[CLUE-Talk] easiest distro to install

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 08:25, bof wrote:
> Dennis J Perkins wrote:
> 
> >I was asked which distro is easiest to install.  I'm told Mandrake is one of 
> >the easiest but I don't know how easy it is for a non-techie to install.  He 
> >doesn't want any technical questions.  Is there a distro that doesn't ask about 
> >partitions, etc?
> >

All distros have to partition the disk -- period, end of story. If
you're installing Windows on a new machine, it will also ask questions
about partitioning -- there is no way around this. A fresh hard drive
with no filesystem has to be partitioned -- and it'd be damn rude for
the OS to just make assumptions about the partitioning for a disk
without user interaction. 

AFAIK Mandrake, SuSE and Red Hat are at about the same level of
user-friendliness as Windows when it comes to installs. I've installed
all of them, even helped my S.O. with a fresh install of Windows XP, and
if a person can handle installing Windows on an unformatted drive, they
can handle installing Mandrake, SuSE or Red Hat -- so long as the
hardware is compatible, of course. This is also true of Windows... if a
newbie tries to install XP on a machine with hardware that's not
supported by XP, they're going to get just as frustrated as they would
if they find their video card or whatever isn't supported by Mandrake. 

Mandrake is probably your best bet. They're in beta for 9.2, it might be
worth waiting a few weeks for the next Mandrake release...

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net