[lug] Attempted hack from 202.185.243.121

[Nate Duehr]

> In conjunction with the user friendly install, RH came out with
> graphical admin tools miles ahead of the competition.  Debian still
> wants you to edit config files, I think.

The old "boot-floppies" installer has been heavily revamped for Woody
release, and this will be the last time it's used.  The next installer is a
SUPER result of design and a bunch of coding effort -- highly modular, and
of course Debian has the cross-porting issues that Red Hat bailed out on and
dropped their Sparc support to avoid... so making one installer that works
across all the different platforms Debian supports is really really rough on
the install team, from watching the debian-boot mailing list for the last
year or two.  (I'm not good enough a coder to even THINK about diving into
that mess, but it's amazing what you can learn about how hard it is to write
an OS installer by lurking!)

> Yeah, apt kicks ass.  Yes, Debian is rock solid.  But during Linux's
> formative years it was not friendly to beginners.

I think that by the release of Potato a couple of years ago, most folks with
a basic computer background and who had installed Red Hat, or some of the
Windows OS's themselves could get through the Debian installer, but
hopefully this will continue to get better!

Nate, nate at natetech.com