My first experience with Linux was Kubuntu 6.10 so my 'Old Days' do not extend
beyond that. And I have yet to learn much linux command line commands. But, it
seems to me that the 15 seconds pre-change test is a wonderful feature adding to
the safety and usability of Linux but should not and does not exclude direct
access to the database of drivers but rather supports it. This would be utterly
irrelavent if the autodetect worked every time but it doesn't. And in my case,
I've found that the frequency of failure to be high enough that these two
options should have been given together, complimenting each other rather than
having the autodetect option at the exclusion of the driver select option.

Which brings me back to my original question. Is it still available, or
something like it, in the repos? I can understand if there is a space issue on
the Live CD but there is no reason it could not be available in the
repositories. I was pleasently suprised to see how well Ubuntu 8.10 worked on a
P3 laptop with 512mb of RAM. Only the video suffered, but the speed for
everything else was very acceptable. But it failed to autodetect/setup my screen
correctly and I was stuck in 800x600. In fact, the drivers had to have been
there because my fix only involved changes to the xorg.conf file using the
display info/setup from a Kubuntu7.10/xorg.conf file. Cut & pasted.

If we want Linux to apeal to the masses and encrease Linux user numbers, some
form of solution is needed which does not include terminal windows and command
line prompts because that is where the masses draw the line on acceptability.