so many posts about how linux has a bad install.. and your post even goes as far to say Linus and Alan should be taking a deep breath instead of focusing on the kernel. OK. Linus and Alan work on the _kernel_ they don't work on installers.
Continuing with the motoring analogy "should engine and transmission builders supply the upholstry?"
Have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch on a computer (Win95, win31 was a pleasant breeze as long as you had the disks on a network. We used to set up Win31 machines with scripts in like 2minutes each)?
... which doesn't work because you're using the realmode drivers).
It's a royal pain in the ass.
You sit there searching for drivers for your hardware that works (unless you get shafted and something happens like the protected mode drivers for the IDE controller are on a CD-ROM
It's even worse if, like this guy, you don't even know what hardware you have.
Win95 tries to plug-and-play. It invariably screws up complex machines.
Several of my friends built high-end machines this summer. Dual-slocket Celerons, DVD drives, CD burners, sound cards, NICs. We were using a variety of standard video cards while waiting for G400s. The only piece of hardware that didn't give us any trouble was the one that doesn't work in Linux -- the DVDs. Everything would have been fine in Linux, where I could have configured it without the bloody PnP drivers magically making up rules, and the operating system idiotically failing to detect conflicts as it assigned IRQs. It took several days to get those systems working with Win98. (NT was unhappy with the large HDs and never quite worked right, though I don't remember if it was the 20gig IDEs or 18gig SCSIs it didn't like, or if it was just a partition size thing).
Face it. You think windows is easy because you buy computers with it already installed. It's way more of a nightmare than Linux. At least someone who knows hardware and Linux can install Linux quite easily. I'm an extremely experienced windows user, and I can't necessarily make windows work right.
"Microsoft is the epitome of innovation and product quality."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Not having read the article - what if it was an embeded vid card? A laptop? Oh, look, the cable on the monitor goes to the motherboard - I'm FUCKED.
They should not have to know what kind of video card they have. At least the system should come up with a VGA driver and let the user try to find better.
The problem is that installs should detect the card, not that users are dumb. Come on, that's what computers are for, doing things automatically for users!
Is it just me, or does she sound like someone who knows what's going but pretending to be a clueless newbie? Something about the way a lot of it is worded sounds to me like she actually knows something (after all, she got an old version of caldera working on a presumably newer machine) Maybe she's just playing a dumb newbie for the article.....
So what if your graphics chip resides on your motherboard? Following the monitor cable might lead you in the general area, but can your mom tell me which of the fifty chips on a motherboard is the one that identifies it's video card? I think the easiest way for any newbie to know what hardware they have is to install Windows98 first, write down all their devices, then install Linux, that's what I do when installing it on unknown hardware when I'm too lazy to open the box and play the model guessing game with Network cards.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
I started work at a major UK high-street company 3 months ago, working for a contractor. (I don't want to mention their name or even field of work).
I quickly discovered that ever NT Workstation and Windows 95 machine was incorrectly installed, resulting in severe performance problems.
Not one of the 100s of IDE machines based at either the HQ or the remote sites had had DMA enabled on the IDE channel. This is a fundamental with either operating system; in 95 it can be circumvented by installing the latest driver disk from the motherboard chipset manufacturer, and under NT a registry key needs setting - Microsoft even provide a utility to set the key automatically. This simple change produces dramtic results, freeing up many wasted CPU cycles.
There were other problems as well with the network client taking a long time to resolve names, due to the incorrect protocol order.
This got me thinking - how many machines worldwide are setup in such a way? Must be millions. In fact I've hardly ever come across a Windows95 machine that has had the correct IDE drivers installed.
For all if it, they did spell out a few things that we could do to shore up the installations for idiots. Some really simple stuff too.
G
People here need an attidute change, reading the posts here make that obvious. :), but I think there intelligent and clever people out there that can (and will) fix it. Maybe Linus and Alan and others should take a deep breath and look at Linux from end user perspectvie, instead of figuring out what cool feature should be put in the next kernel release. I do want alternative to Windows, although a BeOS user myself, I think right now Linux has the momemtum to become a viable alternative to Windows, but this is one of the things that needs to be tackled. :)
"He should have used Red Hat"
Not relevant, the poor sod was trying to install Linux, what the heck should he care about this or that distributions?
"A novice computer user should not be trying to install an OS"
Why not? Obviously, a novice user open-minded enough to try to install alternative OS should been encouraged.
"The strangest thing is that for an accomplished websurfer, a 404 error should be no big deal."
Excuse me sir? The documentation was plain wrong! Is it too much to ask for have it correct?
Linux is difficult to install, (so is Windows, but let's not sink to their level, shall we?)
At least until we get Linux pre-loaded on 20% of new PC's
Jón
My first distro was Redhat 4.2, it was great, until I got to the point where it said localhost login: . I had never used UNIX before and the only reason I bought Linux was because it looked like it might be cool. After finally getting logged in, I was faced with another challenge: [root@localhost] #, after trying a bunch of stuff I finally figured out that you have to type ./ before the filename of things you want to run. Then I disoverd X, WOW graphics (this was right after I almost fried my monitor). My suggestion for Linux, always keep something nearby that you can smash without costing you much, even with KDE and GNOME things don't always go smoothly, but hey Linus said that Linux was supposed to be fun, not user friendly.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
As a Micro$oft Certified Professional (WINNT), my advice to this guy would be to try installing WIN98 before complaining about problems installing Linux. When I do a linux install, the whole process is about 5-15 minutes (depending on what packages I install). WIN98 took me about an hour and a half (and still didn't work with my hardware). I guess I would give more thought to the article if I knew whether or not he has ever installed a fresh OS on a system before. The article gives us no indication that he has experience installing anything, so what is he comparing the Linux install to?
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
{Parody mode on of original}
These god-fangled Model-Ts may be Ford's hotest piece of metal but are they the car of the people?
Would you recognise a z-crank if you tripped over one?
My month-long effort to be cool and try and move from point A to point B without crashing at point C,D,E,F gives me chilling flashbacks to learning how to ride a horse without having people laugh at me. For now, I'm glad to have ol' Silver back with me to rely on.
The good ol' boys warned me beforehand. They had trying finding the pedals and their friends throw bits of metal around on that silly assembly line thingy. I'm car-literate since I've actually washed an early model before becoming a news flack. We're in the 90s but I'm a bit clueless about all the moving odd bobs inside.
My advice is if you've barely mastered whip-cracking and never changed a tire, stick with the ol' feller or take the train. If you know an oil change from elbow grease, perhaps you'd even find this fun (gasp of shock and horror).
In truth, stalling made the task of backing out the driveway wasted the whole day, wasting at least 3 hours figuring out those crazy levers. In the end, with no decent horse sense and as chummy with a wheel as I was with phys-ed torture sessions, you know, the one where the teach' nursemaided those skiiny geeks and prevented us jocks from having fun.
I opened the engine and figured out the hole for that metal thingy you call the crank handle, right? I try to yank the gear as written on that flimsy bit of paper they call instructions manual but those gunshot backfires nearly gave me a heart attack. Not a good omen.
I turn to the "Cleaning Engine" page in teh manual but couldn't figure out that picture with all the bits and pieces meant. The next page says something about changing oil but all I want to do is drive this silly hunk of junk, not build it. Opening up the engine didn't show any spots to hook the reins.
I turn the handle but think something's wrong as it was making all these funny noises like my horse has colic or something. I press the pedal and nearly wiped out my favourite mail box. At least a horse is smart enough to avoid impaling itself.
Well, it least it seems to move but don't know why I have to keep looking over my shoulder to see where I'm going all the time. I survive smashing into the barn door but the manual warns against driving without flags and horn blowing. I get outright dirty trying to count the cylinders and rpms as suggested, taking half an hour to motor 50 feet back to the house.It then dies for some strange unknown reason so I know it's time for lunch.
After a nice big juicy steak, I give the od' editor a hollar but he mentions something about gas fill-up and to check the tank (as if I'd containminate my washing water!). After a while, a neighbour drives by so I swallow my pride (yes siree, gave me indigestion for resta the day) and asks what a gas tank looks like. He mocks me "And you're learning how to drive?". Next time he gives any mouth, I've gotta shotgun handy. He helps me fill it up a bit (at least I guess which is the right hole) but then some shit musta hit the fanbelt so I drop this project for a couple of hours.
At this point, I'm burnt out. I start wildly guessing buttons to push. God must have been with me as it started again (must remember to buy a new can for that mailbox). I can make it to the barn (and even stop!) without hitting anything too important. That's good enough for me.
Then I head home, bleary-eyed. My superficial knowledge of gasoline engines made this project frustrating. I would have helped if I were a mechanic. On the other hand, I'm surprised I got as far as I did, just like trying to connect with a baseball bat. It was mildly fulfilling in a mysterious way. I may have no idea how to use this car but I got my hands dirty.
{Parody mode off}
I sure would go a lot better when someone invents the automatic GUI transmission! No disrespect to the poor guy but unfortunately it is relatively early days and the only way to learn is to be willing and get those hands dirty. Congrats on making a start and a warning to the rest of the Linux mechanics that exotic details of kernel file spaces is as relevant as quantum physics to the average driver.
LL
not to be rude...
but installing caldera when you know nothing about your computer??? silly! He should have gone with slackware/redhat/suse... anything except caldera or debian... they are great distros... but NOT... and I mean NOT for 1st time linux folk!
This article is kind funny... but also misleading about linux.
PimpSmurf
www.KMFMF.org
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
I can install Linux just fine. I can install Solaris just fine. But installing Windows is another story. I'm not sure if it windows, or people creating crap for windows. I still can't get a driver for my sound card. (the manufacturer won't give it out), and the major vendor I bought the thing from doesn't give it out. So by following the logic of all the people who hate linux, if my sound card doesn't autodetect during windows install, then windows sucks right? Oh ya.. and windows did not detect the modem either.... so does that make windows suck even more? On a brighter note, installing redhat on my alpha, everything was detected. :)
The one good thing about the Windoze install is autodetection of hardware from a huge variety of vendors.
To us geeks, that's lame. I mean, fer chrissakes, how could anyone not know what their hardware is, and if we don't, we know what's close-enough-to-work-on-boot. Don't have an SBSuperMegaWowzersLive! driver on your Windoze CD? Tell Windoze to pretend it's an SB64 or whatever, which'll be close enough for now, and install the right drivers later, simple, right?
Wrong.
The fact that the guy didn't even know if he had a video card (i.e. that "having a video card" is exactly the same in terms of installation as "having a chipset-built-into-the-motherboard") should be telling us something. I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy. Since the home user still has to install Linux him/herself, it's incumbent on us to make that installation at least as easy as a Windoze install.
Your installer can't fully identify the hardware? Make a guess based on the manufacturer. Can't even guess? Default to 640x480x16 VGA, just like Windoze, and pop up a note to the effect of "I couldn't figure out what you've got, but I know this'll work. Read this file or go to this URL for assistance." Heck, since we're not M$, we can even provide useful information - like "I dumped the information I could glean from your hardware into this other file. Show this file to someone who knows a lot about computers, and see if he can recognize something."
NO, the Windoze way of "plug it in and watch the installer scribble on your hard drive as it makes educated guesses as to your hardware config" approach isn't the kind of flexibility we want for ourselves, but if Linux is ever gonna Dominate The World, we've gotta stop designing for ourselves and start designing for the guys who don't know whether they've got video cards or not.
I know now you'll probably make this a -1, but moderators why did you make my previous post "O, Redundant". I looked at the article, read the few comments there at the time, and posted this. I didn't see anything that said exactly what I did at the time. If I had I wouldn't have posted anything. Moderators you guys need to lighten up. You're here to moderate good posts up, the only things you should moderate down are "first posts" and flamebait. I don't see what I did to deserve a 0.
