[NCLUG] Re: 'we have met the enemy, and he is us'

[Matt Rosing]

Installing the OS on these machines is nothing compared to maintaining
the OS.  Installing redhat is pretty straight forward.  Things go
great ... until you have to add some hardware that requires groping
around the net looking for drivers, reading HOW-TO-xxx, or adding some
module.  Having some sort of rpm dependency thing for hw would be a
great and welcome improvment.  Maintaining windoze has different
problems.  Usually you add a cd and click install and it works, but
eventually one install breaks something for some other app and it's a
nightmare figuring out what happened.  The standard way to handle it
is wipe the disk clean and start completely over.

I'm not a sys-admin, I just work on what's in my house.  But my
feeling is there's a big need for some sort of diagnostic tool to help
with the huge complexity of these systems.  Maybe an inference engine
with a big knowledge base, I don't know. The acid test is my
fater-in-law, who still doesn't understand the difference between ram
and disk space.  We've finally convinced him to be afraid of his
machine so we won't go in and muck with it.  If someone built
something so my father in law could maintain his OS by himself then
they'll rule the OS world.  M$ would like to believe they have my
father-in-law's interest in mind but that's horse shit.  MS is the
king of eye candy but fundamentally it's by the geeks, for the geeks,
just as linux is.  

I.e., people should set their sights higher than windows if they want
to compete with windows.

Matt