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Linux Software

Install Linux in 4 Minutes 150

Posted by Hemos from the wham-bam-thank-ya-mam dept.
Bill Clarke wrote to us about WholeLinux system they unveiled at LinuxWorld. From a "cheap" CD-ROM even, they can install Red Hat Linux in 4 minutes, plus another 2 for things like Apache, Sendmail etc. Heh-run around with one of these things at your office/school. See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*
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Install Linux in 4 Minutes More

Install Linux in 4 Minutes

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  • What do you mean "of course"? You have some information about the product you should be sharing with the rest of us? From the artical: "By automatic, I mean no input whatsoever is required from the user." Just how much of a guru did you imagine was needed for this complicated task?. Hey - if you grabbed a copy of their disk and it doens't live up it's claims spill the beans and let us know the details. AdamT - at work
  • We just got a copy of Red Hat 6 and it's rocks! We loaded several applications on it, and we don't have to worry about filesystem corruption! No reboots, either. That is awesome. Can't beat that.

    But seriously, I don't see why auto-repair of files would be desired for Linux. With today's hard drives you don't in general worry about corruption at the hardware level, and Linux just doesn't suffer from this, especially not to the degree that NT does. I'll take a system that doesn't screw up in the first place (Linux) over the one that repairs itself automagically (NT5) any day.
  • You said it. Lord knows how many NT admins aren't even aware that it's possible to use a DOS boot disk with their machines. (And with Linux Samba servers, btw.)
    --

  • There's something to your rant. The other day I popped into comp.os.windows-nt.advocacy (for the first time since the good ol' OS/2 days in '94 + '95), and the on-going Linux/NT was a hellava more intelligent and cordial than a typical Windows NT thread on slashdot. Amazingly, less ads too.


    --
  • Try to roll out 20 new machines with 15-20 minute installs. When you return, you will have answered your own question, grasshopper.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Yes, sort of :)

    I've gone from redhat 4.2 via 5.0 and 5.1 and 5.2 etc, through suse 5.1, 5.2, 6, 6.1 and am now on debian (potato, dist-upgraded religiously every evening :)

    Your problems with hostname could be solved with one blast of 'linuxconf', but I for one can't remember whether RH4.2 even had that... :)
    (And of course, debian has it nowadays, and it rocks being able to use it to set up samba and configure firewalls, etc :)

    ~Tim
    --
  • I wonder why so many distributions use RPM, when Debian's package management is streets ahead (and yes I have tried both).

    What is the point in an easy installation, if you are going to battle with broken dependencies whenever you install a package? Installing Gnome on RedHat 5.2 was a nightmare, and it seemed to hang after about 6 minutes of use. With Debian, I typed one apt-get command! As a relative newbie, I feel that the package management is the most important aspect, but it always seems to be overlooked.

    Saying RPM is a standard is simply not good enough - you could claim we should all use Windoze as it's the most common OS! There are so many Debian packages that there is really no excuse, although you also hear complaints that there are too many! You can also install RPM packages on a Debian system by using Alien.

    It's good to see that Corel have actually investigated the distributions before pushing another into the marketplace.
  • Who cares how *long* it takes to install an OS. That is completely uninteresting to me. Whether you are using Linux or NT you should never have to reinstall, so it is worth taking the extra time to select packages that you really want.

    I think it is rediculous to spend so much effort making the install faster. It is much more useful to make the install smarter; i.e. by coming up with logical grouping of options and automatic dependency selection, for example.

    -Tom
  • Bad words about NT might have something to do with the years of abuse and mind games it inflicts upon my time. Just this morning, I had to deal with an NT machine that peed all over itself and "lost" a whole directory of files. How does a computer just lose files? And I had to reboot another NT machine, not once, but twice to get it working. What's up with that? No, these are not desktop machines that people use, but ones locked in a cabinet used to control *shudder* equipment. Nothing like downtime and scrap, let me tell you.

  • Linux Easier to Install than Windows (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 16, 1999 @03:44AM (#1745406)
    I have only been working with Linux for a little over a year and I love it. What I find interesting is that I now find it less cumbersome to install any version of Linux than Windows NT or 98. Although I have never gotten Linux to install in 4 Minutes, the 20 Minute install does me just fine and I have everything that I need. That is a FAR cry from the 68 Minutes it takes Windows 98 to install. That just drove me insane. I've primarily worked in Mac shops most of my carrer and intsalling Mac OS 8.5 take only 15 minutes off of the CD, pure and Simple. Just pop the CD in and install. No Problem. Because I'm a Mac guy, booting off the CD is commonplace. But do that with Windows, no way. But Linux on the other hand, I can just pop the CD in and off it goes. The installer Finds my hardware and it's off and running in under 20 minutes. I'm no Linux pro or New-Newbie for that matter. I have had my share of Linux Exposure, but I will say that Linux is now easier to install that ANY version of Windows.
  • you could write something to restore to a different size hdd under linux too. Just make a huge tar.bz2 of the file system, then on the new box mke2fs then untar. Nice and simple.
  • One Reason is that Debian's package management system is so draconian that finding, and fixing, all dependency problems with apt takes too long for certain packages. This means developers take a long time to get something rolled into apt. In turn, this means it's hard for users to get the software they want for apt. Not just bleeding edge types, but anyone who wants their packages within months of the software release.

    Technically superior is less important than useful to most people.
  • This isn't for file level corruption, it is for programs that try to corrupt NT. This *should* in theory help stabalize mature installs of NT5 (DLL version problems are one of the biggest reasons why NT installs go bad). When you try to install something with older DLL's (like Office 97) NT5 detects that, and won't allow it to happen. If you try to delete system files from winnt (assuming you have the permissions) it will detect that, and replace those files.
  • it's not a problem with .rpm files that you describe. It's a problem with the software. Why redhat hasn't written a better program for installing rpms is beyond me, but as far as i can tell .rpm and .deb are pretty much the same, just .deb uses a bunch of files to describe the package where redhat uses one, and imho which ever method is "better" is personal preference.
  • Hm. Let me think here. Edit config files, like I'm used to doing, or wade through endless configuration dialog boxes with buttons and fill-in blanks which are designed solely to hide complexity but end up making it just as complex because you now have Yet Another Configuration Tool to learn. And then, the next time I upgrade my window manager, I now have to upgrade my System Configuration Tool and hope that its smart enough for the new version. Or suppose I decide that I really want to use FVWM 1.0 instead. Oh, whoops, that version isn't supported anymore. Let's see... um.. NO.

    Just because it has a console interface doesn't mean I want to go through a dozen flippin' menu screens to find the right dang box to bang in my hostname. I happen to like being able to edit config files. It's powerful. I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice checkboxes and buttons and menus and goooeeeees in order to have full configurability at my fingertips. Hostname? lets see here... could that be in.. um... maybe... /etc/hostname????? Let me fire up my all-purpose sysadmin tool... I call it "vi". Imagine that. Someone likes configurability more than ease of use. Heh. never would've guessed

    What bothered me most was knowing that I was doing it the Right Way (tm) but the configurator conspiracy was undoing it every time. Once I read the manual pages for "hostname" on every Unix system I could. The results were pretty much the same. "The current name of the host is stored in /etc/hostname. Editing /etc/hostname, then running the 'hostname' command is a good way to change the name of the host." Except Redhat, which had the same manual pages, except it didn't work.

    And tomorrow, when someone decides it won't be /etc/hostname anymore, but rather /etc/this_is_what_I_call_my_system, I'll be able to find a manual page for that. But we'll be working in reverse to hack up linuxconf to support the new standard and the old standard because some people are still running the old standard.

    Hm. Makes "/bin/vi" look more and more like a universal configuration tool, doesn't it?

  • The comment was good natured... I mean, installing NT on my workstation was worth it, but it took longer than four minutes.
  • Should be www, not wwww....
  • Clever people buy UPS anyway.

  • Unnecessary flame-bait in Slashdot stories (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why is it necessary to take shots at NT for no good reason? It's very immature. You know how yahoo has a special site for kids? Maybe Slashdot should look into doing something like this...
  • The question is how usefull is a 4 minute install of any OS. Name 50 usefull things. I have a 44X SCS cdrom connected to a dual PIII 500Mhz box and RH Linux takes at least 15-20 minutes to install. That's installing enough for it to be usefull.
  • The 4-minute install time is, of course, valid only for people so experienced, they could do it in their sleep. What really counts is the install time for clueless novices, or slightly clueful novices. That is the true measure of ease-of-install.

    Joe

  • NT reinstall times. (Score:5)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Monday August 16, 1999 @02:51AM (#1745420) Homepage
    See how long it takes for the NT people to reinstall. *grin*
    Less time than you'd think. I admin NT for a living and we have a super quick method of getting NT onto any system.

    1. Chalk out a inverse pentagram inside a circle on the floor.
    2. Place a lit candle at each point of the pentagram.
    3. Place the computer in question in the center of the pentagram with the case off.
    4. Chant "Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin." while sprinkling the blood of a freshly slain rooster on the motherboard.

    This works in under 5 minutes for intel hardware. I once managed to get NT onto a VAX 780 this way as well, but it took a few hours.

    --Shoeboy

  • NT 5 (Score:4)

    by CmdData ( 68013 ) on Monday August 16, 1999 @02:51AM (#1745421) Homepage
    We just got a copy of NT 5 server edition and it rocks. We loaded several applications on it and then we did a lot of things to corrupt over 85% of the system and application files and the system did what is called self-repairing. The application binaries were repaired from the corrupted state. We used HEX editors to screw up binaries all over the system and as soon as we would screw on up the system would detect the screwed up file/binary and it would repair it. That is awesome. Can't beat that.

  • restoring NT? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Pulling a disk image (made with dd) of an nfs server with dd on a 100mbit network restores NT in a jiffie !

  • Addendum (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Monday August 16, 1999 @02:53AM (#1745423) Homepage
    To install service pack 5 the correct deity is Shub Niggurath, Yog Sothoth only provides the NT 4 golden bits.
    --Shoeboy
  • Hmm. 31% of the internet's webservers run linux.

    IT world still not taking it seriously?

    Fact is Novell, NT, and HP are all commercial-ware. Maybe when 1 of those servers goes down, your company wants to be able to call HP and get someone in to fix it within 4 hours.

    Face it, while you laugh at linux.. It laughs back at the money you're shelling our for those commercial servers.

    ...
  • This is really bullshit. If your IT managers make decisions based solely on SlashDot comments, then they deserve to run NT. I'm not saying Slashdot comments are insightful, but that basing a business decision on a bunch of childish posts is just as stupid as the posts themselves.
    (hint: download or purchase a distribution of the OS, install it, run some apps, make a judgement for yourself).
  • This isn't your usual license flame, but a serious question. I'm in the process of building a CD with a live version of RH on it, munging the RH installer to set up various things. If their system can recognize all this hardware and set things up, it would be a great help to build a system you could boot off CD and try Linux. (rw storage is handled by a loopback filesystem on the dos drive.)

    But I can't use their code unless they have a free license....
  • What is your stock ticker symbol so I can short it? Seriously, if your IT management makes their decisions based on postings on an advocacy site such as Slashdot instead of doing a serious analysis of the actual products, then they are probably making a lot of other stupid decisions.

    There is valuable information to be found in online forums, but anyone who is a veteran of the computer world should know that the signal to noise ratio in most online forums is not what we'd like.

    If you think that 'people with 12 year old minds' are the most visible Linux advocates then you just aren't looking very hard, and probably not at Microsoft either. They've certainly got their share of the juvenile trolls. Unfortunately, what they also seem to be plagued with are the advocates that obviously have a vested interest in Microsoft (I.E., paid off in one way or another).

    Juvenile trolls will probably grow up some day, while the people whose allegiance can be bought will eventually move on to other pastures.

  • "it's not a problem with .rpm files that you describe. It's a problem with the software."

    That's an other reason why Debian is better,
    because the Debian guys package the software. And not the maker of the software. They know much better, what works on a Debian system, then any software maker in the world.

    just my 2ct.

  • On disregard (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is very unfortunate there are some companies who may benefit from the use of a product, but instead choose to ignore it not based on any possible weaknesses of said product but merely because a vocal few of the people who use the product have poor social skills.
  • you mean from boot to reboot? because installing 450megs on my dual PIII-450 with 40x scsi cdrom takes abouts 2-3 minutes.

    ---
  • I am a bit confused about this product. It seems that something that is as important as the installer should be Free Software so I could modify and adapt it to new hardware/software combinations. But I couldn't find any hint of the source.
  • That's because you're on windows.
    Try reading it from a Linux machine and you'll see the question marks.
    It's because of the non-standard characters that Microsoft uses.

    I'm guessing the origional post wasn't written by hand. It was written in word, or frontpage, and pasted into the text box.
  • This sounds like another case when one will end up pulling his hair out trying to figure out what the hell is going on behind his back.
    It might be good idea but MS better document this behaviour extensively or it will end up as another registry-style mystery.

    But, as I said, it might be good idea after all.
  • O, I forgot. it would also be cool to adapt it so it can also use Debian deb packages.
  • If you're viewing this through an MS operating system all will appear well.

    Basically, MS has two different characters for an apostrophie (sp?) one of them is the standard character by for some reason MS also uses another one which isn't displayed properly on non MS platforms.
    --
  • Microsoft brings this crap upon themselves. It's so typical: they invent "solutions" like auto-repair, hype it up, but fail to attack the underlying problem itself. Any respectable hacker knows user applications should NEVER go around modifying critical system libraries. I imagine MS thought they were clever when this whole thing started (hey, we can change our system libraries at will to outdo our competition!), and I'm glad to see it come back and bite them in the ass.

    In my eyes, this is the exact reason they deserve to be split up. They take advantage of this all the time- think Corel gets to rewrite pieces of Windows to make its office apps work better? Die, MS, die. :)
  • Simple: Slashdot is "news for nerds, stuff that matters". If someone posts saying "linux can install in 4mins" someone is bound to make a *comparison* between that and another OS - given M$loth are a bit big, they're the obvious comparison.

    ~Tim
    --
  • See this morning's (Monday's) FoxTrot comic strip (the website is at http://www.foxtrot.com/, but it's a week behind the newspapers).
  • So we have ~40 comments on how quick you can install something in. How about the longest install time of a remotely modern setup?

    (I'll kick the game off: 3hrs for a Debian installation, including byte-compiling emacs19 and emacs20 modules!)
    ~Tim
    --
  • Give BeOS a shot at installing, if I remember right, it takes about 15 minutes as well, including hardware detection/configuration. Lets see ANY MS product do that.
  • Are there any screenshots of the WholeLinux installer in action? The only screenshot [wholelinux.com] I can find is after the install is finished (with KDE running, etc)...

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Go here...

    http://www.news-observer.com/fun/

    ...and follow the Foxtrot link for today's comic...

    Very amusing, Cow...that just went up on my wall...

