A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

Wed May 30 19:04:41 UTC 2012

Hi all,

normally I just listen to the mails (or rather, read em), but now I just want to mark a few things:
as a first, An inexperienced User is not likely to use Ubuntu server version. I had some trouble with the server version when I first tried it, only after some "getting into linux" I got it right...

Also, my expirience is that when one of the 3 named variables is lacking, it will still work out... (like, less mem, or less HDD can be compensated by more mem or more swap) I don't know about the Processor, but i got 2 old solaris sparks here on wich I can test that if you guys would like that...

Lastly, Ubuntu is not really an Hobby-project, it's got canonical to back it up... so people won't really be like "Oh my, this is done by hobbyists O.o", even better, Dell and Asus sell (or at least they did at one point) 5-10% of their pre-build (dunno the exact word in english) systems (mainly the laptops) with Ubuntu already installed on it!

well, this is my first (rather small and ranty) contribution, hope you guys get some useable info from it!

greetings from the netherlands!

C.

From: Jonathan Jesse 
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 8:11 PM
To: Doug Smythies 
Cc: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com 
Subject: Re: A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

who defines these mim specs?  Some one from the Engineering team at Canonical or was it someone from the Unity team that says this is the min that Unity will run under? 

Needs to be "official" so just curious as to who officially creates these min specs?

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Doug Smythies <dsmythies at telus.net> wrote:

  Hi,

  I will only speak to Ubuntu server edition in this reply, as that is all that I use.

  The minimum specs are: 300 Mhz CPU and 128 Megabytes of RAM and 0.5 or 1 gigabyte HD.

  As part of the 12.04 release cycle, I tested these minimum requirements with a very old 200Mhz, 128 Megabyte, 60 gigabyte ATA hard drive computer (it is hard enough to find old ATA drives lying around, yet alone a 1 gigabyte one).

  Actually, only 18 months ago I retired the computer from being my main Ubuntu server.

  Various versions of 12.04 beta were tested. Yes, installation was slow and some things are somewhat sluggish, but it worked fine.

  Very late in the release cycle, there was an issue (bug 986654) that I am still working on trying to confirm or deny if the root issue is because my system does not meet minimum specs and/or if minimum specs need to be changed.

  Myself, I would not change server edition minimum specs beyond what is actually required.

  ... Doug

  From: ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Tom Davies
  Sent: May-30-2012 01:30
  To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
  Subject: A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

        Hi :)
        Possibly it is too hot here and i'm having a "bad hair day".  Please don't anyone take this personally it's just a rant about the unfairness of the world in general 

        <a rant about official documentation>
        Official documentation can be really annoying.  The official page showing the "minimum specification" that Ubuntu can run on is sooo low that almost none but the most advanced users can get Ubuntu running at all let alone satisfactorily.  Most people that start with Ubuntu are not Gnu&Linux experts so they find that Ubuntu wont work on their machine with 2Kb of Ram and then say that means that Ubuntu doesn't work and that Gnu&Linux never works.  

        Of course MS makes outrageously low claims for Xp too but with that people don't expect it to work unless they have far MORE than the min.spec.  For some weird reason people expect Ubuntu to work with far less than the min.spec.  

        That adds to the general "blame the user" attitude in the Windows world.  After all it's  corporate OS right?  So it couldn't possibly go wrong unless the customer stuffs it up could it?  Lol.  By contrast people don't expect a "hobbyists, community thing" to work so if they do something really dumb then they blame the project rather than themselves.  If it goes wrong it proves to them what they had already decided before trying it.  
        </a rant about official documentation>

        When i first tried Ubuntu i somehow stumbled onto the community docs page and despaired slightly that my machine was only just over the min.spec quoted there.  So, I didn't think it stood a chance.  My neighbour installed it and to my amazement it flew.

        I think giving people false expectations is damaging and we should really quote min spec as something like this or higher
        10 Gb hard-drive space  (Xp quotes lower but most people know it's uncomfortable with less than 30GB and 20% of that being free-space)
        2 Gb Ram (people will read that and then try it on machines with only 1Gb.  If we wrote 500Mb they expect it to work on 256Mb ram)
        1.6 GHz cpu (again people will try it on a lot less expecting it to work)

        Regards from
        Tom :)

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