Not a bash, just the facts

[Michael V. De Palatis]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2006 at 09:51:21AM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> I can't even get Windows to install Java any easier than with Ubuntu, so
> where's the real problem?  You download a zip file from Sun and uncompress
> it.  If you want it automatically, you can even get it from multiverse. 
> Yes, Ubuntu could do a better job of explaining how to get it, but it's Sun
> that makes it a hassle, not Ubuntu.

Yes, some packages are a little more difficult to get installed,
namely Java. It is actually real easy, however, to download the
JVM/JDK from Sun, and create a .deb file with make-jpkg.

I think this brings up a good point about usability on installation. 
Perhaps there could be some way to have these explained very
easily upon install. I don't know the best way, but perhaps as an
example, when logging in for the first time, an HTML file is opened
that clearly explains all the issues such as these (it could even be
included in the Ubuntu default startpage in Firefox, for example --
quite honestly, this would be exponentially more useful than the
current "About Ubuntu" start page anyway, since users have probably
already read at least some of this if they bothered to install
Ubuntu).

I hope that was coherent and made sense.

Mike