'I am tired of this attitude that because people are newbies we need to "forgive" them. The whole point of RTFM is that no one ever does. Im glad I was told RTFM when I was first getting into Linux, because if it weren't for that I would be like all these other saps that pop in linux help channel on IRC and ask "Can I ask a stupid question".'
Why do newbies need your forgiveness? Have they committed a crime against you, specifically, or against the community in general? The answer, of course, is NO. Newbies who incur your annoyance are doing only that - annoying you. They are people sharing the same virtual space as yourself but without the skills to move as quickly or as adeptly. In that sense they're kind of like bikers or pedestrians or even new drivers - except luckily, newbies can't cause traffic accidents. You have a choice in your reaction to them. You can blast the horn, give them the finger, or yell at them to get out of the crosswalk. Or you can be a polite citizen and be patient or help the little old lady across the street.
At the very least, I'm asking you to ignore them, because unless we WELCOME new members to our community, it will DIE. Not everyone was born knowing how to use computers and people who are making the effort to learn deserve patience. Even if they go to the help channel to ask their question instead of leafing through an intimidating manual (what a crime).
I did my first install with old Slack on floppies as well.
:)
Now-a-days, I just got done installing RedHat via FTP. One floppy for the bootnet.img and the rest was to locate a RedHat mirror that was accepting anonymous users. Boy that was easy, and quite fun.
I still have a dual boot of slackware because it will always have a place in my heart (boy am I a geek
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Actually, he has a point there.
Why can't the linux installer check the hardware automatically like windoze does?
Why can't you ever back up in an installer menu system?
Why aren't installers ever checked to see if they work properly in situations other than the "everything worked perfectly and the user didn't deviate from the script" situation?
I've yet to see a linux installer that a) works properly and b) is low on headaches.
I even tried the new Caldera installer (the one with all the flashy animations running around) but it has its own share of headaches.
What really bothers me is how the braindead distribution creators choose what programs get installed on your machine.
Ever try to install Redhat without X?
Ever try to install it with ftp/http and no X? I'm not sure if it's possible.
Caldera has an install that supposedly doesn't install X, but if you look under the hood afterwards, there it is.
Have you ever looked at all the crap that gets installed?
Why do I need to have giftrans and xfig installed on a non-X machine that will only run a web server? Why did it install TeX? Why did it install gimp? Why did it install xbill and a bunch of other stupid games?
I could probably shave off a few hundred megs if I went and manually selected files (like I do in redhat) but Caldera doesn't offer that option, and I'd rather not spend an hour doing it anyway.
What was redhat smoking when they decided how to categorize the programs in the installer?
Why do I have to select and deselect, only to find dependancies on something I don't want to install (because it has dependancies on a few hundred megs of other stuff)? Why is there no option to deselect the packages causing the dependancy failures? Don't they realize how LONG it takes to go back through the million categories (chosen by random number generator, I'm sure) to try to find the packages causing the dependancy failures? (after writing them down on pad and paper because they forgot to include a dependancy window)
Linux is fine if you don't have to change anything. If you do, get ready for a week of document reading and cryptic rc file configuring (and don't expect all the config files to be in the same place!).
Want to add a user that has ftp access, but no web page and no mail, or has mail but nothing else?
Want to change the permissions of one ftp user but don't want to create a bunch of groups?
Want to make an ftp user that doesn't exist anywhere else on your system?
Good luck, and good hunting (in the dox)!
This is what NT has over Linux. If Linux can't address these (serious) issues, it won't get very far.
I do hope that once Borland gets c++ builder out for linux, developers will start to realize the benefits of a gui-based configuration system (designed by gui designers, not engineers!!!).
The writer only really went through the install process once! And it worked! Hell, the first time I installed Linux back in 1995, after a year of Solaris expeience and with some serious geek credentials, it took me two whole weekends to get it more or less running.
And as nasty as the process is (take note here, geeks: there's too much jargon in even Caldera's installer!), it doesn't sound all that much worse than installing NT 4.0. There are good lessons here.
