2012-03-08 Within four days, I did two GNU/Linux installations for persons who haven't used it yet but wanted me to set it up for them. Here's the summary: Person 1 (he) has an Acer notebook, which did neither display any BIOS nor text console output. I had to use a Live CD with the graphical installer. On the boot prompt I needed to work blind. I couldn't install the boot loader, (probably) because there had been a hidden recovery partition on the disk. Later the problem was gone. The second problem was the German translation. When I should have selected an online repository, I did not because the word ``Spiegelserver'' couldn't transport the right meaning. After I had identified those two problems, the rest went fine. Installing the non-free firmware for his b43 chip was trivial with `firmware-b43-installer'. The Debian Wiki provides excellent information therefore. One problem remaines, but is likely a hardware defect: The back- light of the screen flickers, as if it would be a CRT on 50 Hz. I'm clueless. In the attempt to check if newer packages would remove the flick- ering, I dist-upgraded to testing. (It'll freeze soon anyway.) Unfortunately, I didn't install the new versions of the package tools before I dist-upgraded. This resulted in a deadlock situa- tion that apt-get couldn't resolve. Eventually, aptitude did resolve it by removing large parts of the system. Person 2 (she) has a Toshiba notebook with already Windows 7 in- stalled. This time I could succeed quicker because of the knowledge I had gained during the first installation. Also, her notebook did display BIOS output and I could take the text mode installer. First however, I needed to shrink the Windows parti- tion. The gparted Live CD came in use, as always. The installa- tion went fine. Then reboot, and we were inside Debian. This time it was an Intel wireless card, but equally trivial to get working. `firmware-iwlwifi' was the right package. Again, the Debian wiki was perfectly useful. The only thing that did not work at once was the Windows handling in grub2. Although, during the installation, it had detected it, it had not added a boot entry for it. Again, the Debian wiki helped. Adding the line GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to /etc/default/grub and running `update-grub2' solved the issue. Well, that was it. Let's see if they'll be satisfied. My quick view into Gnome still gives me horror. I tell people that Unix has a good user interface and that the developers write good software to satisfy their own needs. Now that I used Gnome for some hours, I feed ashamed. It simply isn't usable at all. I ended in click-sequences and I was irritated. (We needed to enter the root password so many times into pop-up windows for single actions, that she asked me with a strange look if this would be normal. I could only tell her, that on the command line interface I have never asked me this question.) I'm close to admit that Windows does it better. How sad. This was about Gnome2, but Gnome3 had been nothing but irritat- ing. That's truly no ground I'll enter. I can't say much for Xfce, but it must be better. I can hardly be worse. Comparing the Windows UI to Fluxbox, for instance, then I'll clearly vote for Fluxbox. Fluxbox had been the image in my mind for all those years. Now my eyes were opened to the real world. The only possible conclusion is: Free Software developers can't really create these GUIs for themselves, because who would want to use such bad interfaces? I simply cannot believe it. This at least explains the run to Apple. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke