Live cd solutions

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rahul Sundaram escribió:
>> That I believe is what really makes a distribution "user friendly". 
>> The fact that Fedora doesn't ship with proprietary software (driver 
>> or application programs), 
>
> We won't point to proprietary drivers. General user level applications 
> are different from kernel drivers because of potential legal issues, 
> debugging problems they induce etc.
>
> Rahul
>

I am very aware of that situation, however, just having an attitude of 
"no can't do, and sorry can't help you with that" is not very helpful 
either. I know about the politics and the reasons behind such policies, 
however leaving the users in the blank isn't (IMO) the best course of 
action. I know there's lots and lots of documentation, but to new users 
(and I here speak out of experience with more than a couple new users) 
the available information is not all that clear (mainly due to 
technicalities and jargon used) and is not really helpful as it doesn't 
state what can they actually do to (for instance) use their hardware, 
even if that means going "unsupported" (which Fedora already is, given 
its nature, only in such situation the users are going astray from the 
stable pool of code, which means if they get a kernel oops or panic, 
they're on their own). Bottom line is that even with all the information 
available, they're still (kind of) left in the dark. I know there's a 
thin line between mentioning something and actually endorsing it, like 
in this case, the use of proprietary drivers or application programs, 
but it is kind of absurd we can't reach a point where we could help 
users without actually endorsing using such solutions (which seems to me 
to be the core of the problem and dilemma here)