[CLUE-Talk] easiest distro to install

[Dennis J Perkins]

> 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
> 

I don't know how he's going to react to questions about a swap partition.  I 
guess he could use a swap file instead, but that person will probably still be 
confused.