On 6/12/99 Evan Moore wrote:
Ever look at the macos installer? it has one of the nicest installers of all. for a newbie it is nicer than ncurses or xwin based linux installers and much nicer than a windows based installer. You can get full blown 24 bit color at full resolution with their installer. the UI is nice and easy to use etc etc... easiest OS of all to install. Wow i sound like a mac fan, i'm not, but just thinking that if linux had an installer that was as easy to use as the mac it would then be a lot closer to being "the OS for tha masses". It may be interesting to see what the linux community can bring over from the darwin project (Apple open source project).
The only reason the macos installer is able to get nice color and resolution is because it only runs on proprietary hardware that apple has all the specs for, so they can 100% accurately detect what chipset is installed and use it properly, in the world of hardware choice where you can get the video hardware you prefer that is not possible and we must attempt to get it initialized to the sanest state possible, and that usually means lowest common denominator or a much lower success rate. now if there were a standard that ALL manufacturers complied to for accurately detecting exactly what video chipset we were dealing with, and of course they openly supplied specs so XFree can be made to work well this would not be such a problem....
actually I think the redhat installer is far better then the macos one, the macos installer does no dependency checking whatsoever and has complete spaghetti mess for packages. don't choose something another software needs? whoops it just fails obscurely. using the default selection usually results in all kinds of crap being installed that you don't want (ahem MSIE) and of course once something is installed its a mess to remove with files scattered all over the place randomly, just like win95/98/NT... Redhat's on the other hand has iirc 3 stages of complexity, first where you just choose a profile, KDE workstation, GNOME workstation, server, and custom, custom has several groups, and if that is not enough you can go to full package by package from the various groups similar to dselect. (though probably less confusing to a new user, but less powerful then deselect.) redhat's installer is not as nice about resolving dependencies as dselect is by any means. (though dselect could use some work too in that area)
actually i think the OpenBSD installer was the easiest i have come across in my wondering of unix and GNU/Linux. after you get past the (somewhat wierd) fdisk and disklabel part you have a set of 8 groups to install. very quick. though you have to go get the ports tree to really get any useful software at that point...
as for darwin, i really do not see much of anything interesting there, its basically a bunch of *BSD utilities with a NeXT thing or two thrown in, hardly a useful system without all the proprietary stuff you have to buy from apple, like say a GUI (for apple hardware only). we already have a full complete useful OS called GNU/Linux which is truly free. personally I would rather work on that then give stuff to apple for proprietarization. just IMO of course.
flames to /dev/null or if you insist at least offlist :-) Ethan
