[ale] Average Joe installs, RedHat, Caldera, etal.

[Michael A. Smith]

	Here's an interesting nugget from Slashdot on this product named WinLinux.
You can download it from http://www.winlinux.net/ .  The naming kinda scares
me but it may be a good product for the average windows user that wants to
take a look at what there missing....



-----Original Message-----
 From: owner-ale at ale.org [mailto:owner-ale at ale.org]On Behalf Of Glenn
Stone
Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 1:35 PM
To: scott at certumgroup.com
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Average Joe installs, RedHat, Caldera, etal.


<rant attrib=net.old.fart>
There was an idea batted about Slashdot a few weeks ago about Linux Lite,
the idea being that somebody should come up with a distro of Linux
explicitly set up for Joe Random User, with a Caldera-like install and
with *all the bells and whistles that will bite JRU in the ass turned off*.
Red Hat comes up with things like gated, httpd, named, nfs, and SENDMAIL
for Linus' sake *turned on*.  Your average dialup 56k JRU shouldn't even
know what sendmail IS, much less have it installed, MUCH less have
the scrooey thing RUNNING.... he's going to use Pine or Netscape or
some Gnome or KDE somethingorother to slurp his mail off the ISP and
drop it in /home/jru/Mail, don't pass Sendmail, don't collect two hundred
script kiddies.

<kingofsiam> Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum,
nauseumque. </kingofsiam>

In a nutshell, come up with a set of features (and a partitioning
schema) that will be 90% of what JRU is likely to need, and if
and when he really wants to do more than dial up, get mail, surf
the web, and play Tetris, he can bloody get out TFM and R and learn
how to use kpackage and add functionality to his workstation.  And
make sure TFM is R-able.  (sorry, find /usr/man -print | xargs nroff -man >
/book/DoctorLinux don't cut it, we all know man pages suck rocks for JRU.)
(a LOT of this effort will be Good Tech Writing, something most of
us hackers really hate to do.)  (BTW, MacMillan has an open call for
authors right now, they've got like 20 books backed up they want
written yesterday and they need people who know what they're doing to
write'em.  They say don't worry about style, their editors will fix that.
Just know your stuff and be able to express it.)

But I have to agree, yes, letting them loose with the full power of
Linux is dangerous, but if we expect the OS to survive, we have to
provide a roadmap to get them off Windoze.  Otherwise we'll end up
with OS/2 all over again.  So we trade off.  We give them a not-quite-full
default setup (no sendmail, no webserver/fileserver/nameserver with which to
get themselves in trouble with the script kiddies) and if they want to
upgrade to the full power of the World's Best Development Environment,
let'em work for it.  Rather like self-moderating newsgroups a few years
back.  If you were sharp enough to know how to post to the group, you
had obviously taken the time to learn how the net worked, and were presumed
qualified enough to have your say.

I think this is just another step in the free beer/free speech thing.  You
have the right to say whatever you want.  But nobody has to give you an
amp and speakers and a mike.  You can print whatever you want to.  But there
aren't any free printing presses, and you have to learn how to run the fool
thing.  (Magic markers are, of course, less than a buck apiece, but they're
slow and they give you writer's cramp a lot faster.)  Same thing here.  The
net is like a library, the library card (Linux) is free for the asking, but
if you want to put a *book* *in* the library, that's going to cost you at
least some sweat equity.  A lot less than the regular treeware..... but I
think by (l)earning your right to publish, it becomes of more value and
thus hopefully more thought is put into what is said.  And how it's served
up.

</rant>

--- Glenn
"If you want to to touch the sky
 you better learn how to kneel." -- U2