Quote:
Originally Posted by TwilightVampire  Oh its all quite true  I showed this to a few friends of mine and they thought doc was an incompetent windows user trying to just plain flame Windows and praise linux fake propaganda style. They had no idea really installing Windows was an annoying/long thing. |
Here have been my experiences with working with the various OSes:
Installing XP from a "full" installer CD: 1. Boot computer from CD. 2. Run the partitioner, select partition to install on (assumes that the XP install CD has LBA48 patches, your HDD is 120 GB or less, and that you have all SATA/RAID drivers handy.) 3. Format install partition. 4. Copy installation files to the formatted partition. 5. Reboot computer. 6. Wait for computer to install base OS files. 7. Input locale, username, network settings, etc. 8. Reboot computer. 9. while(needed_drivers > 0) { Download and install a missing driver; Reboot computer; needed_drivers = needed_drivers - 1; } 10. Find the CDs and registration keys for or download any applications you want to install. Reboot after installation if needed. 11. Create a limited user account. 12. Log into limited user account, change theme to Windows Classic (because the Luna theme sucks.) 13. Restore user data from an external HDD. 14. Finished. Elapsed time: It generally takes me 60 minutes to get the partitioning, formatting, and copying of OS files done and to the first reboot, then about 20-40 minutes to get the base OS set up. Driver and application installation varies widely. My desktop was easy as it pretty much had only NVIDIA ICs in it and needed just one driver disk, but laptops are often much thornier and take a lot longer, including several drivers put on a USB thumb drive so that the laptop can get online and download the rest it needs. Installing programs also varies a bunch, and installing proprietary programs is always a much bigger pain than open-source ones as the OSS stuff can be simply downloaded instead of having to find install CDs, keys, mucking with activation, etc. for proprietary applications. Patching also takes a varying amount of time, depending on what SP/patch level the install disk was. The quickest I've installed XP from a full install disk is about four hours, the longest is the better part of two days, but generally it's more like 6-8 hours.
Installing XP from a restore image 1. Boot computer into recovery partition. 2. Select recovery type, hit "Enter." 3. Watch the computer copy files and restart itself 10-15 times. 4. Enter your name, locale, etc. 5. Uninstall the crapware that's present on the recovery image. Reboot if needed. 6. Install an antivirus and run updates. 7. Install your programs. 8. Create a limited user account. 9. Log into the limited user account and change the theme to Windows Classic as the Luna theme is ugly. 10. Restore user data from an external HDD or network. 11. Finished. Elapsed time: Generally 30 minutes to an hour to perform the reimage, then the time will vary considerably depending on how new the recovery image is (number of patches/updates you need to get), the amount of crapware installed, and what programs you need to reinstall. Generally a reimage will take two to three hours as long as there is a decent broadband connection to get updates and the user doesn't need to restore 500 GB of data from an external drive.
Installing a binary Linux distribution 1. Boot the computer from the installer CD. 2. Either select "Install to disk" from the boot menu or from an icon on the desktop, dependent if you have a standard or Live CD-based install disk. 3. Specify your desired disk partition setup in the partitioner. 4. Fine-tune what programs you want installed in the system setup if you want to change the defaults. 5. Watch while the installer copies the OS to the hard drive and installs/sets up itself and its programs. 6. Input a root password. 7. Input your (limited) user account information and locale, language, etc. 8. Reboot the computer. 9. Run the package manager's update tool. Reboot if there is a kernel update. 10. Finished. Elapsed time: 20 to about 90 minutes, depending on the speed of the computer and the number of programs installed. Generally it will be 30-45 minutes on most newer computers. Restoration of user data is only necessary if this is a new install or the HDD died as all Linux distributions I know of put the user files on a partition separate from the OS, allowing a reinstall to not kill the user's data.
Installing a source-based Linux distribution 1. Boot from the install disk. 2. Run the disk partitioner and set up the partitions. 3. Format and mount the partitions. 4. Download the source tarballs to the root partition on the HDD. 5. Set the base system compile/configuration options. 6. Chroot to the root partition on the HDD. 7. Compile the kernel and enough of the base system to boot from. 8. Reboot the computer. 9. Set up your user account. 10. Compile and configure X11. 11. Compile and configure a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. 12. Compile any other applications you need. 13. Finished. Elapsed time: It generally takes an hour to configure and compile the kernel and base system on a decent system. The rest of the compilation and set-up very much depends on the throughput of the computer. My Athlon 64 X2 4200+ desktop generally takes about 20 hours to compile the entire base system, kernel, desktop environment, and programs I need. My old 2.2 GHz P4 laptop took several days as the P4 is bad at compiling and it's a single-core versus a dual-core CPU.
However, it's usually around an hour as I have to do something else while it's installing.
