I beg to differ here. It's really time for the consumer oriented Linux distros (Ubuntu, Xandros, PCLinuxOS being examples) to grow beyond the "u have to want to learn linux" mentality. I maintain a few linux PCs that my friends/relatives use. I set it up for them n they just use it. Easy-peasy. It's easier for me to support them too 'cos I'd setup their router to allow me to SSH in when needed. Day to day usage-wise, they're happy. But setting up the PCs was not so smooth. I had to perform some additional configurations due to some quirks in the hardware support etc. Definitely not something they can do themselves. This is limiting me to just supporting 3-4 of these PCs. I'm not interested in being the defacto PC support person for 50 ppl (esp when I'm not paid for it). That wld really take up all my time. But I would still like for more people to start using Linux (any flavor that suits them).

So, the more consumer-targeted distros can settle individual quirks on the setup process, the better it is. I'm not talking about users like you, me and the average Linux-centric geek. Ubuntu may not even be the best distro for us due to our very different requirements. I'm talking abt ppl who expect things to work like it would on a Mac. Like it or not, I've come to accept that there're ppl who use computers out of necessity, not 'cos they enjoy the experience. The OS should be transparent to them, for all intents n purposes. That's the holy grail.

I've been jumping from distro to distro over the years, especially when I was using Linux in a non-work capacity. Just 'cos I have the time. I had the time to spend 5 days compiling and settings up distros such as Gentoo and (B)LFS. But in my company, I don't have that luxury. Even Fedora 8 (at the time) wasn't good enough 'cos of the sheer number of updates that came in every week and the additional steps needed to setup proprietary codec n font support (trying to balance LivNA and other 3rd party RPM repos was a friggin' nightmare). Kubuntu, was a godsend. Automatix and (after that) Medibuntu made installing all the media stuff a breeze. Most of the time, I could get a working laptop up within an hour (most of the time spent just waiting for installation to be done and updating). It's seriously simple. When things just work, that is.

So, let's look at the roadmap to Linux supremacy:
1) Simple installation of applications (done; Synaptic/Adept/PackageKit fulfills this already, just need more apps in the repos)
2) Simple setup (done; the LiveCD concept was brilliant and I believe Knoppix was the pioneer in this)
3) Fool-proof installation (pending; there're still too many PC/laptop configurations that do not work perfectly just yet)

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reposito...ory-howto#pools

looks like u're right

either "ifconfig -a", which will give you info abt all your network interfaces, or "ifconfig <device name>" e.g. "ifconfig eth0"

Ya know, I don't think it's got anything to do with the Power Manager front-ends, whether KDE or Gnome. I've had PowerDevil (KDE) running swell on 1 machine and totally wonky on another and both are using the exact same distro n patch level.