Steve McMahon (steve.mcmahon@lambada.oit.unc.edu) wrote:

quoted text
> A couple of weeks ago my X setup stopped to work, for some reason or
> another (corrupt display/fonts, ..etc.). After posting several
> articles about the problem, in some of which I was literally begging
> for help, all I got was one unenthusuastic reply. I wasted a week
> chasing the problem, and replaced every imaginable piece of hardware
> in my system -- to no avail. Finally I gave up on it and purchased
> Windoze. I had been using linux since 0.12 and X since obz first
> ported it to linux.

quoted text
> The moral of this story is that net.support is fine as long as your
> problem is a FAQ-type question. But for real trouble, it's basically
> non-existent. No one is going to go out of his/her way to help you if
> the answer to your query is not firsthand in their minds. Had their
> been commercial support for linux, I'd probably have resorted to it. I
> don't think it would take more than a couple of days to resolve the
> problem had it been under Windoze, sigh.

quoted text
> -Steve

I have to disagree with you on this one.  I was having (back in
December or so) a devil of a time trying to get the TCP/IP stuff
working with my NE2000 clone card; at first we couldn't decided if it
was my hardware (I have a Quatel BIOS in my box, which seems to be the
most unheard-of BIOS on the planet) or if it was the Becker drivers
(this was right before autosensing, etc.  Way back, in relative
terms.)  I posted to the mail channels and had many people write me
with suggestions, and one or two of them were willing to spend some
more email time going in-depth.  I've also had pretty good success
with the folks on the MSDOS group (Long Live Howlin' Bob! ;-); I was
having problems getting ipc to work, and the author wrote me with the
fix.  Needless to say, I'm impressed.  

I think that c.o.l. is a harder place to get help, since there is so
much traffic on the group it's hard to keep up.  I know for myself
that sometimes I'll want to help with things that I can answer, but
someone will either have beaten me to it or not have read the FAQ.  

Sorry to discover that you were unlucky.  So far my experiences with
linux have been like the old frontier barn-raisings -- everyone comes
over to help, since that's the spirit of the time.  

And as far as commerical stuff goes -- I'd love it if IBM/DEC/whatever
would help as per the so-called service contracts go.  We wound up
replacing major amounts of our Ultrix utils with GNU equivs.  
--
 David Gabrius                                          gabrius@gem.valpo.edu
 Pro Student, Computer Engineering              perfessr@imsa.edu  (IMSA '90)
 "And you can find/Your own way out/You can build/And I can will..." -U2
 "You miss too much these days if you stop to think..." -U2 | PGP22 available