Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution) | Date | Tue, 15 Jan 2002 12:00:16 +0100 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> said: > Charles Cazabon <charlesc@discworld.dyndns.org>: > > Yes, and yes. Aunt Tillie is running Linux because someone installed a > > distribution for her.
> You don't know that. Maybe she installed it herself.
Linux-from-scratch or some such? In which case she'd better be able to configure a custom kernel without help...
> > She is never going to need anything out of her kernel that her > > vendor-shipped update kernels do not provide.
> *You can't know that.*
Right. But 99.9% of Aunt Tillies won't need anything else. To have _everybody_ go through a lot of pain for the sake of 0.02% of Linux users is silly. Better let Nephew Mervin keep the junkheap, and give Tilly a new machine for her birthday.
> And your belief that you *can* know it is a key part of the elitist > developer psychology and implicit assumptions that keeps Linux mostly > inaccessible to the Aunt Tillies of the world.
Have you ever tried f.ex. Red Hat's installer and updater for the latest versions (Just because it is the one I know best; other distribuctions have similar facilities)? Have you tried a machine with Linux preinstalled?
Have you ever battled with Windows "autoconfiguration"?! _It doesn't work_. At all. _Ever_. And that hasn't been an impediment to Aunt Tilly to get a WinPC...
I just think that your idea is cool. You are just wasting effort on trying to solve a non-problem, when there are lots of problems that could use your talents.
But again, it's your own time. -- Horst von Brand http://counter.li.org # 22616 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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