  • :/ (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was going to make a post about length of installation comparisons between Netware, NT and Linux, but obviously the conversation has gone slightly off the track. I run NT at work and at home. I don't laugh at Linux...I have a rh-mandrake box sitting next to my NT workstation at home. Both boxes run great. Neither crash.
    I do laugh at the social ingrates who so visibly post here. NT is no joke and it's not going away. Neither is linux. Yet posters here just love to mock NT inside and out. Why? Why isn't there an NT website dedicated to NT news with a messageboard with deranged 14 year old NT advocates? Why, oh why? I haven't met an NT administrator who calls Linux "gay ass shit" or Slashdot "pure FUD". I'm not saying everyone here posts content like that, but it's a large, visible percentage. Those types of remarks about NT have been in several posts I've read just today.
    I read Slashdot frequently and was starting to post a lot. I was even going to start an account...dangerous for an advocate of NT *AND* Linux (and Netware! and FreeBSD! gasp!) After reading comments like this day-in and day-out, I'm done. I'm not going to set up an account, I'm not going to read posts here, I'm not going to even read the news here anymore. I'm tired of seeing fools make idiotic posts, and I'm tired of seeing articulate, intelligent people act immature on a routine basis.
    Maybe I'm wrong. I'm still entitled to my opinion. But not here. My posts are flamebait simply because they don't conform.
    See ya Slashdot.
  • As I understand it (not having used Debian since the pre-apt days), apt is just a front end that sits on top of dpkg, much the same way as dselect used to do. There's no reason you couldn't have the same or a very similar front end running on top on RPM. dselect was one of the few reasons I stuck with Debian for so long. But in the end, I just found Red Hat easier to work with. Plus it was nice to have a single distribution on all my platforms (I understand Debian may now have a Sparc version available, but they didn't at the time).
  • I think this is to provide left and right double quotes, left and right single quotes and a distinct apostrophe. Anyone know why ascii doesn't have two types of double quotes, while it does have two types of single quotes?
  • I spent Friday and Saturday trying to install OpenLinux2.2 (with Lizard) on two different machines. The first one installed fairly quickly, walked me through the setup, and got me into the X86Setup where it promptly failed to connect to the X11 server. I had been pleased with the install up to this point, but from there it took me about four hours to get a display larger than 320x204! Finally I had to be satisfied with 640x480x4 because apparently the driver support for the S3Trio3D is not yet complete. Ugh. My second install attempt was even more irritating. My first obstacle was that Caldera's setup program apparently launches some 16-bit app that barfed under Windows98 when launched from the CD. After copying each directory under the Winsetup folder by hand to a directory on my harddrive (since Windows kept bailing with a 'autoexec.bat already exists' error) I was able to run the setup program, however every time I installed the Wininstall utilities to my C:\, they wouldn't launch correctly because Win98 couldn't find the correct path. FINALLY I was able to get the Windows* side of things working correctly to be able to boot the Linux CD. The kernel loaded fine, but since I was using a SiS570 graphics card which can't even handle the VGA16 X11 driver, I wasn't able to see the Lizard setup screen. Gah... Finally, probably six hours after I started, I was able to get Linux to install with LISA. I've left out the pain in the ass of LILO (my NT machine (the first box) won't boot correctly now since the Caldera linux install does that very last, and I had to reboot before finishing configuring), and the pains of setting up the Linux partitions (Linux fdisk is more adequate for the task than is the Caldera edition of Partition Magic). Easier to install? Parts of it are, but none of you should fool yourself into thinking that it's easier than Windows. Windows is clunky, but it was designed so that even a newbie could install it under most circumstances. *Yes, I know Windows is an ugly unreliable OS and could be blamed for some of my install problems, however a well written installer should take those potential problems into consideration and work around them. After all, isn't Linux about ingenuity?
  • They used that where I was working too... My question is, why can't you make and write an image with dd, and make that one floppy a free linux boot disk? I don't see what ghost does that's so special...
  • Seems like it usually takes me about 1/2 hour to pick what I want installed and 15 minutes for the machine to install it. Now that I have a larger HD, I just install everything.

    If you want an ultra fast Linux install, what about the following:

    1) boot from CD
    2) format and partition the HD
    3) create symlinks on the HD to a live image on the CD
    4) use a copy-on write scheme to turn the symlink into a real file if somebody trys to write to it
    5) The system can now be used
    6) continue copying the filesystem from the CD "in the background"

    Even though the complete install might take 5-10 minutes, the time between booting from the CD and logging in could be on the order of a minute or so.
  • some things are too horrible to be unleashed upon the mortal world.

    Heh. Herbert West, MCSE, coming soon to a Windows Media Player near you. :-)

  • Want to screw up Win2000(NT5)?
    It's pretty easy.

    Step 1: Install the Logitech mouse driver.
    Step 2: Reboot.

    It's pretty cool, you lose your mouse AND keyboard. And no, it doesn't fix the problem for you, even if you run the repair functions.

  • Is this distribution anything more than a vanilla RH 6.0 distro with an altered installer script? From what I can gather on their site, it seems as if this distro can be built by anyone with 1/2 a clue and a few hours of time.

    Kinda makes you wonder what will happen to the RedHat stock once the techno-idiots realize that RedHat is essentially selling air. Ok, perhaps compressed air is a better analogy... ;-)

    Since I manage a lot of linux servers myself, I take things a step further. I customize an install on one machine and then tar the whole thing up from the root directory.

    Installation on multiple machines is then as simple as popping in a boot floppy or custom cdrom, making the filesystems, untarring the image, setting the network parms, running LILO, and rebooting. Viola! Totally customized machines cranked out at six (or more) per hour.

    -p.

  • I prefer to summon Ghost. Norton Ghost to be precise, it's saved us buttloads of time.
  • I'm glad they could do it in four minutes... I've been struggleing for about 4 days with my Mandrake6.0 install. The damned thing won't recognize my video card (it's an apollo 7400 8MB, with the intel740 chipset, but Linux treats it like a standard VGA). If I pick an SVGA server I get 320*204 resolution! That's not even enough to read the help files in GNOME! AAARrrrrrrrrrrgh!

