RE: LINUX Workstations

Joe,

These things you're talking about are all things that RedHat has been
working on for awhile.  If you get RedHat 9, I think you'll find that
it already meets most of your demands.

You don't have to do an FTP install if you don't want to, or burn a CD.
You can order a CD from RedHat online, just like you would for a Windows
software package, and you can simply boot that CD.

The only moderately difficult thing is the disk partitioning.  If you're
not familiar with Unix, it's hard to imagine what the partition sizes
should be...  but, there's an "choose sizes for me" option in the
installer.

Aside from that, after the install it boots right up to the graphical
interface and asks for userid and password, just like you expect it to.

And, unlike Windows, you don't need to get drivers from the manufacturer
to make the video card work.  Or the network card.  Or the printer, etc.
It's all done automatically for you from the RedHat CD.

Of course, a lot of Linux users frown on RedHat for that reason :)

The "expert" users like to have more control over things, like to be able
to set things up exactly the way they want.  Those are the people who run
things like Debian or Mandrake instead of RedHat.


> If I'm wrong, prove me wrong.  Create a web site that tells me which
> Linux I should download, lets me download a setup file to my Windows
> machine which in turn burns a CD.  If you want to be nutty about it,
> make it a Java application and let me run it anywhere I have a JVM and a
> CD burner.  Let me boot my hardware off that CD and answer a couple of
> basic questions (admin user ID and password, IP or DHCP address) and
> install the thing.  When done, I want the machine to boot up to a
> graphical interface that asks me the user ID and password and I can get
> started.