Re: easyLinux Beta.

[Matt & Kim <patawi@polarcom.com>]

Hi Jean, and All,

Sorry I haven't been able to contribute much yet but I've been away from my
home 'pooter for awhile... 

I have a couple of pages of notes I made while installing Indy but they are
almost a month old, and judging from the list traffic and probably not
relevant anymore. However there is one thing I haven't seen discussed yet,
online (meaning on disk) documentation, more below.

At 10:48 AM 07/02/99 -0000, jfm wrote:

>The specific feature of EasyLinux is the X based install.
>
>First this isn't new: Redhat tried it in 95 or 96 and ended going back
>to using a curses based install.

I for one have no problem with a curses based install, as long as it works
and is adaptable.

>fact nearly useless.  I would much prefer an install allowing the user
>to configure PPP so he can immediately ask for help in case of need
>instead an X-based one.  Also installs are not half as importanat as

Agreed, PPP should have an option to be configured at install time.
However, consider the situation where the new user does not already have an
internet account.

>to configure PPP so he can immediately ask for help in case of need
                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don't know much about Linux (yet), but I am capable of figuring things
out provided I know where the resource material is. From my first 3
iterations of installing RH and Indy, with many restarts in Win95 so I
could read on-internet docs, I eventually discovered: 

(excerpt from my install notes)
inst> Installing the html How-To's only sort of worked because except for the
inst> index page, all of the urls point to sunsite. However if you use the
link
inst> below as your start page, you can surf the how-to's without being
online.
inst>
inst> file:/usr/doc/HOWTO/other-formats/html/HOWTO-INDEX-3.html
inst>
inst> This brings me to a point I'd like to mention. There's a little too much
inst> focus on going online to get information. There's at least 10mb of
installed
inst> documentation and it should be clear to users that there are local
resources
inst> as well as the splendid online resources. A caveat tho': a lot of the
inst> HowTo's seem to be rather dated. It's probably a monumental task, but it
inst> might be a good time to try and arrange them by age or relevance to
current
inst> distributions or something.

The default start page mentioned above is "file:/usr/doc/HTML/index.html",
which the page both Lynx and Netscape default to.

>down: bring your box to an install party or still better buy a
>computer with Linux preinstalled (that will ensure no hardware
>compatibilty problems).  But what happens after that "unbeatable"
>install?  ...

A very good point to keep in mind.

-matt