[Haifux] Outsider's look

[pevzner david]

First of all I want to say thank you  to all Haifux club for organization of Linux day   A bit about myself , I'm not coming from Technion nor I have any computer science aknowledged education . I started interesting in Linux seriosly about a month ago . First I was reading a lot about "philosophy" behind open source movement  e.t.c Then I got rather outdated russian book about Linux with a disk included , it was  Open Linux  2.2 (Caldera) .I didn't managed to set up all the hardware with this distro but I've got something what actually worked ! Next I started searching Internet about other distro's , I downloaded from Slackware website mini edition ZipSlack , it is a very basic distro which installs even on vfat and loads with Loadlin , I liked it simple and straightforward file system organization ,all in all very fast and nice distro . But you have only Shell and networking tools no X e.t.c. So I keep searching and eventually I came up to Haifux site , I went to hear one lecture about installing Linux and then It was insta party.      Now here we come . I've read your posts about it now let me express myself ... I My purpose was two-fold 1) To learn more about particular distros , Red Hat , Mandrake                                      2) Burn them out and then install at home. Since I 've already had some basic knowledge about Linux I decided just to get disks there and not bringing my comp up to there.I know You were complaining about the same  idea burning disks at the same day cause it adds a lot of work and some disks were damaged e.t.c. But if you advertise that please do it !  Instead of burning RH and Mandrake , I've burned just RH and not all the disks , missing 4 and 5 .Initially I choose RH because it was said that You have 5 disks including the sources I wanted them too , but ... Though I arrived really at the begining of the party I saw it was really not easy to do technically .So I give up  .BTW many thanks to Alon I was a bit dissapointed by the way how installers managed installations . May be I'm biased but by the time I was were from 12-16 there wasn't too much people with computers May be 10-12 at most . How You get to 75 I don't know , but this is not a point , may be there where  actually 75 comps installed by the end of the day .The point is that nobody really knew what is the difference in those distros at least I couldn't get the answer . Most of instalations which I saw where  just hitting Enter and not really configuring the system for a specific purposes.In case of trouble many of installers didn't knew how to handle it exept Alon .It seems not wise putting him in charge of burning disks , a job many others could do , instead he was busy all the time with CDRW.     I think that people which are doing installation should know more which distro had which packets . For example when I back home I started Installation of RH in some stage you are asking do you prefer to start with console or X next time you boot. I'm convinced that 100% of insta's made at the party where choosing the "easiest option " aka. X . Then people go back home and they start working with their new box with preset Red Hat Gnome desktop. What's wrong  you can ask me ? Suppose I don't have enough memory  (which is actually true in my case ,only 32+64 RAM ) I got very slow desktop and I don't have a clue that there are another options to choose from ...Because they weren't installed or set up properly. So average user come to conclusion that Linux is bad because it is very slow. Though he was told that for Linux to run even 386 will suffiice but on his 586 with let's say 32 Mb it will run really slow. So you should explain him at least in words that he has many different  things to choose from ... I've seen in some post idea with premade kickstart floppies It could solve many different solutions not just "Home desktop" , "Workstation" , and whatever they call it in Red Hat otherwise you should manually pick up different packets , many of which are not necessary or in contrast are missing from premade RH solu- tions. You should give a feeling that Linux is different from Windows in sense of freedom to choose.  I think all Linux is about freedom  to choose what you actually need !                                 P.S.                                 I still have some troubles with hardware will try to fix them                                 May be will post next time if things doesn't come up .