Thursday 24 July 2008

RedHat Installer aka Anaconda

What an annoying inflexible tool! It reminds me of Windows in it's methodology e.g. abstract everything from the user so that he doesn't have to know anything, hide real problems from the user so he doesn't know whats broken and then won't worry, stop the user from being able to manually setup anything so he can never fix any problems that occur from the automated fashion the installer uses. What happened to the rescue shell that used to start back in the day giving you some flexibility? What happened to the option of loading another driver at install time from supplemental CD/DVD or the Internet? What happened to the ability to partition using fdisk or something seperate from the anaconda script?


IMHO all this type of thing breeds is a new type of Linux admin very similar to a Windows admin of late who can only follow others step by step work and heavily reliant on Wizards and management GUIs while pissing off the experience Open Source community members who are forced to use distributions like these because of their support structure and market share.

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