Linux in the news

[Richard Royston]

Charles Young writes:

> >...
> >http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/poy/poydos.htm
> >...
> This blurb mentions "full plug-n-play compatibility" for Red Hat 4.0  What is
> one to make of this?...

The term "full plug-n-play compatibility" seems to have migrated from being
an engineering term meaning that options could be set under program control,
and didn't require the changing of jumpers or switches, to being a marketing
term meaning that it partakes of the nature of motherhood and apple pie.  I
am no longer certain what it means precisely.  I notice, too, that the
distinction between it and "installation wizards" appears to be gradually
eliding.

I presume the writer was using the term in the same sense that Microsoft
seems to use it much of the time - the installation software does do quite a
lot of probing and guessing about what would make sense to do.  But, they
(Red Hat and Microsoft) both need quite a lot of help from the user when the
going gets tough.

Remember, most people buy their computers with Windows pre-installed, so they
don't know all the horrible things that happen in real life installations.
For various reasons I've had to do several installations of both Windows 95
and Red Hat 4.0 on my computer recently, and I would say that they both
needed much the same amount of help from the user, but Microsoft actually
made it harder than Red Hat for me to know and do the bits I had to do.

Another point in Red Hat's (or at least, the user's) favor is that the
logistics of the marketplace cause the Microsoft disk to be somewhat older
than the Red Hat one, so that the Microsoft disk has a set of hardware
drivers that is not as up-to-date as Red Hat's.  The result is that if you
have to reinstall Windows 95 on a system that came with it pre-installed you
actually end up retrieving more drivers, etc. using FTP than you do with Red
Hat.

Yet another factor in the linux user's favor is that there appears to be a
tendency for Microsoft to interrogate the components in a product, but give
up if the exact, specific product's not on its list, while linux will come up
with a combination of generic modules that match the components, and usually
does very well.