FC-6: four small whinges

Timothy Murphy tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
Thu Nov 9 00:50:40 UTC 2006


Rahul Sundaram wrote:

>>> I also use KDE and got the choice between KDE & GNOME. I used the DVD
>>> tho. None was hidden. BUT, I also had to go thru the individual
>>> packages and unselect the GNOME stuff as it wanted to install that
>>> instead of the KDE defaults. I then had to select the KDE stuff.
>> 
>> Exactly.
>> That is what I meant by "hidden".
>> Why not just ask if the user wants to use KDE or Gnome?
> 
> The initial selection is geared towards novice users with task based
> groups instead of a blanket list of packages.
> 
>
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tours/FedoraCore6/004_Install_Default_Software
> 
> Other users who want to choose a specific desktop environment,text
> editor, mail server or whatever can do that by selecting individual
> packages or groups. Desktop environments are a very prominent choice
> there.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tours/FedoraCore6/007_Install_Applications
> 
> When repositories like extras/core are unified it would become unwieldy
> if Anaconda has a separate step asking users if they want GNOME or KDE
> or XFCE or other dozens of desktops environments and windows managers.

I usually agree with you, Rahul, and am very grateful
for all the help you have given me,
but I feel in this case you are being disingenuous.

In the first place, if one does a standard install
but chooses a custom choice of packages (or rather package groups),
the only choice of desktop offered is between KDE and Gnome.

Secondly, I am reasonably sure that if newbies were given a free choice
a large majority would choose KDE,
so if the selection were really geared towards novices
the default selection would be KDE.

I can't help feeling that this is in fact a "political" decision,
in that someone has decided for other reasons
that Gnome is a "better" choice,
and so has deliberately made it more difficult to choose KDE.

===================================================

Incidentally, the URL you gave reminded me of another slight problem -
when I clicked on "Fedora Extras" in response to
"Please select any additional repositories ...",
the effect was that anaconda tried to connect to the internet,
and when it was unable to do this
(because I had not been asked for my WiFi encryption key)
the installation hung, and I had to abort and start again.

I tried this twice, with the same result.
Did I misunderstand the question?
What doubly puzzles me is that even though I did not click "Fedora Extras",
it still appeared in /etc/yum.repos.d/ .




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland




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