[plug] Installfest

[Darrell Horrocks]

Bret Busby wrote:
<SNIP>

> For example, while I am a Red Hat user, and, on Sunday, we upgraded one
> of our machines from RH 6.0 to RH 6.2 (upgrade, not clean install), I
> understand that Debian has become significantly easier to install. I am
> not sure where I read it; it may have been on the Debian website.

Having come from a RH installation (and formerly Mandrake), which I guess
holds your hand through the install, I was relatively shocked when I
recently (last weekend) installed Debian (thanks Matt).

The installation was not really friendly, and if it has become MORE friendly
then I would hate to have seen it previously!!!!  However I think that this
is an unfortunate by-product of having VERY easy to use install and replace
functions (the much talked about APT-Get and DSELECT).  If it is simple to
add and remove applications from your system, why attempt to install the
kitchen sink in the initial install?

That having been said, if you have no experience with the packages ("Why do
I need to install, "A Patchy" server" ;-) ) then it is going to be VERY
daunting to start with.  However from a relatively experienced users
perspective (the group that I only tentatively put myself in) it is nice to
know exactly what is and isn't on my system.

> I believe that it would be interesting to see a comparison of
> installation, of the various distributions, if people were willing to be
> involved.

It may be worth asking for a quick poll on what the experts on this list
would install for the various types of machines, like servers (web/database
etc.), desktop (office based, games based) as I don't think that there is a
clear overall winner across all these categories.

I think that rating a distribution based on the ease of install does take
the focus away from what the distribution is aimed at doing.  At least you
know that if you install Linux once, you wont have to do it again (unless
you help out friends, or decide to try a different flavour!).  Don't forget,
MS has an advantage on installs as MS doesn't explain to their users about
partitions!

I think that the comparison of installs will probably be informally done at
the LinuxFest anyway!

Regards all

Darrell