Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo healthy?

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Wednesday 20 December 2006 19:42, Mark Knecht wrote:

> As for family members not a single one of them, except possibly my
> son today could even have a chance of setting up a Linux box.

Looks like you are assuming stuff up front and never actually getting 
round to checking it out for real

> My 
> son's first computer was RH when he was 6 or 7. Today's he's 14, runs
> Gentoo, rips CDs, uses Aqualung & xmms. He *might* get through a RH
> install but not Gentoo. 

Can't he read or something? Gentoo's install is more heavily documented 
than any other distro out there

> It's not that Gentoo is so hard. It's that 
> none of them know anything about 'vi' so how could they even edit a
> config file and give the system an IP address or point it at a name
> server? 

The basic installer does not provide vi for this exact reason. It 
provides nano, so this objection doesn't even rear it's head

> (Maybe the graphical installer but I'd not let them try for 
> fear they'd wreck existing Windows installs trying to load it.)

The risk that the user might nuke the partitions containing Windows is 
always there regardless of what distro you use. You still make the same 
decisions, fdisk, cfdisk and gparted are still there. Whether you click 
here, click OK then say "oops..." or type "fdisk /dev/sda" <some stuff> 
then say "oops" you're still gonna say "oops" ....

alan
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