Nick Rout wrote:
strangely there a number of reviews about that say distros like mandrake have easier installs than XP.
No doubt there...my friend at work and her boyfriend just got a new Athlon PC with win xp...took her several goes to get the 50 digit activation right!
I certainly find gentoo an easier install to get _working_ than any version of windows, but i'm not a newbie. (tongue in cheek only slightly)
I have to agree that installing a new version of Windows is yuck, but people buying a PC will already have Windows installed on it. If they can accurately type a 50 digit number they can even start using it! ;-)
seriously though Chris, did you find mandrake that hard?
The installer was brilliant I thought, but my previous *nix experience was limited to Solaris/Irix terminal access, and a brief play with Linux/68k on a 32MHz 68030 Atari...I had a lot of learning to do with KDE etc...more so than when I first tried Windows 2.x/3.x/95 all those years ago...
Installing software from the net is a classic example, with the multitude of different methods used by the different distros in my humble opinion being one major hurdle to gaining major brownie points over Windows. Installshield is dead simple...even my silly work friend has already figured that out, but I know she couldn't source a Linux game, download an RPM, and install that without a serious lesson. I've used Linux 7 months now and I'm still quite lost on many issues...
The simplification of some little issues like that will greatly help us 'sell' the concept of linux to the Windows masses...
Kind regards,
Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch.
