[Rule-list] Older *and* rarer?

[Peter Flynn]

This is a wonderful project. I've been griping at RH for a couple of
years (well, since 6.0 knocked out compatibility with so much older kit)
to keep support for older stuff they know works. In my job (academic
support in a university computer centre) I come across lots of students
with hand-me-down or scrounged boxes they've pieced together, and Linux
has been an obvious choice. Suddenly finding half the kit was no longer
supported *merely because it was old* was  major blow.

We joined the RH University Program, wanting to make RH the standard
distro, and adding stuff like presets to local ISP dialups, software
from our local LUG, and stuff everyone "ought to have" :-) but which
isn't part of the normal distribution (xv, dog, curl, wget, ra,
tkpaint...). But we had to suspend work when we found 6.* didn't
support half the stuff 5.2 did. I tried to contact RH's tech people
but the line was that they didn't support older hardware "because it
interfered with the installation routine for American users".

A second problem in Europe is that a lot of hardware is labelled
differently from how it is in the USA. I have no idea why manufacturers
feel they have to do this: I think it's some arcane form of
market-protection. Not just brand names but model names and numbers can
be different, and even serial number can come from batches that even the
manufacturer is unaware they use. So when a user tries to look up
datasheets there is a major mismatch problem. If we can get support from
more European users maybe we can start to build compatibility indexes.

Two related difficulties are (a) very common but untraceable Far Eastern
kit, and (b) very common but inexplicably unsupported well-known stuff.
For (a), over the years, systems integrators, VARs, and OEMs import
batches of parts because they're going cheap. Often they work fine but
the doc is not present. They are frequently perfectly usable once you
find out the right settings (eg sound cards, screens, etc).
For (b), I had given up puzzling why setups for XFree concentrated on
rare and little-used hardware and neglected the most common and popular
until I realised it was a variant of the European problem above. Stuff
that is common in the USA is often unheard-of here, and vice versa (I
had to drop the idea of running up RH on my Alphas when I found the most
popular graphics card here simply isnt in the list).

Your installation targets are dead on, especially the languages and the
concept of rigging the setups so they reflect the most commonly-needed
working situation. For the language, I suggest just listing the language
names beside a number: I think it's obvious enough that people type in
the number corresponding to the language, rather than taking up 80x24
real-estate with "Wenn Sie Deutsch sprechen, 6 eingaben" and equiv for
40-50 languages.

For the setups, probably the most frustrating part for the new user is
that there are no icons or menu entries for all the packages requested.
If the user asks for Emacs, there should be a GNU on the screen in KDE
or Gnome when s/he first logs in. If they asked for TeX, there should
be a Konqueror link to CTAN. Etc etc. (I mention these because they are
outstanding examples of how RH got it right: both install faultlessly
and execute right away without any further configuration).

I shall start contacting users for records of their setups on older kit.

///Peter





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