From: Ofir Cooper <coopeo@cs.huji.ac.il>
To: samyron@gentoo.org
Subject: suggestions from an enthiuastic user 
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:49:14 +0200
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Hello.

I installed gentoo linux on my laptop a few months ago, and this was the first 
linux distributation I tried. I loved it.
I would like to make a few suggestions (which are,maybe, obvious), but I think 
would greatly improve the gentoo experience, and the popularity of gentoo.

First, gentoo needs a graphic installer. Installing from text mode is good for 
technical - oriented people, not regular users. It's too bad you don't have a 
graphical install, because the install documentation is excellent. 
I think you should combine the install docs into a graphical interface, and 
that will make gentoo much easier.

Secondly, I recently bought a new desktop computer, and tried to install 
gentoo on it as well.  I failed - and I tried to figure out what is going on 
for about 15 hours !

You need to add support for the latest hardware to your system.
Here are a few of the problems I encountered:

1. I have two cdrom on one IDE channel,  a sata drive and an older IDE drive 
on another channel. Gentoo found the cdroms, detected the sata as scsi 
device, but failed to find the second harddrive. After some research, I found 
out that on my motherboard there are two IDE controllers - one that is in the 
BIOS, and an ITE/ATAPI controller that doesn't list its IDE devices to the 
bios. So gentoo couldn't detect the second harddrive (I tried to boot with 
doataraid, doscsi - nothing worked).

2. I have internet connection through a cable modem and an acount in a ISP.
But, I use Virtual Private Network to connect in windows - it took me a very 
long time to discover that I need to compile a new kernel for the cable modem 
i have (motorolla SURFboard SB4101)  - and I couldn't connect because making 
a VPN on linux is not so easy (I tried installing PPTP, but I think I didn't 
configure it right).

3. I also had problems configuring other hardware - but not during the 
install.

I think you should add support for ITE/IDE controllers in the installation. 
and for as much hardware as possible, in general. Make the install kernel 
large and suitable for all systems - the kernel I had was not good for my 
system.

Secondly, maybe you can do so something to make connecting to the internet 
easier for the average user. 
I consider myself very adept ad using computers, but even I couldn't connect 
to my ISP (again, I had to compile my kernel to support cable modem connected 
by usb, and also had to compile it to support vpn, and I couldn't connect by 
VPN, even though I downloaded pptp, and pptpconfig - which I couldn't use 
because I couldn't compile a desktop without an internet connection !)

that's all I can think of for now.,
Bye