    Would any of you kindly *nix-ubber-geeks know where to direct me to find help for this? The I'd love to be able to get the rest of my 'linux' stuff working in 4 minutes!

    P.S. the manufacturer of the video card left no contact info.
  • It took me about three to three and a half hours to do an ftp install of RedHat 6.0 with my cable modem.
  • OK, I've been a Unix swe for 15 years now, but just getting into Linux. So last Friday, armed with a 6" stack of CDs from the expo, I finally decide to install Linux.

    Being a novice at Linux (but not Unix), I decide to try out WholeLinux first of course. I wasn't concerned about install time, but ease of install. Pop in the CD, pop in the diskette, reboot, answer a couple of legalese prompts... A few minutes pass and no more questions are asked, and... Unbelievable! Everything is up and running! I've just installed Linux with very little stress! Yes, but... Where's apache? How do I configure the box for the LAN? And why the hell can I only see a 1/4 of the screen at a time and I have to constantly scroll up-down and left-right? Hmm, I have to configure a ton of things before I can do anything else... But how?!?! This might take hours to setup the way I want it...

    So I give up and try Mandrake... Pop in the CD, reboot, ahh a series of good old questions on what I want to do... Choose partitions, network setup, packages to install... Many questions and 20 minutes later, my Linux is finally installed. That's a lot more effort than WholeLinux! was it worth it? YES! My Linux is up now already configured with a web server and everything else that I need. I can start enjoying Linux right away and get to know the intricacies of the system later.

    WholeLinux might be a good idea for doing a vanilla install on many identical workstations, but it's not for a Linux newbie who wants to get a system up and running with little effort... Mandrake rocks, I won't recommend it to a Win or Mac user, but the end-result of the install is a much more usable system. For real *nix newbies, the Mandrake installer should at least support mouse input and provide more on-screen explanation...

    This is all my humble opinion of course, YMMV. Now, is there an extended FAQ somewhere for Linux newbies?
  • You could get an account and set up your preferences so that you only see those posts with high scores. There are likely (though not guaranteed) to be not quite as lame as the posts to which you are referring.

    I think lame posts are inevitable in forums where normal people get to post. You can always avoid them by not visiting public forums, but that seems kind of like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Then again I have a long history with and great fondness for BBS's, which probably skews my opinions.

  • The explanation I heard of this (from my boss after going out to Redmond for a Win2K dog-and-pony show) sounded like the new Windows versions will a) keep a backup copy of all the system DLLs and b) watch those system files and replace them from the backup copies if they are changed. Yes, as I heard it, that includes if the new version works perfectly.

    But that's OK, because Windows will now also refuse to let anyone else install software. All installations will have to go through the MS Install Wizard, which will presumably know enough to update the backup system files when installing a new version. (One more obstacle to just copying software onto a machine instead of using a bloated install program...)

    But, hey, I could be wrong. This is just what I thought I heard my boss say he was told by marketing drones a couple months back. Even if it's all correct, the drones could've been speaking inaccurately or MS could've reworked these "features" since then. I haven't used Win2K or NT5 and, if there is anything I can do about it, I never will.

  • There's an article about NT5's new filesystem in Dr.Dobbs this month (or maybe last month). The filesystem keeps a database of every change that is made to the filesystem, so it know exactly what happened where. This could be really nice for fighting viruses and trojan horse DLLs that are becoming more common.
  • I have a new logitech trackball for my NT4 system and whenever you use the wheel, it makes the system sluggish and soon unresponsive.
  • All installations will have to go through the MS Install Wizard...

    Will this work as well as MS's Hardware Installation Wizard?

    *shudders*

    Isn't that the one where the best strategy is to avoid any button marked "recommended"?


    --
  • Sorry to hear of your trouble. I've tried COL a while back and my impression was "definitely not finished." It felt very alpha to me. Not something I would install on a server *or* a desktop.

    If you want easiest to install, with a similar set of software (minus office packages) as COL, Slackware is the one. It's also very solid and easy to install over NFS, just the slakware directory is needed.

    I use SuSE myself, because of the large amount of actual working packages, and the incredibly easy YAST. SaX is very nice too, unless you have a Mach64.

    I'm one of those that never have Linux install troubles but *ALWAYS* have trouble with MS stuff. The other day something messed up in my install I use monthly at most. A registry problem which required me to reinstall (why, oh why, is there no console regedit?!). It crashed during installation no less than 6 times. With each reboot it would get a little farther. Finally mostly installed, it would crash just as the "discover win98" screen came up. I suspected maybe the soundcard (TB Montego) so I got into safe mode and removed the driver (mostly. It, for some reason, does not allow you to remove all of the entries in control panel). Still crashed at the same place.

    So I delete the windows directory and reinstall again! This time it didn't crash, but I had NIC trouble.

