Excellent Idea! Tha concept of attacking at the root is great. It sounds mighty difficult to implement though. Regarding distributions, i think Redhat would win my vote. The main reasons would be 1) Extensive Hardware Support 2) RPM (It was built on RH) - Numerous applications available for install via RPM 3) Up2date 4) More online help forums for RH than any other distro. (also a very helpful IRC channel). 5) Very easy to work with, especially after bluecurve (I am not supportive of their idea of degrading KDE in the process of Unifying it with GNOME. However, the result is indeed quite beautiful) 6) Automatic Installation of New Kernel via up2date
These are the features that i think would be necessary for newbies which are covered in Redhat. Most experienced users might not need the above. Indeed, some might consider it a hindrance. But from the newbie point of view, features like Auto-Kernel update are very very helpful.
Just my two paise,
On Sunday 17 November 2002 02:00, mails@munshi.dyndns.org wrote:
Hi,
How about having a tour around the city, visiting as many hardware assemblers and teaching them basic installation of linux (hope we agree on a distribution which we can install in front of them). My hardware vendor have engineers who are prety smart but have never used linux so do not know much about it and can not support my system. Since many assemblers take a risk by giving pirated softwares with their PC's they may like this idea. Also Linux will gain a upper hand in being the first OS that people get on their PC and problems with learning a new OS will not exist for linux anymore. We will be fighting propritary software right the at the root. The negative side will be that their software modems and printers (which are cheaper) will not make a market so they may even resist this. We also can ask them (the assemblers and the new users) to subscribe to our mailing list to ask for help. I would suggest an easy to use distribution like Mandrake, or caldera. I would really prefer caldera since it fits on a single CD and assemblers can easily provide a copy of with every comp they sell. Also caldera has limited number of applications, for example just 1-2 broswers, which can be quiet helpful for newbies to computers, also I have not heard a lot of flames for caldera as there are for RH and mandrake. On the other hand, Mr. Rajeev had a problem with Myson NIC which worked under Mandrake, but the kernel module would not compile under most of the other distributions.
This is finally just an idea guys, may be there is something very wrong in this idea and may not work at all.
Bye