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Not Ready for General Use
Jun. 21st, 2005 12:00 pmA couple nights ago, when I couldn't get to sleep, I booted up a Knoppix Linux Live CD, which lets you run a Linux environment off of a RAM drive. I played around with it for a couple hours, and discovered that I really like KDE (one of the Linux window managers.) I was, however, amused to find that the things I like it for are precisely the things we always tried to avoid at Microsoft -- it provides a ton of options for everything, all the time. There's a wealth of information and configuration available to the user. As a geek, this is nice -- for most general users, it's an information overload that confuses them.
Well, I decided that since I'll be soon taking a job where some Unix knowledge is required, it would be nice to have a Linux/BSD/other-Unix-like-OS system to play around with and explore. I looked over distribution choices and their advantages and disadvantages. I actually started out with Gentoo, for the simple reason that I don't actually know how a Linux system is architected and put together, and thought this would help me figure that out. Gentoo is a source-only distribution; you have to build the whole thing on your PC.
And you know, it actually did. I know how the filesystem is assembled on boot now, and what the process is for starting up a Linux system. I learned quite a bit from the several hours I spent doing this. However, the problem with a source-only distribution is that it takes a long time to get a usable system, simply because compiling and linking, even on a high-end system, are very time-consuming. I decided I'd come back to this later, and for now just install a binary distro to play around with.
I downloaded an ISO of the Fedora Core install DVD and burned it to a disc. Fedora Core is actually meant to be a Windows-alternative; a full Linux system usable by general home users (in its defense, it makes no claims of being complete yet -- only that this is intended eventually.) Thus, it has a nice graphical install process. Now, since I'm installing a dual-boot system I had to manually partition the drive, and the manual partition interface would not be comprehensible to a non-technical user; on one hand, this isn't the base configuration, but on the other hand, I'd imagine most people installing this on their PC want to dual-boot, so this is a bit of a usability issue. I began the install, and about 10 minutes into it, it failed due to an unspecified error copying from the disc.
I generated an ISO from the disc and checked its SHA1 sum with the one posted on the Fedora Core site; they didn't match, apparently I'd burned a bad disc. So I burned another one (the downloaded image on my hard drive had the correct sum), and once again checked the SHA1 sum -- this time it matched. Thus, I know the disc is perfect -- there's no errors on the disc.
Figuring this was the problem, I retried the install. Four times. Each time it failed in a different location, due to an unspecified error. I've still not managed to get it to install.
Now, this may be a hardware issue -- possibly I'm getting 1-bit errors during the disc read due to a faulty drive or connection. This said, in four years with this drive I've never had a read error on a disc that wasn't either defective or dirty, but it's possible. But even if it is, this points to a very serious usability issue that's very easily fixed -- the installer treats all errors as fatal.
Microsoft OSs, even back to the days of DOS 2.2, do not consider read errors fatal. Instead, they display the classic prompt of "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" While perhaps not completely obvious to general users, this allows recovery from a simple read error -- you can Retry if it was a bad read (the option to Retry would have meant my install would have worked by now; there's nothing wrong with the disc), or Ignore if it's truly an unrecoverable error but you don't care all that much about the particular file it was accessing. Only if you choose the Abort is the error considered fatal and the entire process cancelled.
These are the sorts of issues Linux systems will need to get past in order to be generally accepted -- the problem they have is not Microsoft's market power or the number of applications available for Microsoft software. The problem is simple usability, the sorts of issues that would never make it past the first step of the design phase at Microsoft. At Microsoft, I had to consistently reject good, useful features on the grounds that nontechnical users might not understand them. But open-source projects tend not to have usability engineers; it's like a software product created entirely by devs, with no one else on the team.
Now I'll see if I can find a distribution to play with that doesn't involve copying 4 GB of data off a disc. That or continue compiling Gentoo; at least I was learning quite a bit from that process.
Well, I decided that since I'll be soon taking a job where some Unix knowledge is required, it would be nice to have a Linux/BSD/other-Unix-like-OS system to play around with and explore. I looked over distribution choices and their advantages and disadvantages. I actually started out with Gentoo, for the simple reason that I don't actually know how a Linux system is architected and put together, and thought this would help me figure that out. Gentoo is a source-only distribution; you have to build the whole thing on your PC.
And you know, it actually did. I know how the filesystem is assembled on boot now, and what the process is for starting up a Linux system. I learned quite a bit from the several hours I spent doing this. However, the problem with a source-only distribution is that it takes a long time to get a usable system, simply because compiling and linking, even on a high-end system, are very time-consuming. I decided I'd come back to this later, and for now just install a binary distro to play around with.
I downloaded an ISO of the Fedora Core install DVD and burned it to a disc. Fedora Core is actually meant to be a Windows-alternative; a full Linux system usable by general home users (in its defense, it makes no claims of being complete yet -- only that this is intended eventually.) Thus, it has a nice graphical install process. Now, since I'm installing a dual-boot system I had to manually partition the drive, and the manual partition interface would not be comprehensible to a non-technical user; on one hand, this isn't the base configuration, but on the other hand, I'd imagine most people installing this on their PC want to dual-boot, so this is a bit of a usability issue. I began the install, and about 10 minutes into it, it failed due to an unspecified error copying from the disc.
I generated an ISO from the disc and checked its SHA1 sum with the one posted on the Fedora Core site; they didn't match, apparently I'd burned a bad disc. So I burned another one (the downloaded image on my hard drive had the correct sum), and once again checked the SHA1 sum -- this time it matched. Thus, I know the disc is perfect -- there's no errors on the disc.
Figuring this was the problem, I retried the install. Four times. Each time it failed in a different location, due to an unspecified error. I've still not managed to get it to install.
Now, this may be a hardware issue -- possibly I'm getting 1-bit errors during the disc read due to a faulty drive or connection. This said, in four years with this drive I've never had a read error on a disc that wasn't either defective or dirty, but it's possible. But even if it is, this points to a very serious usability issue that's very easily fixed -- the installer treats all errors as fatal.
Microsoft OSs, even back to the days of DOS 2.2, do not consider read errors fatal. Instead, they display the classic prompt of "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" While perhaps not completely obvious to general users, this allows recovery from a simple read error -- you can Retry if it was a bad read (the option to Retry would have meant my install would have worked by now; there's nothing wrong with the disc), or Ignore if it's truly an unrecoverable error but you don't care all that much about the particular file it was accessing. Only if you choose the Abort is the error considered fatal and the entire process cancelled.
These are the sorts of issues Linux systems will need to get past in order to be generally accepted -- the problem they have is not Microsoft's market power or the number of applications available for Microsoft software. The problem is simple usability, the sorts of issues that would never make it past the first step of the design phase at Microsoft. At Microsoft, I had to consistently reject good, useful features on the grounds that nontechnical users might not understand them. But open-source projects tend not to have usability engineers; it's like a software product created entirely by devs, with no one else on the team.
Now I'll see if I can find a distribution to play with that doesn't involve copying 4 GB of data off a disc. That or continue compiling Gentoo; at least I was learning quite a bit from that process.