    I have two NICs in this machine. An original Novell NE2000 and an Allied Telesyn AT1500t. It only detected the NE2000, and guessed the wrong base port and IRQ. Of course the NIC card I needed at the time was the AT1500t. So I removed the NE2000 driver (for some reason default TCP/IP (gateway) won't work on a card installed second) and installed the AT1500t driver, which windows only took default (wrong!) values and didn't allow me to force them until after I rebooted (I also got the correct values from dmesg in linux, as both of my cards settings were detected correctly). Ok, the card working, I had to set up the TCP/IP settings. Then, after reboot, no internet... Ok, try IE (which I have only ever used to download Netscape), it dumps me into the "internet connection wizard" which asks me redundant questions until it actually allows IE to run. Still, no internet.

    By this time I forgot why I was trying to get windows to work in the first place. I booted back into Linux and haven't rebooted since.

    So, neither is really "easier" than the other. It depends on the person, the hardware, and maybe the phase of the moon.

    For me, Linux was always easier to install and maintain. I have friends who had more (or as much) trouble installing Linux than Windows.

    My advice. Try everything at least twice. That's what I do. I tried Red Hat twice, Caldera twice, Debian twice, FreeBSD once (I'll try again, soon), and Mandrake once (I'm still using it for a print server). Everything else was Slackware and SuSE, which are my favourites.
  • I can't go to Linux world for my free CD.... anyone care to pick me up one and mail it to me?


    Pleeeeaase???


    Ok, well thanks :)


    Chris Carlin,

    volkris@cryogen.com

  • I was at RedHat last week for training. A Custom install with no changes on a 6GB drive took 6 minutes, not counting formatting and whatnot.

    If you used kickstart, you could probably do it within 8-10 minutes.
  • when you think that on a fast cdrom ... NT is still takes a long time to install... add that up over the months... and you have 'alot of time' that is pretty well a waste...a fast OS install is
    a dream come true... the point is to be productive... unless of course you read dilbert + productivity... then it's ok to laugh and not be productive... so as engineer you

    1. take 1.5 hrs to install NT
    2. spend your time pressing 'next' alot
    3. wondering why everyone thinks NT is great and
    thinking 'my this NT install sucks...'
    4. laughing while you get paid pressing 'next alot'
    5. next is a word you can't stand seeing and no this is not disneyland where 2hrs is actually
    1hr...

    my spew...
    ik
  • We don't take shots at NT, we just point out the obvious flaws.

    ~~Kev
  • It's probably because many people have to deal with NT that would rather not have to, and have come to resent the shoddy crap that emanates from Redmond.

    The reason I'm awake right now is because a flaky NT server stopped responding, and I got paged at 5:20 AM. Rrrr.

    Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, NT *does* suck?

    P.S. Thanks to VNC [att.com], I didn't have to drive downtown, and sit at the console to recover. Why didn't Microsoft think of that?

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

  • Nether the less (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Useful or not, 4 minutes is pretty impressive. It took me 5 minutes to get the cd out of the plastic wrapper. Maybe we could make this an Olympic sport? The 100m Linux Installation. Then again, maybe not.
  • Speaking of having a school situation.. it _could_ be useful. A "barebones" install could be great in a teaching situation, and if something stuffs up, a four-minute downtime and voila, back up and running. I've taught Introductory Linux in my old college (year 11, 12 - im Australian) and how I would have loved to have had a box for each of the students; maybe this will pave the way for making this viable. If it is true, and classes like this become more of a commonality, then isn't that good for the Linux community? If it does work, it's bloody great opportunity to get Linux into the spotlight and demonstrate it for what it is: powerful, functional while still being as minimalistic as you please, and not as daunting as people think it is.

    Vive la Linux.
  • Yeah! How dare they! Imagine using humor to lighten the atmosphere... and of course, we don't need it!
  • Mmmm, a trekkie NT advocate. Not that OS advocacy right here on slashdot is some sort of induatrial flamebait or anything.
  • Ok it seems that /. has started a wave of bad information. No I don't mean it bad. I mean it horrible. In three days we get a desinformation, a hoax and now a bit of yellow advertisement. To be precise:

    Life is 2.7
    US Government considering charging E-mail
    Linux can be installed in 4 minutes

    I make part of my living by installing Linux boxes. Specially for users who wouldn't never had dreamed to work on it. And I can say one thing for sure. Presently no average desktop workstation/server can be installed with such speed. If you do it you'll just get the same M$ LemonSoft out-of-the-box or even worse.

    The reality is that Linux is hard to configure. At least to create an environment for a typical M$ user I and several people take A MONTH to do it.

    Looks strange? Under my experince no. An advanced *NIX user or an experienced computer user may have the luck to get such things in a few hours. For some maybe even an hour is enough. On servers things may run up to a week or two. However the ill-doomed average user is unable to work on such stations.

    For such users the installation, configuration, tuning can turn into a long wait. However I can say that after such headaches they can use such stations. It may take a month for them to get acquainted with several features that are natural to *NIX. At first time they usually hang in the usual conditionalisms brought from M$ world. But in a few monthes they start making a few steps into a more *NIX world. But I can say they Linux is a painful thing to learn. A few thousands users I forced into *NIX can testify for it.

    Anyway I can say one thing for sure. It takes two weeks for them to forget the "back to M$!" mood. And in a month or two the vast majority becomes Linux partisan. Yes there are some conservators that wish that things would go back. But not even they criticize the move. Most argumentation goes around "M$ still rules" and the dangers of running out of it.

