Use Case:  Small Business

 

ABC Consulting Group is a small engineering firm with 5 professionals and one office manager.  They have a network of 6 PCs running Windows XP, and 3 running Redhat Linux 9.  The Linux workstations are used to run their engineering software, and one project involving some programming.

 

One of the junior engineers is the "computer guy".  He is familiar with Unix and can even write shell scripts, but he has very little experience setting up systems.  He is looking for a replacement for Redhat, after a frustrating week of upgrading from Redhat 8 to 9.  He looked briefly at Debian, but gave up after getting lost in the poorly organized documentation.

 

What this company needs is a Linux distribution that makes it easy to *find* packages, *install* without snags, and *verify* the installations.

More specifically, this Linux distribution should have:


1) Simple download and install of a core system.


2) Easy search for packages.  Find a package from a keyword, the name of an included file, or the general category.  Categories should be organized hierarchically, for ease of browsing.  How about some links to reviews and user comments, like Amazon does for books.

3) Reliable installations.
  a) Install routines which automatically verify all the files in a package against checksums from a central website.

  b) Packages which install correctly and do not require searching for missing files, adding symbolic links to files in the wrong place, etc.


4) Retention of configurations.  Ability to upgrade to a new release without losing settings that have been done in an earlier version of any installed package.

5) Display of currently installed packages, sorted by category, package name, install date, size, etc.  Checkboxes to select packages for verification, removal, update, etc.

6) Simple verification.  Ability to verify an installation and flag any files that have differences from the original release, or from any saved benchmark configuration.

7) Good documentation.  Learning time for all of the above should be less than 2 hours for a person with a good understanding of computers, but no specific knowledge of this distribution.