For all the writer's sarcasm and suffering, I'd say Caldera deserves some quiet applause. And--oh-yeah--all distro maintainers should take note; say it along with me: there's too much jargon in installers.
And fer chrissakes, the warning about XF86 autoprobe damaging hardware really isn't necessary, is it? Sure, it's correct, but friggin' DirectX autoprobes and you don't see it warning anyone of peril. We're such pedants, us Linux folk.
There is _nothing_ wrong with asking an experienced user. But how is it fair for them to spend the time to help you if you haven't tried to solve the problem yourself?
Unless you are going to start paying the people who are helping you when your not contributing, I suggest you read the manual.
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
Ack! No no no, thats exactly the kind of thinking that gets everyone into trouble.
Computers are supposed to do what their told, not act as some kind of magic
talisman to solve the words problems.
My car can get me where I want to go, but not without my assistance - which requires that I know how to drive.
Same applies with the computer: it can do all sorts of wonderful things for me,
provided I tell it what to do. I can't expect it to do everything without intervention.
As with driving, without a basic amount of knowledge, you'll never get your PC out of park.
Computers are a tool, and should be used as such. Once people understand that,
everything will go much more smoothly.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I am a several month 'veteran' of Linux, but had *lots* of exp w/ windows and dos before as well as hardware, and one thing I have found, Linux is an OS where reading is required (unless your a senseless user who uses 2 or 3 programs). A demo will definitly help those new to the OS get comfortable with how Linux works, but nothing will replace the need for reading HOW-TOs, man pages, and books... there is just too much info to fit into a 'demo'.
"the main reason I run Windows98 still is that I run bleeding-edge hardware which Linux/Windows NT both can take months or years to support fully, yet Win9x supports out of the box."
Ummm...No.
If you run bleeding-edge hardware, you almost never get support for it "out of the box," even with Windows. You have to install the drivers that come with the hardware, maybe, but that's a matter of manufacturer support of Windows, NOT Linux support of the hardware in question. Of course, if your idea of bleeding-edge hardware is a new floppy drive or a Zip drive, well...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
The point is, the author is correct, to the average computer user, this is not the easiest task. The installation DOES requier that you know what hardware you have installed. But more than that... my generic ethernet card installs as ne2k-pci, my adaptec scsi card as aic-7000... what's that all about... my tnt2 is a riva 128..
Point is, getting linux up and running is a headache to more than a few people. Installation programs bail out with cryptic error messages, package and program descriptions read like a foreign lanugage textbook. It's not about cramming features in anymore. The platform is well ahead of the next best thing, the software can do anything, and it's getting better every day. The problem is that the audience is expanding.
My mother can't tell the difference between the TI typewriter and her PC, but I've seen her install windows, ms office, type up a report and print it out in under a few hours. I shudder to think what decisions she'd have to make configuring the printer port to use a postscript filter, or configuring the sound card.
So the suggestion I humbly offer is that the error messages be decoded into normal speech, the installation programs given detailed descriptions to each of their options (not only what the choice is, but when to pick it, when not to pick it, and what happens after you do). Also, programs need to behave in a more intelligent manner when dealing with errors. Instead of bombing out to the console when my X server can't find one font server or font, it should move on, make a substitution, etc.
And if all of this can be done already, that's great, but it should be done by default, or it should be made perfectly clear up front which button to push to get it.
--Chorizo
Now if someone can tell me how i can get ssh and ncftp3 to appear back as options in my debian package manager, i can continue work... one day they were there, the next day, gone...
I think that these journalists are looking for a high-end OS that has a high-end setup program. It doesn't matter if the guy knows what he's doing, it's if he thinks he knows what he's doing. It's basically a mind over matter situation here - and it's utterley pathetic.
Ok, ok.. so your a bit bitter on anyone giving negative comments to linux. Uhm.. tell me this - why? Sure you like it, and maybe you like the Backstreet Boys too.. I don't give a flying frig about any of it - I have opinions on linux and the Backstreet Boys that I keep to myself because I know people would be offended to hear them - on either side of the spectrum. For example, one of these statements below will offend you:
- Backstreet Boys rule...
