Re: SEUL: Re: What's the diff to SEUL ? (fwd)

[Rick Jones <rickya@siservices.net>]

George Bonser wrote:
> 
> <sigh>  This might actually be tough. We need a way to queary the card and
> have enough "canned" setups to be able to see what hardware is being used
> or ask the user the brand of the card (not the chipset).  Maybe something
> that parses the output of SuperProbe but even that can be dangerous on
> some cards. We then set up the card with some sane defaults and the user
> can push it to the bleeding edge if they want to. Monitor type is
> important too. Don't want to blow someones horizontal amplifier just
> because we set a bad mode.

100% right.  Using any  probing of my video card would fry it.  I think
a bare SVGA setup ids the best option, VGA to be on the absolute safe
side.

> This is where many distributions try to get too cute.  Look, if an ISP
> will except a default Windows95 dialup without any scripting or input from
> the user, then it will most likely accept a PAP Linux connection.  We just
> put the username and password in the pap-secrets file, set up a sane
> options file with the user supplying a baud rate and I/O port and modem
> setup string and off we go. We just dial up the ISP, wait for CONNECT and
> turn the connection over to PAP.

Not true.  Windows 95 uses PAP in addition to login.  If one fails it
falls back to the other.  If this was done for my ISP there would never
be a connection, not to mention a half-dozen other ISP's I've either
used or consulted for.  It is not hard *at all* to create a good script,
command line or dialogued, for ppp setup.  I don't know why Debian
doesn't have one.

> 
> No need for cute dialup scripts like Red Hat and Slackware.
> 

There's nothing *cute* about it.  It's needed for CI or should I say LI
(Linux Illiterate) users.  I can't count how many people have emailed me
or the Debian list, from Windoze, because they couldn't get ppp up. 
This is a complaint that needs to be eliminated all together, given the
growing interest in the internet and the fact that they are most likely
using Linux because of it's superiority in a networked environment.

A business owner is tired of Windoze freezing up on him and hears Linux
blows it away with more networking ability. (NT for that matter)  He
asks his employee, known by everyone to be a keyboard jockey
(self-proclaimed), if he knows anything about Linux.  "I tried it once,
but couldn't get it to connect to the internet no matter what I did. 
And You know I know computers.  I wouldn't recomend it."  End of story.

Instead of running to the boss upon successfully installing Linux to get
him to make him sysadmin and replace Windoze with Linux, he bad mouths
it because, even though he might be a Windoze guru, he couldn't get
Linux to work, therefore, he isn't at fault for not knowing what he's
doing, the OS sucks.