Lighten up, its just a joke ^_~..

Dreq, try out MEPIS, easy for grandma to use, and not too hard to get up to date software for.

It's based on Debian so it uses apt-get, which resolves dependancy hell, and makes installations easy by simply copying the livecd to the harddrive. Only problem is you're pretty much stuck with KDE.

Well I personally am a gentoo b*tch and wouldn't change for the world.. I also am a KDE b*tch so.. no problems with the KDE thing anyway ;) I'll look into it though for 'the other guys' who don't like doing what i'm doing this very moment (configuring a non-gentoo kernel so I can actuially use my hardware correctly ^_~)

this is slightly off topic, but may be related to what the OP wants, has anyone used Vidalinux? and if so what was their experience with it?

I tried the RPM route once (with Mandrake) and gave up in disgust. These days, I just compile my own. Everything I run (which isn't much, as it isn't a desktop machine) is self-compiled, although I boot-strapped from that Mandrake CD a few years ago.

The problems I found?

1) People who build RPMs include dependencies that aren't necessary, which forces you to UPGRADE LIBC just to install some security patch. Ix-nay!

2) RPM really isn't all that user friendly even for someone who understands the command line. I had a system with some number of RPMs installed, and a CD with a bunch of upgrade RPMs. There was no command I could give to upgrade JUST THE PACKAGES I HAVE using the upgrades on the CD, because "upgrade" means the same as "install".

I don't think RedHat and Mandrake are killing off potential users. Their use of RPM's really does simplify things for those less well versed in computers. I know my grandma still runs windows 95, and does she need to upgrade? No. The computer runs, and she can use word processing. That's all she does on there. But because you're better versed in computers, you look at it the way I would. I want to try anything I think is cool, which means installing lots of software. Then again, that grandma probably won't be updating her computer or grabbing files off of Sourceforge. She'll happily use the OpenOffice program that was installed with her linux OS. And then every once and awhile you can run the update program for her, and the system should work just fine. So, RPM's probably won't hinder these people from using linux.

It will be nice when Gentoo receives a GUI for its install system, and iirc there is one in the works. Now though, isn't Knoppix a Debian installer? That should make installation really simple, and I'm guessing you could maybe even play solitaire while you install. And from what I hear, Debian has a really great packaging system.

I don't really think the debate between how to install software is where we should be at. Linux needs to show that it has software that is unique to linux, not found elsewhere. Give me a reason to switch to linux. Sure, its more secure you say, but I can't use my scanner in linux because there are no drivers. Hence, I use windows. What drives me away from linux is not the package system (I don't mind RPM's when the whole process is automated, and I don't have to hunt down extra files), but that not all hardware currently works at least at the level it does on windows and that I program games on windows. Eventually I'll do a linux port, and maybe I'll like linux more. I'm counting on the WINE projects to help me use linux more. I guess a really great feature in linux is that central store of programs. You can't tell the windows OS to go find all updates to your software, nor can it install the programs with a few commands. That's one of the great points of linux. I used to use CNet's update program...but sadly they discontinued that.

Vidalinux, from there website, is Gentoo. I haven't used it, but perhaps it tries to simplify the install? I see that everything else appears the exact same as Gentoo. Now I remember the GUI for Gentoo's portage, called Porthole. I never did get that thing working under Gentoo, I suppose its grown since then.

Quote:

Original post by Dreq 99% of the time, installing a program requires simply: - ./configure - make - make install Is there no way to automate this in a newbie-friendly way?

Source RPMs.

Before jumping to conclusions about Mandrake and Red Hat "killing off potential Linux users," how about you really get informed? A novice Linux user should know to RTFM; the web is littered with constructive HOWTOs and FAQs on package management, and there are more books on Red Hat Linux that probably all other distros combined.

Can we be a little less reactionary, please? And before proferring "solutions" to problems, can we understand these problems first? Gentoo is not a solution to the problem because it doesn't operate at the same level: Gentoo requires building from source on each target machine, which is possible on all distros. Package management is about deploying and administering pre-compiled binaries.

In summary, RAFB. Or something.

Btw, you don't need to HTML-format your posts. The board preserves most whitespace.

Quote:

Original post by Oluseyi In summary, RAFB. Or something.

I haven't seen that one before. Nice.

Quote:

Btw, you don't need to HTML-format your posts. The board preserves most whitespace.

Strangely, it doesn't for me.

Debian and SuSE both have package managers almost if not as good as distributions. Being binary or source-compiled has absolutely no relavency to the package database. Gentoo has an amazing source database, and debian (and SuSE, to a lesser extent) has an amazing binary package tree. Of course, technically, most Gentoo programs can be installed mostly from binary (though I think it still does the linking) and most Debian packages allow for retreiving the source.