I must agree with this 100%.... Knowing little more than how to compile an irc bot on my ISP's fbsd box, I installed slack 3.4 as a 'virgin'. It ran, 2nd try too! Just to toss in an xtra tidbit, I have a friend who has been repairing printers, copiers, fax machines, etc. for more than 18 years. While he could identify feed rollers and little plastic gears from some off-brand chinese copier by sight, his PC knowledge is minimal beyond "My Computer". I sent him home with a Slackware 8.1 CD and a Compaq Proliant 1600 server. (Including WIPED HW raid cfg, etc.) While I was hopeful, but also what I thought realistic I assumed I'd be at his house in a day or 2 installing it for him. Two days later I recieved a phone call from him. There was both excitement and dissapointment in his tone of voice. He had indeed succeeded with the raid cfg, slack installation, and was staring at a root login prompt. I couldn't believe it. Problem was, the success came at approximately 4:00 AM the 'night' before. That's right, in a sleepless stupor, he was being what he thought was clever and put some ridiculous root password in there which after some sleep had completely vanished from memory, and didn't appear on any sticky notes in the immediate area. :) Moral of the story? Apt, RPM, PKGTOOL, whatever. As long as there is human intervention there will be problems. I do see a trend where "linux" to many new/curious folks means REDHAT, and in the past have found that 'linux support' meant that there was an RPM available, nothing more. That just ain't right. There should be fair and equal "billing" for all. If someone passes because all you have left are Debian, Slack, Gentoo or whatever then I'd consider that a good "weeding agent" and let them pass. .02 -mj >I think one of the great things about linux and > open source is that you're not locked into one vendor's distro. I think > it's important to get that message out so people don't get the idea that > RedHat = Linux. There are always alternatives... > > Personally, I think Debian might be too much for a new user doing an > initial install without assistance. But for a workstation, and for > someone who doesn't want to compile everything, it rocks. The package > management is far superior to rpm, IMHO. > > Slackware's installer is menu driven and straight forward. Accepting > the defaults (like redhat installs) gets you a running system in no > time. It detects most common PC hardware out of the box. It just > works. Makes a great workstation and gives you the flexibility to learn > more when you're ready to start compiling stuff from source. > > distro flames > /dev/null > -- > scot > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list --------------------- Jentges.NET, Inc. Voice: 763.783.3702 Cell: 763.370.1201 --------------------- _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list