Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> For example, it took more than a day to get printing working (a standard
> Linux-supported Samsung Laser printer on the parallel port).  It involved
> delving into the printing-HOWTO, and the kernel documentation, enabling
> the port support, rebuilding the kernel, struggling through the
> undocumented garbage that is (?was) CUPS, discarding that for a
> documented printing system, selecting a printing (formatting) driver by
> trial and error, .....
>
> This was typical of most things - a long hard slog, fixing problem after
> problem after problem, a typical problem taking between 2 and 6 hours to
> resolve.
>
> And yes, at the end of that month GNU/Linux did indeed work
> fantastically.

From what you and others have written it looks like the weak point when 
installing GNU/Linux is the hardware. I wonder if this still is the case 
with Ubuntu?

In that case, should not investigating hardware be something that is 
done as earlier as possible in the installation process - with a 
possibility for the user to just back off if the installation process 
finds hardware it does not recognize.

I think that such a scheme could make GNU/Linux reputation in this 
regard much better.