> That is a difficult area for me to comment on, as I haven't installed RedHat > since 5.1, and I have never used Corel. The only other distros I've played > with are SlackWare UMSDOS and TurboLinux. The reason I ask is that Corel's installation asks almost no questions except for basic password stuff. The result is that their installer breaks often during installations. RedHat's installer lets you test video and such and works quite well but it doesn't ask many questions either unless you go into expert mode. A bit of new input on this, I just installed SuSE7.0 on a machine. It's got some nice additions to the installer regime while also keeping things really simple. It seemed to autodetect all my hardware except for my ethernet card. It does let you intervene if it's detected wrong (a good idea in my view) but simply agreeing that it's detected your hardware properly, you can just press Next and move on. They've added a really nice feature that gives you two sets of onscreen arrow keys that let you adjust the size and orientation of your video. I thought it was a nice touch. They also seem to have a new user guide to Linux as an online tutorial. Haven't looked at the contents of this but it seems like a good idea. > That is fine if the user has sackloads of hard disk space. Many don't - Good point. > especially newbies who are trying it out on a dual-boot Windoze machine, or > on a laptop. For example, I only have a 6Gb drive on this laptop, and need > 4Gb of that for Windoze - and that is way too tight; it's nearly all gone. The problem I see with delivering stripped down version of Linux is that very quickly a user is going to read about some application, download it, and find that it's not "compatible" with their installation because they don't have this or that. Unix has always been a building block system and without a whole bunch of blocks available, one will surely be missing when new software is installed. I do think that it's silly to be providing, by default, things like Star Office, AbiWord, Word Perfect, etc. If that stuff is on the CDs that's great but they should be things you ADD to your normal 'newbie' installation, not something you have to remove as an 'expert' installer. > Out of the remaining 2Gb, once I take out the suspend partition and Linux > Swap, I'm down to 1.7Gb. A full 7.0 installation, plus StarOffice 5.2 and > I'm almost out - and that's before the data... Data...no time for data creation :-) > Better descriptions of the individual packages would help. These don't need > to be long, just to the point. For example, "vi - small, no frills, > powerful but steep learning curve", "pico - similar to DOS Edit", "Emacs - I agree but let's look at those examples. A newbie looks at this and says, "Yuck, I don't want any of those editors; I want Word Perfect." If you leave those out you might as well leave Pine out (some might argue that's a good idea too). But what does the newbie do, after he's done all this with the view that he does his editing with WP and he needs to add a line to fstab? What's he do if he loses his X installation? What's he do if he edits rc.sysinit and saves it as a Word Perfect file (grin)? I'm not really arguing that you're wrong but I am suggesting that excluding a lot of this stuff is a tough call, especially for the uninitiated. Cheers --- Larry
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