    There is one thing I would like to state clear. No average user, today, can make a good Linux station out of the box. Only a good expert can do such thing now. And it is not an easy work. One have to take into account a lot of things:

    User psychology

    Level of computer knowledge

    Linking console and X applications into a more friendly environment, while preserving the traditional independence they possess

    Constraints based on hardware and work environment

    Bug-fixing, feature-fixing.

    Doing all this and keeping Linux stable and high-preforming

    Now anyone can do this in 4 minutes? I take a month doing this on each station release. Truly, after it, I rarely take more than 4 minutes hanging on each problem that comes up.
  • You continue to mock the perfectly legitimate practice of maintainence by demon-summoning. This displeases my master greatly.

    -ElJefe
    Lord of Evil and Consumer of Processor Time
  • Sysadmins do. From what I can gather from their web page, the point is customised installs based on any distribution you like, using a predefined set of packages.

    What sucks for them is that Slackware already has that facility. Caldera seems to have it as well. I think all distribs should have that feature.
  • Then I suppose you are in favor of ditching ext2fs? It's crappy software that corrupts files during a power outage.
  • whats obvious install time? i just installed redhat 6.0 on my dual p3 500 and it took over two hours to get it up and running, and another two to get it working properly. Every OS has flaws, deal with it. there are more important things in life than bitching about which OS is worse/better etc. Linuxs worse problem is the same as the amiga and mac had too many zealots going on about how wonderful it all is, instead of injecting reality and making plausible cases for and against, this isn`t hollywood overhype kills.
  • Wait for your next power outage, and see how nicely ext2fs handles *that*.
  • Of course. This is "News for teenage nerds. Linux stuff that matters." after all.
  • One word: UPS.
  • Every OS does have its flaws, but the fact that MS has billions of $'s pumped into its R&D, and still produces shoddy software full of fluff, spam, and "features" is evidence that their flaws are significantly larger than any Linux has or will have. The mere fact that the Linux community reponds to bug fixes in a matter of hours shows us a commitment to stability and integrity. Install time is one flaw for Linux/NT given certain circumstances. Lack of a good driver base for Linux is a huge flaw. Would I consider that a cheapshot at Linux if you were to point that out as a flaw? No I wouldn't, because I know a year from now the hardware support for linux will be significantly larger because of the recognition of hardware companies to devote resources to Linux support. Now as for NT installing slowly, or Linux installing slowly, I wouldn't call those cheap shots. As for why it took you 2 hours to install RH 6 is beyond me. Installing over a network? Maybe it was slow. Installing on a slow harddrive maybe? Or maybe you've got a slow cdrom, or have selected _every_single_package_ to install. I am however blatently telling you that you are fibbing if you are suggesting that RH 6 takes 2 hours to install. You either don't know what you're doing, are extremely slow with what you do, or you hardware is limiting the install speed.

  • Re:NT 5 (Score:3)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdotNO@SPAMhackish.org> on Monday August 16, 1999 @11:26AM (#1745511)
    You're buying people free UPS's now?

    If not, that's not a solution. I'm not going to spend $50 because ext2fs sucks.
  • "I just want to click on a clearly marketed button called "Do" or "Start" or whatever."

    You are M$'s dream customer.

  • Nt install time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We use a product called Ghost, to image our boxes, off of one floppy, and 1 cdrom, it takes 7-10 minutes on our 166 workstations, but 4-6 minutes on the servers. - A/C
  • That explains the wax in the NT computer room. Plus, I was wondering why the NT team had included a couple of roosters in the latest quote for a new NT server.


    -- Keith Moore
  • Of course, anyone bored enough could write a simple script which used rpm -Va and rpm to do the same on a RedHat system. Of course I generally prefer to avoid corrupted files, then creating more bloat to make up for crappy software.


    -- Keith Moore

  • Re: Necessary accuracy in Slashdot stories (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Monday August 16, 1999 @03:18AM (#1745516) Homepage
    P.S. Thanks to VNC, I didn't have to drive downtown, and sit at the console to recover. Why didn't Microsoft think of that?
    They did, It's called SMS. I'm not going to tell you the summoning ritual to get that onto your server though, some things are too horrible to be unleashed upon the mortal world.
    --Shoeboy
  • Um.. so what? I can install FreeBSD in about 5, Debian about 2... nt in about 10.. and if you say multiple installs at the same time, all of these can be net installed which is almost just as fast on a speedy network. OS/2..well.. os/2 always took me a good while ;>

    And for configuring software? Sendmai lusually comes presetup to a degree. Do I need to add a feature? Use m4 to recompile the cf file

  • I still find it odd that some people consider the FSF/UNIX market to be "behind the times", when MS is the one playing catchup (with the exception of Bob & the paperclip, which we really just don't like).

    Automatic detection of corrupted files:

    rpm -Va (MD5 Checksum checks + others).

    Disk image creation/restore:

    dd + gzip.

    Granted, Ghost does have a few other advantages (ability to restore to different sized disk). However, the basic idea is very old in the UNIX market, and is relatively new in the PC market.

    I remember finding a piece of shareware that let you *gasp* make images of a floppy onto your harddrive! Hmm, dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img.


    -- Keith Moore
  • Quite. Some of us do have to put up with NT, or even *shudder* Win9xx "workstations". That's why we hate them so, probably a lot more than those rare souls who have never had the misfortune to have to maintain the wretched things.

