On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 01:25:35 +0200, "Thorsten Froehlich"
<tho### [at] trfde> wrote:

>>>The average Mac OS takes 10 minutes ;-)
>> A custom installation?
>Yes.  The trick is that with Mac OS you setup everything before the install,
>not during it.  I find it very annoying to have to sit next to a computer
>for an hour just to press a button every once in a while.

But you still invest that time, right? :) Besides, most Linux
distributions are already like that, too.

>> It ran perfectly fine right from the beginning.

>So you have very "standard" hardware?  

WOW, that's a bold claim! :) Nothing in this hardware is standard,
nothing at all. It is a K6/233 on a Taiwanese brandless mobo, one of
the IDE ports is dead and has to be switched off from the BIOS, the
power supply is horrible and I put 4 big capacitors in parallel to
filter the noise, the RAM gives a 'Memory Test Failed' error on
reboot, the video is a brandless S3 ViRGE 925 clone, the keyboard is
Bulgarian, the mouse is Chinese... you get the picture. In the times
of yore when this PC ran Windows 95, an uptime of 6 hours was a reason
enough to party.

>Last summer I installed a Linux just
>for "fun".  It was no fun and took much longer than a Windows NT install.

My experience shows that the time NT takes to install is not the
matter, it's the time it takes to recover the lost data.

>In particular I missed any useful documentation.

How so? What was the distro? Slack 8 comes with a whole CD of docs,
HOWTOs, the SlackWare book etc. Same goes for most other distros.

>Nothing was straight forward as one would expect 

Ditto :-)

>and it would never keep its TCP/IP configuration

Odd. That sounds interesting. Any details?

>I found it very annoying and removed it after three month (by that time my
>father wanted the partition back).

It's a choice, after all.

>> Of course, with Linux you can tweak and tune all you like.
>I know.  I was more up to any improvements in the default installation.  

Precisely. The good thing is, I have made my own default installation.
I have never had that much control under Windows, not even with
98Lite.

>I don't to have to tweak the system for weeks until I can use it.  

Depends on what you call 'using.' If you are building a firewall, of
course you'll have to tweak it. Same goes for a web server, proxy etc.
A user system is usually ready straight out of the box.

>I am not interested in learning the setup of Linux after all.  And I am planning
>another install in a PC emulation on Macs in order to run apache/mysql/php.

You'll run Linux on an emulated PC on a Mac? Wow... must be a hell of
an emulator!

>So my major concern is if it makes sense to install a system in less than an
>hour and have it up and running well.  

Slack, RedHat, Mandrake or Debian should do the job.

>I wouldn't even need X-windows, I just need it to boot quickly and it should 
>be easy to turn on/off what I want with some tool rather than hacking 
>configuration files.  

What would you need to start / stop? Daemons? Servers?

>It has to be fool-proof because I never read any documentation...

Nothing is fool-proof, fools are so ingenious.

Seriously, if you want to set it up for serious work, you'll have to
read some. Usually the HOWTOs are enough.

Good luck.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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