hindsight/user experience

[John Billings]

I just wanted to relate a cautionary tale, about packaging an install
cd with a live cd.  I was at a Linux event, and someone gave me a
copy of the previous ubuntu release, nicely packaged with a red live
cd, and an orange install cd.  I had no use for the cd, but I
thought I would pass it on to a friend who was curious about Linux.
I gave him the cd, and explained about using the red cd to boot off
the cdrom and try Linux out.  

This person is a work at home consultant, and he seemed pretty tech
savvy to me, so I didn't think anything about giving him the cd, until
a week later he called me and asked, hey I tried the Linux out, now
how do I get my windows files back?  He had wiped out his whole
windows install using the orange disk.  Now I know, we all should have
been smarter, he should have realized that reformatting the hard drive
would erase his data, and I should have only given him the live cd,
because I knew he had no intention of installing it, but hey, it 
happened.  I rushed over to help him restore his Windows system, he 
had a backup from February, and most important data was not on the 
system, but it was still kinda traumatic. 

I'm not trying to say anything bad, actually we probably learned some
good lessons from this experience, I learned the fixmbr command, he
learned how easy it is to install Linux :) 

I'm afraid something like this could happen elsewhere and create a 
bad introduction to Gnu/Linux for someone. So my point is please
reconsider distributing a live cd and an install cd together. I
thought about sending this to the developer list, but thought it
might be a good story to relate to users as well, and there are
probably some developers on here. 

Thanks,
John