- Linux sucks because...
- Linux rules because...
It's a primary yelling match that belongs in the sandbox or on the playground, not in office buildings or tech-savvy places.
So these journalists are just looking for things that please them.. whether it be a blue setup screen or a red setup screen, whatever appeals to them is what effects their point of view in their column. But at least try to give them credit.. somebody has to write crappy articles or else we'd never have anything to criticize
Peace,
Matthew
_____________________________________
sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Secondly, people can be intelligent, and yet be ignorant in computing at the same time. Installing Linux, and using it successfully, versus using Windows/MacOS, is the same as writing essays in college, versus writing a novel. It is a big step, and the vast majority of the population can't do it. Even though most of you, like me, know how to compile modules that allow for SCSI emulation, you have to be open to that fact that an entire world exists outside of computing, and that there are people that dominate those other parts, like we dominate the world of computing. It is our job to make it simpler for the rest of them. This is the only way Linux will become widespread among the general population.
I know a good bit about automobiles, and I do minor repairs on my car from time to time, but I'm not going to go out and try to install a new transmission or rebuild the old one and expect it to go smoothly. In fact, if I wanted to learn how to do such a thing I would FIND SOMEONE WHO KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING and get them to help me with the process. Why? Because I wouldn't know a synchro from any other part in the darn thing!
Can you imagine if I wrote an article about doing something like that for CNN? I would be laughed off the face of the earth.
It frustrates me when people write articles like this. But, on the other hand, maybe the writer will take the time to learn the OS and will actually like it. Maybe some knowledge about computers will be the result of the experience.
As a complete newcomer to linux, I have to agree
with the rtfm comment. I installed a redhat 5.2
on an old 486 after reading the install guide, and
didn't have any of these problems. But I did take
the trouble to note the devices listed in the Windows control panel.
I can't wait for the story about the difficulty in
programming a vcr. I guess it blinks 12:00 still.
Uhhhh, no. grep is the fastest search program available, and can parse gigabytes as fast as the HDD can supply it. But grep is strictly command-line, so it sucks? What planet are you from? It may be the wrong choice for somebody who isn't aquainted to the command-line, but that doesn't mean it sucks.
You're implying that because you don't own a ferrarri, you're entitled to say they suck. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way in the Real World(tm). If you don't own/know how to use something, that doesn't mean it's bad - it simply means you don't know how to use it . 'tis this, and nothing more. Claiming that the user should not require any training to be proficient is a Microsoftian-fallacy. To use power-tools, you need to know how to use them.
Unix sucks - it's too powerful!
--
I would recommend that the author be given a new PC with only DOS (or maybe nothing) installed and then asked to install Windows 98 only with what comes in the retail box.
Where's that CD-ROM driver now?
Linux developers can learn something from this. After all, why should people have to know what a kernel is?
But on different hardware every time, always late model hardware, and on full machines.
I work at a video game company. We don't use standard computers, we use rather high-end gaming systems. We use the latest video cards, sent to us by the manufacturers.
The last machines I installed had serious issues because they had so many peripherals, they used every one of their IRQs even after you disabled the parallel port, the serial ports, and anything else you could find. None of the hardware was unsupported by Windows -- it was all fairly standard stuff. Multiple IDE and SCSI HDs, Plextor SCSI burners/CD drives, vid cards, 3Com NICs, MS mice (USB I think, or maybe PS/2).
Of course, if you set up the same machine every time, you can get it down pat and efficient. Setting up the second of these two identical machines was much easier than setting up the first. Similarly, installing windows on standard hardware is very easy (assuming you know enough and have good drivers ready etc etc), but I find this no different from Linux.
