[plug] Just introducing myself to the group

[Onno Benschop]

Trevor and Ariana, welcome to Linux, I hope you'll enjoy the fronteer
and the community that goes with it.

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 14:47, Tim Bowden wrote:
> If you're keen on debian you will need a good deal of patience and 
> perseverance (possibly a trip to the workshop?) to get it going but 
> knoppix gives you a good idea of what you can end up with.

While I agree with your last comment Tim, the first needs some feedback
in my opinion.

Fundamentally I disagree with those that suggest that you need patience
and perseverance with Debian. While I'll be the first to admit that the
installer doesn't look sexy, nor does it auto-magically answer all your
questions, a typical Debian install takes me ten minutes, mostly hitting
Enter.

I have been getting familiar with Linux since 1999 because my
dissatisfaction with Windows began to outweigh the ease-of-use -
specifically installing and uninstalling applications and service
patches - often leaving my machine totally unusable.

I got numerous magazines with front-cover Cd's - I was on a dial-up
connection - and installed Red-Hat, Storm, SuSe, Mandrake (there were
others - I forget) all from scratch. They all mostly worked. Then I
tried to install and remove packages. They mostly broke.

I was pretty much at a loss where to go next. I tried BeOS, looked
really nice, installed simply, but there were no applications.

I'd been a Macintosh user since 1985, used Win.XXX for most of that time
as well. I've run NetWare servers since 2.11 and in my quest for the
next Workstation OS, even tried Solaris.

As you might gather, I'm not one to give up too soon.

A friend told me about Debian.

I got really confused about dselect, but once I got over that, I can't
honestly even consider any other distribution. (Today I don't use
dselect, others may give differing feedback on this.)

For new users, I'd recommend installing using the task selector and not
using dselect - in-fact, today I select the task selector and select
nothing. I generally bail out of the next apt-get as well, but you can
ignore that last bit of advice until you've done this a few times.

The patience and perserverence for me were related to finding a
distribution, not with Debian.

Of course your mileage may vary and you may well come to have your own
opinion on this, but I for one will be using Debian for some time to
come...



(I know, I've glossed over a lot of issues here, but this message was
getting rather longer than I thought it should be... start a new thread
and I'll play.)


Onno Benschop 

Connected via Optus B3 at S15:51'18" - E128:45'05" (Crossing Falls, Kununurra, WA)
-- 
()/)/)()        ..ASCII for Onno.. 
|>>?            ..EBCDIC for Onno.. 
--- -. -. ---   ..Morse for Onno.. 

Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon
ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - onno at itmaze dot com dot au

_______________________________________________
plug mailing list
plug at plug.linux.org.au
http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug