[TriLUG] different versions of 7.2 for sale]

[Brent Fox]

On Tuesday 30 October 2001 10:07 am, Mike Parkhurst wrote:
> Roy,
>
> Thanks for asking.
>
> I use both Red Hat and Mandrake.  For my tastes the Mandrake installer
> takes to many steps to install.  They ask single questions per screen,
> while the Red Hat installer asks several related questions on the same
> screen.
>
> However, I think this thread has lost focus.  The primary purpose of an
> installer is to install a functioning copy of an OS.  When judging an
> installer, my first criteria is does the system work when the installer is
> done.  Does it boot?  Does the network work?  Do my applications work?  For
> example, on my laptop ( Compaq Armada M700 ) Mandrake 8.anything does not
> set up the PCMCIA Ethernet card correctly, but Red Hat 7.2 does.  That to
> me is MUCH more important than the colors of the install screens.
>

My line of thinking about an installer is pretty close to yours.  If you 
think about it, the installer is a one-time piece of software.  It's job is 
to get bits on the disk, and do some basic hardware configuration.  To me, I 
want to spend as little time as possible in the installer, because I'd rather 
be using the OS.  Clean layouts and nice colors are important too, but not 
all-important.  I think that gets overlooked sometimes.  If a user chooses a 
distro based solely on the colors of the installer, they are not using a 
rational thought process.

As far as configuring things like modems, printers, and such, it makes more 
sense to me to have good config tools that allow you to configure this after 
installation.  You will always need a modem config tool for the installed 
system, so to reproduce this functionality in the installer is redundant.  
The ethernet card is a special case, though.  It's important to configure 
that in the install so that you can ssh to the box and configure it remotely 
if you want to.  

The video card is a special case too, since you need to select a resolution 
to come up in.  In the past, this was also important because we would only 
install the XFree86 server needed by your card.  XFree 4 will ultimately 
remove this problem since it uses driver for the individual cards instead 
separate servers (and thus separate RPM packages). 

The Red Hat config tool project is an ongoing thing.  We don't have a 
complete set, but we're working on it.  The first step was to replace the 
functionality that Linuxconf (*shudder*) had.  We're pretty much there.

> My only nit to pick is that my laptop has a corporate approved windows
> partition that must be preserved, at almost any cost.  During the
> partitioning phase, I couldn't tell if the auto-partition option would
> preserve or destroy my windows partition.  For me it was no big deal as I
> just used one of the manual options.
>

If you select Automatic Partitioning, you have three options:
1) Remove all Linux Partitions
2) Remove all partitions
3) Keep all partitions and use existing free space

It sounds like you want option 1 or 3.  #1 will not remove any non-Linux 
partitions.  #3 will not remove any partitions at all.  #2, however, will 
blank your partition table and start from scratch.  Don't pick #2 if you have 
data that you want to preserve.


Cheers,
   Brent