Patrick Barrett
Yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
I have watched (and listened to) seasoned computer veterans sweating and swearing over a simple microsoft (95/98/nt) install and whistle through a Linux install. The great unwashed buy their computers pre installed with ms along with a handy dandy crash CD to reinstall. Perhaps the working press who have had to reinstall their ms windows boxes think that it is a great technological triumph to do so (insert CD-ROM, press install). Preinstalled Linux boxes with a preburned crash CD might make them feel like they are True Geeks(TM) who can speak with real authority.
Whatever, just my $7.83 worth(I have a higher hourly rate)
"pull my finger" - Uncle Chuckles
Ok, this guy had an older version, and installation has improved a lot in the meantime, so that's a little unfair.
.25 before it would play.
/etc. I also learned about "man" on the way. All in all a good experience because I wasn't expecting much different and I learned a lot. But to someone who has been protected from all knowledge of how computers work, and who could care less anyway, this is a nightmare. Sorry, but it is.
But most of what this guy complains about has something like a kernel of truth to it. Win9x does do a very impressive job of probing for hardware. When it gets it wrong, you are in real trouble, and it will take hours to fix it, if possible at all. But nearly all the time, it gets it right, and you have to give them some credit for that. If for any reason, you don't know what kind of hardware you have, things get tough in Linux installation.
Two examples personally, with RH5.2, both with video setup. Until recently I had been using a very ancient Mitsubishi monitor to which I had lost the little booklet. It happened to be one of those models with zillions of close relatives and it took me a flashlight and a magnifying glass to pull the actual monitor model number off a microprint label on the back of the monitor. The model wasn't on the compatible monitor list so I had to specify frequencies on my own. Eventually I found a web reference to the monitor that specified it's frequencies. Using those got my monitor setup, but it didn't quite work yet. Turned out the whole number horizontal frequency was *just* short of being sufficient for the resolution I desired, so I had to bump it up by
The other problem was with my video card, a Spider Tarantula. Spider is now out of business with no web page. Card is not mentioned in compatibility list, though I remembered it was an S3 964. My manual does not mention what kind of dot clock setup is on the card. So guessing time again. Eventually I guess right, and finally X starts.
In the process of getting X started I also had to learn Emacs (well, *learn* is a little strong ) to be able to edit the configuration file, after finding it in
This doesn't mean Linux can't be used by everyday computer users. It just means that it is highly recommended that they buy a pre-installed system, or be ready to buy Linux compatible hardware before installing. At the least, get a geek friend to help. Microsoft is no different in this respect except having less unsupported hardware, and that is changing.
"but can your mom tell me which of the fifty chips on a motherboard is the one that identifies it's video
card?"
Was that part of the deal that terminates at "user friendly?"
I must have missed that.
Nevertheless, "mom" can learn that nifty bit of tech know-how from the same places everybody else does. (I was born with such abilities, but I don't expect that from everybody.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Okay, this is possibly redundant.
Caldera 1.3? We have two options here. I'll address both.
I don't see what could POSSIBLY have been all that tough as to take 8 hours of this man's time. Caldera 2.3 is even easier to set up than Redhat 6! Some leeway can be given because the guy admits he's a complete newbie. But all you really have to do in Caldera is make easy choices (desktop system, web server, everything, etc), and keep hitting NEXT.
The man is completely hopeless. This is something akin to installing Windows 1.0 on your brand new Athlon 650 with a Winmodem, GeForce vidcard, MX300 sound card, ATA/66 hard drives, and wondering why the hell it doesn't recognize anything. I know newbies don't know a lot about what they're doing. But most of the neophytes I deal with at least look for the latest version!
Also, the person never once thought of turning to the community itself to ask for help.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Most of the negative comments here fall in one of three categories:
1) If you don't know what a (video card/modem/etc.) is, you have no business installing an OS.
2) Linux isn't much harder to install than Windows NT, so what are you complaining about?
3) If you don't know what a kernel is, what are you doing installing Linux?
Numbers one and two are pure crap. Number one is untrue and elitist; the vast majority of people don't know about all the components in their computers, but quite a few people could install, say, Win98. (A few people have talked about how hard the Win98 install is. They have either talked about difficulties like not finding the CD key - hmm, maybe the sticker on the CD marked CD Key? - or talked about how long it takes, which is irrelevant as ease of use is not a function of length.)
