On Sat, 2003-06-21 at 13:41, Paul Johnson wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Sat, Jun 21, 2003 at 11:08:22AM -0400, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > > My mother needs to access her email. I installled Debian on the > > computer. She has no problems using Debian. However, I had to do the > > install because she has no clue about settings in XFree86. With knoppix > > she just has to press the power button and she gets logged into KDE. > > Yes, but see, this still holds true that the difficulty of the > installer doesn't matter. Debian trades off one bitch of > an installer for the ability to run on very little maintenance (which, if > you script it, you could have her box send you an email every time it > dialed up, or serve the dialup for her yourself, and do it yourself > for her every once in a while) for extremely long periods of time, and > extremely customizable to your mom's needs and what hardware you've > got to do it with. Difficulty still matters. I don't see how X is easier to setup than in Knoppix.
> Knoppix, on the other hand, trades off a lot of usability and pretty > much the entire need for a packaging system but lets you cram the same > OS on almost any semi-recent (like at least a Pentium) hardware with > the reasonable expectation that most, if not everything, gets > autodetected correctly. True. > > I got X to work. It wasn't so tough (I can even run the gimp). You just > > have to remember to mount your mouse :) > > Umm, you can only mount block devices...character devices like mice > can't be mounted... In the hurd you can add almost anything to the filesystem I call it mounting. You can even "mount" ftp sites (even as a normal user). > > the command is something like > > settrans /dev/mouse IMPS/2 /dev/psaux > > and you tell X to use /dev/mouse and osmouse. > > OK, that's telling X about your mouse, not mounting it. In the hurd you "mount" everything. I call it mounting because you are adding it to the filesystem. Actually what happens is that you run a server (read "set a translator") with settrans that provides the service. Then any program can probe that file or directory and the server you set will respond. Kind of like running gpm and having X read /dev/gpmdata Bijan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]