On Saturday 15 May 2004 21:04, Syd Hancock wrote:
On Saturday 15 May 2004 8:52 pm, Graham Trott wrote:
What took a day and a half was learning how to do it manually from a minuimal command-line install up to a complete GUI, leaving out all the redundant fluff you get with SuSE or Mandrake. And ending up with a much better understanding of what's going on.
Oh absolutely, very different indeed, but I just couldn't resist making a comment, especially as you often remark on how difficult it is to do things in 'linux' compared to windows :-)
It's all horses for courses of course. I guess I'm in a minority in ALUG as I'm not an IT professional so I just use something that works for me with the minimum of hassle. Although I'm still quite happy to edit config files when needed so I'm not a total wimp (bad pun intended).
Well OK I know I've made some unflattering comments about things that Windows users take for granted but in Linux are very difficult. I'm not an IT pro either; just a programmer who specialises in GUI stuff, so the hassle factor is pretty much the same for me as for you.
The problem at the top of my list is not how easy it may be to set up a system; it's what happens a year or two down the road when it's time to upgrade or the hard drive fails. Figuring out what has to be done to restore my personal files and applications on a new system is a right royal PITA whether on Windows or Linux. From what I've seen so far, the package management of Debian is significantly better than any of the others, though I'm not clear about the best strategy to deal with stuff for which no package can be found, only tarballs. Unfortunately there's quite a lot of that, especially once you get into multimedia (for example).
It's getting late so I may be talking even more garbage than usual, but would it be a good idea to keep all custom system files in a folder structure under /root that mirrors the main structure (e.g. /root/custom/{etc,usr...}) and just set up symlinks to them from their "proper" places? At rebuild time that ought to make it easy to identify anything not under package control, but would require discipline. Along with that I suppose I'd need to religiously keep all (non-packaged) tarballs so they could be restored to the new system. Anything under /home obviously isn't a problem; it's the system tweaks that take so long to deal with as the whys and wherefores have been long forgotten.
-- GT