It is true that a Linux install (BTW, when I say Linux install, I mean "a recent version of RedHat". And no, I don't mean an ancient, pre-GUI-install version of OpenLinux.) is not much, if at all, harder than a WinNT one. This is because the WinNT install sucks. The first time I installed NT4, I encountered blue-screen STOPs at three different places. There are also some very stupid parts to its design... for instance, why does trying to install your hard drive and CD-ROM as separate devices cause problems during the install? And on that topic, since when is an IDE hard drive a SCSI device? This may be a reason why WinNT has had little success in non corporate/power-user areas. Another installer being bad is no excuse, though; I'm sure RedHat has HP/UX beat too.
The next point makes sense, though. This is all because there is a huge Linux-for-grandmas push on. Power users should have no problem installing Linux. The problem is that it is now being targeted to home users, and you simply can't expect home users to know all about their hardware and know some commandline Unix.
Anyway, the install front has been given too much attention lately. There are quite a few projects: Caldera's Lizard (already out, now open source), Mandrake's Panoramix (pretty bad interface and design, in my opinion), and whatever RedHat's is called (Lorax? Or is that the distribution?). This should soon be improved. And once it is, tech journalists will continue to use outdated version and talk about how hard they are - "Compared to Win98, Debian 0.9 is very difficult!".
Find something that's really complicated and not Linux-related. Now explain that something to someone, using only words. You can't draw diagrams, you can't wave your hands, etc. Now do it again, with diagrams, hand-waving, etc. Which way is easier?
I'm in a calculus class right now with a superb teacher. If he was stuck without being able to walk around, make funny shapes out of his hands, and draw stuff on the board, it would be one of the suckiest classes I've ever had. This holds true with almost every conversation I have that goes above simple social interactions.
What do I use in real life? I use words AND pantomime AND pictures.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I do believe that the writer of the article is female. The picture shows a girl running with the beloved penguin, and Robin *is* a girl's name. Why did you all assume it was a guy???
--------------- hear no evil see no evil date no evil
Im NOT saying that they shouldn't ask for help. Im saying....Investigate First....then ask. How hard is that to understand.
Has no one heard the saying "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll eat forever"?
I dont see what is so wrong with that attitude.....do you?
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
1) Install a recent version.
:)
:)
(maybe they fixed something)
2) Have some idea of what these terms mean: "fdisk", "Partition", "Video Card".
(you'll need to know them for Linux and Windows)
3) Don't be afraid of text boot-up messages. The BIOS does this too.
4) If you can't figure it out, ask for help, or contact the vendor.
5) If you can't do any of the above, *don't* publish a story!
Seriously, is this journalism? How can the ignorant attempt to report factual information? Is today April 1st?
Details:
Caldera - Please install 2.3, not 1.3. I have copies of RedHat 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0. Guess which one I'd rather install?
Video Card: not onboard, or not hard to find -- his friend showed it to him.
3Com card: I hope that was a modem! I've got a card that says "3com" on it, and something that looks like a phone cable, and believe me, it doesn't call anyone!
Quotes
"I don't know what a " + [kernel, domain name, video card] + [is/looks like] + "."
"And you're installing Linux?"
I think you can replace that last one with "And you're installing an Operating System?" without loss of generality. Actually, there must be a lot of hype lately for this guy to know what an operating system is, considering the lack of knowledge he evinces previously. If you can't install or figure out DOS and Windows 3.1, you'll suck at installing an old version of Linux...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I recently installed a copy of Caldera 2.2 and I must say that the installation routine seems to have progressed a long way from 1.3. It's graphical, did a pretty good job of finding my _ancient_ hardware, and even lets you play tetris while the software installs itself! Also, the new version gives you a graphical KDE login screen by default (which you can't CANCEL like a certain other OS's login dialog...)
Tetris rules.
Tetris rules.