You must have used the Hamm installer or something even older.  You probably
got tossed into Dselect as well.  The recent installer (potato) is a far cry
from intuitive but it's simple enough.  The new installer going in to Woody
(testing/3.0) is much better, and the installer in development in Sid
(unstable) is quite nice, it includes a GUI and all the niceties that
mandrake has brought to the table in the install.  I also thought Caldera's
installer was very nice. (Gotta love playing pacman while installing..
haha).

Don't get me wrong, I learned the most about Linux by fighting with the
idiocies in RedHat 4.0-6.1, 6.2 finally worked as intended but RPM is just a
pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned.  I really do recommend anyone who
is going to learn Linux to try ALL the distributions.  And it's always a
good idea to learn about the market leader (redhat/mandrake).  But if you
have to upkeep/admin/clean-up/update an OS, Debian will make your headaches
FAR less.  And I love Debian for my desktop, since I can try out whatever I
want from APT and remove it straight-away without worrying about
dependencies or duplicate packages.  And I've _NEVER_ had to rebuild my dpkg
database.  I found that I was doing that at least every month or two on my
redhat boxes because of corrupted files, or poorly made packages...  blech! 

As far as the technical differences or benefits versus loss between RPM/DEB
I would love for someone to actually enlighten me as to why RPM is superior.
I have constantly heard this, but I have never heard a good reason why.

* Blake

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Jerome [mailto:jerome@primenet.com]
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 12:14 AM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Introductions


OK, I just joined this list, but I'll jump right in.

I'm an experienced s/w engineer; I've been hacking on
unices for 10 years, and I've been using various Linux for
several years.

The Debian installer is a mess. It is not for a beginner.
apt-get is great when you learn it, but I've seen too many
people give up on Linux because they tried Debian first.

If someone who worked for me made a program like the last
Debian installer I tried, I'd fire him. Installtion options
that conflict with each other, and let you do just that,
are brain damage. Having to go through an incredibly long
rolling command line configuration of everything that you
installed (even if you dont want to configure/startup them)
with obscure options is brain damage. Pardon me, but
if I did that to my customers then I would be fired.

There's absolutely nothing about redhat or mandrake that
keeps anyone from "getting under the hood". And they are
a WHOLE HECK OF A LOT easier for a beginner to install.

-- 
Douglas Jerome
http://www.primenet.com/~jerome
http://hackerlabs.sourceforge.net
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