InstallFest / Distribution Advice

[George Toft]

Why would you invite a newbie to start with one of the most challenging
projects out there?  Let's set the way-back machine to when you were
learning to ride a bicycle.  Did your parents make you build your bike to 
start off (Slackware, Debian, LFS)?  No - they gave you a bike with training 
wheels that already worked (Mandrake, Red Hat).  As you gained familiarity 
with the mechanics of riding a bike (Linux administration), the training 
wheels were removed, and you were on your own (to ride whatever you wanted).

If a person is already familiar with Unix (riding some kind of bike), then 
this is not much of an issue, but then they probably won't call themselves a 
newbie and ask for help/advice.  By building their bike from scratch they do 
learn much more, but maybe they don't want to be a bike mechanic.  Maybe they 
want to ride the bike instead of being pulled around in the red wagon by 
Microsoft, being taken where ever Microsoft decides.  You don't have to be a 
bike mechanic to ride, although it helps when you break the bike to be able 
to fix it quickly.

There are plenty of bike mechanics out here that can lend a hand to a newbie
when they break their bike, or when they want to trick it out (video capture,
sound editing, VCD mastering, writing device drivers, etc).

Maybe I'm recalling my first Linux experience.  It took me a week to get 
Linux to print without stair-stepping because, at that time, all that was 
avaialble was using vi to edit printcap.  I learned more than I ever wanted 
to know (I was overwhelmed), and ran screaming back to my red wagon.  Two
years later, after having my red wagon tipped over every 60 minutes, I
bought an already built bike (Red Hat) and learned to ride.  When I got Star 
Office 4, Netscape, and Acrobat Reader running (back when these did not come
with Linux distros, but had to be downloaded as tarballs and installed and 
configured and tweaked), I shed the training wheels and threw the red wagon 
away.

You have to crawl before you can run.

My $0.02 plus some.

George