Re: Correction to "More on Alas and Alack'

[Ashley Kitson <akitson bbcb co uk>]

I have to concur with Greg on almost every point.  As a complete newbie
(of 1 week's standing!!) I am experiencing a lot of the problems that
keep re-appearing in this and other lists.

Two things though

1/ the experience.  This takes me back to my days as a much younger man
tackling the Acorn BBC-B, my first machine.  I did eventually become
very proficient and able to program or bend the machine to do almost
anything.  It was huge fun and eventually led me into my second career
(in IT).  I still have the machine and my 15yr old daughter is insistent
that I get it out again for her to learn the fundamentals on.  The last
week with Linux has been much like the first year with the BBC-B.  I
know more about computers now, but I haven't spent as much time in front
of screen for years, (opticians next week I think :-)  The point I make
is that Linux is putting the fun back into computing, (in a perverse way
some might say).

2/ ease of use/install.  Greg is spot on.  I couldn't recommend this to
my company or clients (I'm an IT Director) based on the last week.  I do
not need to spend time and resource on configuring each individual
machine to work with its flavour of hardware.  Too much grief.  And to
think that there are so many variations of distribution.  I believe that
the next step is for all the distributors to agree on a common method of
install and application install management.  Red Hat RPM and their
install program seems to work reasonably well but it has deficiencies. 
I don't know about other Linux distributions.  From a commercial point
of view Red Hat et al might not want to do this as it remains a
differentiator but they are commercially clever people who are making
money out of free software so who knows.

On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 16:57, Greg Julius wrote:
<<I've deleted it as it is long, and you can read it it anyway from his
original mail>>