At PC Forum last week, Jan Hier-King, senior vice president of electronic brokerage technology for schwab.com, made the offhand comment that it seemed like open-source programmers were more interested in satisfying the needs of other programmers than those of non-programmers who will be using their programs. If this is true, it is not an entirely bad thingthe whole culture of open source and alternative operating systems is built around the notion of programmers submitting their work for peer reviewbut what happens to the rest of us who don’t code for a living when we have to get our work done using these programs?
Even the most popular of such programs, like GNU Emacs, are famed for their esoteric and borderline-hostile interfaces. So when Red Hat Software started selling a shrink-wrapped version of Linux, it seemed like a watershed for alternate operating systems. Finally, getting up and running on Linux would be as easy as getting up and running on Windows. Indeed, since Windows installation can be cranky sometimes, an easy-to-install Linux would be extremely valuable.
It hasn’t turned out that way.
In 1998 Silicon Prairie tested the installation of RedHat Linux 5.1 and found it difficult to understandespecially for people who don’t think in 0s and 1s. With the introduction of an upgraded version, 5.2, marketed as being easier to install, Silicon Prairie tried again. Not only did we find similar problems with the new version, we also found new ones.
Silicon Prairie intended to install RedHat Linux the way many people looking to learn more about the alternate operating system areby building a dual-boot machine that runs both Windows and Linux.
The installation program proceeded smoothly until we tried to partition the hard disk. Each time we tried, the program would freeze. After a few trips to the Red Hat errata Web page and an e-mail exchange with a helpful support engineer, we discovered that the version of RedHat Linux that is shipping in early 1999 doesn’t fully support Windows 98, which shipped last summer. In fact, it also does not support the FAT32 file system, which has been available for two years.
The only way to install Linux in such an environment is to download a series of files from either RedHat’s FTP server, which is hopelessly overloaded, or one of the mirror sites, which are so slow you might wonder whether they are run out of someone’s dorm room.
After spending the hours necessary to get these files and construct new “boot image” disks to install Linux, we ran the installation program again. It froze at the same place. So we e-mailed technical support again.
The people at RedHat technical support are knowledgeable, friendly, helpful and witty. The only problem is that they’re stuck supporting a project that, for non-programmers, may be unsupportable. The extensive response we received included complete instructions for specifying drive cylinders, heads and sectors during the initial installation boot and ended with this helpful but (unintentionally) hilarious suggestion for discovering the cylinder head and sector settings:
“You can get the actual information either from the manual, or by removing the drive from the machine and looking at the top of the drive. Somewhere up there the information should be printed. It is probably a good idea NOT to disconnect any of the cables while you are doing this,” the technical support person told me.
It went on, but the basic idea was that we had to remove the drive from the PC and inspect it. We followed the instructions to the letter and now have a successfully running dual-boot system. But what about the 99.9 percent of people who use computers who want their operating systems to install and run without having to open up their machines and read the label on top of their hard disks? Until installing any version of Linux gets much easier, its chance of attracting non-programmers is not very good.
