On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 11:51 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
I for one remember the main stumbling block I had coming to Linux 8'ish years ago when trying to get the system installed was that disk druid in Redhat 5.1 kept telling me I didn't have a "root" filesystem, it took me a good hour to work out as a newbie coming from Windows & the Amiga that I needed to give the partition a label, and that the label needed to be "/", the trouble was that nowhere did it say that the "filesystem root" was called "/" (and at the same time I was having to deal with the concept of having a user called "root" which is about as clear as mud until you have the thing installed anyhow) and you needed to label it, of course looking up "root" in the index of the install manual pointed me to the user root.
I remember exactly the same struggle (at about the same time) when I tried to install SuSE 5.1 on a spare machine. I am glad I persevered (I remember the joy when I first got the thing to play some sound with tracker)
Also it took me ages to get my head around mount points, I think that is probably the biggest shift people coming from windows have to make. It all makes sense once you understand it and you realise how daft drive letters are. That said with Gnome showing a pretty icon whenever you put a readable disk in the drive, I guess the average user doesn't even have to understand those now (lot of crossover there with the other conversation thread that is going on at the moment)