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.