On Thursday 07 March 2002 23:42, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:

> Pfft, installing Debian is childs play.  All it requires is a small amount
> of literacy and some common sense.  Or is that too much to ask?

A. I was not trolling on this occasion.  Installing and configuring a basic 
(for today) system with Debian is NOT child's play. I had the devil's own 
time getting usb devices etc working properly under Potato straight out of 
the box. Admittedly it was r2 and not the newer r4 version and maybe things 
have changed (neither Mandrake nor SuSE had a problem).
B. I realise that most of the users on this list use Debian and so find it 
almost trivial to use dselect and know all the apt commands by heart. 
It is really easy for an expeienced user to add the appropriate entries to 
the config file for apt to allow them to update programs from the usb zip 
drive or a CDROM and I'm sure they know all the mirror addresses by heart 
also, BUT the average newby finds all this quite daunting. 
I couldn't even work out how to upgrade Netscape from the gzipped tar on my 
APC magdisk. (Yeah, I know I'm not too bright, and this is quite trivial - 
but it wasn't obvious to me - with the other Distros that I have used it WAS 
trivial and obvious)
So, when I say that Debian is not the easiest distro to get a handle on for a 
newbie I am speaking from personal experience - not trolling. 

Stay well and happy
Heracles
-- 
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug

Reply via email to