    I brought linux into this company to reduce downtime, and so far, it's beating NT hands down on both price and performance. I suppose the fact that these are real-world situations rather than hugely contrived "benchmarks" helps.

    I have to say that on the whole, NT is also rather boring to run.. there's very little inherent hack value in it. Everything seems to be designed around buying yet another suboptimal bit of M$ ransomware, to make it do things that it should have done right out of the box- and what's more, to make a really shoddy job of it (thereby adding insult to injury).

    Ah well, we can all argue about this until we're blue in the face, but personally, I'm voting with my IT budget..
  • Well... if you know what you are doing, I mean really know, you can actually get it working. Thats if you know the quirks and what not. How well it performs... I do not know. It's like sendmail.cf. If you wanna do anything, you have to know the language. Well.. lets forget that M4 is around ;>
  • BTW, how much was that site-license?

    We use it here too, and it's a nice product, but it's still solving several problems with NT that shouldn't exist. We use it to recover a desktop system quickly after it gets hosed-up. Just a standard Ghost image for each department. I'm not sure what I'll do if I lose a Linux Workstation, I haven't had to come up with a solution yet.

    (I was being sarcastic, I do have a plan, just haven't had to use it).


    -- Keith Moore

  • I mean ... really. There are really only two things you need to know here, both of which you more or less HAVE to know in the first place to be worth much as an admin:

    1. what /dev file goes with what drive
    2. dd at its simplest is just dd if= input file of= output file

    Once you know these two things (the first of which, especially, you ought to know), it is trivial to make the following inferences:

    Gee... I want to get an image of the disk /dev/hdb4 in file blah...

    dd if=/dev/hdb4 of=blah

    Okay, now I want to write that image to /dev/hdc3...

    dd if=blah of=/dev/hdc3

    Hell, if that's too complicated for you, you can just use cp to and from the raw device.

    Either of those commands is massively faster than starting up a shell script or interactive program and answering questions. So much for your precious time savings.

    You, sir, should never, ever be a system administrator. Your unwillingness to learn or even think will ultimately mean catastrophe for your employer. I'm serious about that. You will get yourself in SERIOUS trouble if you don't really understand what you're doing.

    Quite literallly 90% of the serious problems you encounter as an administrator will not be the sort that any programmer could ever have taken into account for you and written a friendly "OK" button to fix.


    ---
  • When I installed RedHat 4.2 it took me 2 weeks to figure out how to change my hostname.

    Okay, yes, laugh at the fool. At the time, my video card was incapable of running X so I had no way to use the "configurator". So I edited /etc/hostname like you do under any reasonable unix like thing. That didn't work, when I rebooted it automagically reset /etc/hostname to "localhost.localdomain". So I found the place in the rc directories where it was being changed. And I removed the line where it was blowing away my changes. That still didn't work. There were a few other bits doing similar things, like removing the changes I had made to the startup scripts!

    After nearly endless frustration, I started X in 320x200 (thats how much the Diamond Stealth 32 sucked in those days) and ran the configurator, thinking to myself the whole time how odd it was that I had to use a GUI, complete with checkboxes and menus and pop-up windows asking "are you sure" when the lack of those little gui (in)conveniences was just exactly what made me prefer other Linuxen to Windows. Oh, and Fvwm-95 didn't help much either.

    Yup. Two weeks. And of course, setting the hostname should be considered part of an installation. And that says nothing of how long it took me to figure out why /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin had been left out of root's path.

    Nowadays I use Debian, which usually takes around 5-6 hours to download everything over ftp. Off the CD, picking packages alone typically takes me 30 minutes. (after all, there are 2500+ to choose from)

  • "I'm not saying it isn't useful, I'm not saying it isn't a solid OS. It is. The problem is the perception of it."

    So you're not using it out of spite? That seems incredibly, mind-bogglingly fucking retarded. "Oh, it works really well but the skript k1ddi3z use it too so we might get shunned by our peers." In reality, your peers are probably all laughing at you. I know I am.

    You can continue to pay $30 per phonecall to Microsoft though. Have fun!

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • It?s like a bully that goes around making fun of everyone; they end up making a lot of enemies. It wouldn?t be much of a problem if slashdot was a small site but it is not.
    Say, do you know how to type that without the question marks on your operating system?
  • Hmmmm.. I thought that Slashdot was the special linux site for kids. ;) This is a linux-centric site that also has other news. I like it that way and it seems that I have millions of friends that like it too. Please do go and start your own Yahoo chat group for people that think NT dosen't deserve ridicule and say hello to all the MS employees while you are there.

    I just had a lovely 4 hours sleep after dealing with NT4ws barfing repeatedly with a PFN_List_Corrupt bsod. According to MS, this is "Caused by corrupting I/O driver structures. If the kernel debugger is available, get a stack trace". The cause? A corrupted dos filesystem from a previous crash a few minutes before. NT couldn't fix the filesystem errors it caused and trashed because a filesystem was corrupt. The result? More corruption on another dos filesystem. When you claim that people "take shots at NT for no good reason", remember that many of them are made by people with years of experience with NT that are disgusted with the flaws. My problems are with a fresh installation of NT4ws with sp5. My Linux system is running nicely and dosen't do random things that cost me time and hair for no reason. I have been running NT since 3.51 which is longer than I've been using Linux. I know which I prefer and why I prefer it.

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