Monday, September 15, 2008

UPDATE --- Major Project Selection

This last Saturday, I had the opportunity to see many Linux instalations taking place at Seneca College's Linux Installfest. Due to the fact that Seneca is well connected with the Fedora Linux distribution community, I had expected to see a lot of Fedora installations.

What I saw was an overall preference for Ubuntu Linux. Most installations seem to be dual boot Ubuntu and Windows Vista systems. I am new to Ubuntu (I use Fedora) but Ihave noticed that Ubuntu is being discussed more than other distributions on forums I follow: techsoup.org for one. I am curious about why this distribution seems to have a wider following than other distros.

train is coming into the station so i have to go.

I plan to mention Wubi eventually...

There is a negative comment/observation below which I will leave in tact to remind me how difficult I think this is.

I'll add a few \ns later:

Wubi is the brainchild of Agostino Russo. From what I understand, Ag or xivulon, had monitored the experiences of people (normal people, not programmers) with regards to attempting to switch from licenced OSes to free systems like Linux. He noticed that people were struggling with the fundamentals like running fdisk and everything todo with partitions. So he automated the process. As he puts it (actually mmy paraphrase), 'in Windows, you click on a windows executable (say wubi-installer.exe) answer a couple of questions then go get yourself a coffee and when you get back it will be done - you reboot and you have a dual-bootsystem. Now that is cool. It should come as no surprise that Linux systems are more and more into the mainstream. It is my belief that Linux distributers must adopt a new approach, a new mindset wwith regards to attracting users. Users should be considered to be customers, clients whatever you want to call them but treat them like they were actually paying customers. I think that the whole Linux distribution system is broken. Because Linux is free, everybody, form software developers to distribution executives expect their users, their customers! to understand things that only system administrators should have to know. The other OSes don't do that - they never have done it. Ask any MS Windows user what she thinks of fdisk and you will get nothing but a funny look - and rightly so because WHO CARES!!! SysAdmins yse, users no. It is the philisophy driving things like Wubi that is will fix the broken Linux distribution model More later.




Looking, but haven't got there yet. After briefly thinking about the 'Wubi - port to Fedora' I have definitely ruled that one out. My thinking is that one needs solid grounding in at least on of those OS to start with - I don't have that.

Thought on it though: Great idea! I think that it is things like Wubi that will enable Windows users to make the leap...

Noticed that somewhere on some forum ut was called 'Linux for cowards'; hey I love it.

Looking at creating 'Windows migration tool' now (on fedorproject site summer of code 2008).
You see I do think migration is a very important topic.

1 comment:

Dr. Vlad said...

There are 2 reason Ubuntu's becoming more popular:
1) It is designed to be very user friendly. Easy to install new programs, change things around, use, etc.
2) It comes with mp3 support by default, and is easier to get proprietary codecs working. Or, is, based off of when I last used Fedora.

-- Slokunshialgo