> You don't know that. Maybe she installed it herself.
Linux-from-scratch or some such? In which case she'd better be able to
configure a custom kernel without help...
> > She is never going to need anything out of her kernel that her
> > vendor-shipped update kernels do not provide.
> *You can't know that.*
Right. But 99.9% of Aunt Tillies won't need anything else. To have
_everybody_ go through a lot of pain for the sake of 0.02% of Linux users
is silly. Better let Nephew Mervin keep the junkheap, and give Tilly a new
machine for her birthday.
> And your belief that you *can* know it is a key part of the elitist
> developer psychology and implicit assumptions that keeps Linux mostly
> inaccessible to the Aunt Tillies of the world.
Have you ever tried f.ex. Red Hat's installer and updater for the latest
versions (Just because it is the one I know best; other distribuctions have
similar facilities)? Have you tried a machine with Linux preinstalled?
Have you ever battled with Windows "autoconfiguration"?! _It doesn't
work_. At all. _Ever_. And that hasn't been an impediment to Aunt Tilly to
get a WinPC...
I just think that your idea is cool. You are just wasting effort on trying
to solve a non-problem, when there are lots of problems that could use your
talents.
But again, it's your own time.
-- Horst von Brand http://counter.li.org # 22616 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/