ubuntu for novices

[Travis Newman]

> Less key feature: A GUI for installation. The installer is relatively  
> straightforward, but might be interpreted as unfriendly-looking due 
> to  its text-based nature. More importantly, for those unfamiliar 
> with  text-based UIs it's not always clear which key to hit, so even 
> if a GUI  installer isn't added, some hints on which keys to use might 
> be a good  addition.

This is in development for Hoary. The devs are (almost) always one step 
ahead :)

>
> Less key feature: NTFS/FAT resize as an option during install. A few  
> distros have this, and I think it's a great idea because it allows  
> Windows users to create a dual-boot setup without doing a reinstall 
> of  Windows or any pre-configuration of their systems. For extra 
> points,  provide a preconfigured option to add a shared FAT partition 
> when  Windows is installed on NTFS.

I would LOVE to see this. Which distros have this, just out of 
curiosity? I'd love to have a live cd (of any distro really) that will 
let me partition well. I've never really used anything in Linux that 
allows for resizing of partitions, just deleting and creating. gnu 
parted does it, but I've never been able to get it to work, and with 
resizing its better to have a GUI in my opinion. If there's a good gui 
for parted (or any other partition manager out there) I'd love to hear 
about it.

> I bring these up not to be negative, but because I've been really  
> impressed with Ubuntu in so many respects, particularly hardware  
> support and UI simplicity, not to mention the whole single-CD install  
> thing. In the meantime I'm looking at distros like SuSE 9.2 (with  
> GNOME), Xandros, and Fedora Core 3 for recommendation to novices and  
> Windows switchers...any comments welcome.
>
Meh. I've never liked any of those. At least, not since I've been using 
Debian based systems. Xandros is pretty good, but the RPM based distros 
just never worked for me very well. But no, I don't think you're being 
negative. Voicing opinions is the way open source works, pretty much. I 
like your suggestions.