Journal: Informing the Popular Media about Linux

While listening to the NPR show "Here & Now" from WBUR in Boston today, they mentioned the recent plethora of worms and viruses affecting Windows computers. Three options were offered by the experts on the show: to wait for the trusted computing platform from M$ and thereby lose your ability to control your computer; to go to Macintosh since there are fewer viruses and thereby lose your ability to buy software since fewer programs are written for Macintosh; or to just keep wasting time and continuing to patch ones M$ system. I queried the producers as to why Linux was left out of the line-up. The response from producer, Alan Coukell, was as follows: "Thanks for your message. We did talk about Linux but had to cut it out for reasons of length. The bottom line from David, and from other computer literate people I've talked to, seems to be that most people still find it pretty difficult, even impossible, to get it running on their home machine. Thanks for writing." Is this true? Red Hat 8.1 installed instantly for me. The Morphix CD gave me a fully configured and working Toshiba 1410 laptop in about 2 minutes with internet access and all. Lycoris installed flawlessly on an old P233 I run. What gives? How can we get the word out to the media that Linux is easy to configure and use?