Damn Les, I'll never understand for the life of me how you could tell me with a straight face about a year and half ago that you were going to stop using Linux because it was too difficult, with too much undocumented shit to learn. I'm not bagging on you; I'm glad you perservered, but I'm here to say that Windows issues and workarounds are just as much tribal knowledge as Linux stuff is.
What's the source of my discontent, you ask? Well, for the last half a week, I've been trying to get some version of Windows to work for me. My friend Susie is in need of a laptop for school related stuff. Lisa's old NEC Versabook (Versa 2530) has been sitting around unused since she got my iBook about a year ago. It's nothing special; Pentium 133, 800x600 screen (sorta splotchy), 48 MB RAM, and a 1 gig drive. Too little to run modern stuff, but perfectly adequate, I thought, for putting on an older OS and some sort of Office type app for Susie's use doing reports at school and such.
So as it was, the laptop had a fresh install of Windows 98 on it from when I was ebaying it, and the winning bidder didn't end up paying. Since all of our local libraries have Wi-Fi access, I thought I'd throw in my old Wi-Fi card so she could surf and do research without having to use stinky library machines. So I get the Netgear install stuff, and "Add new hardware", and guide it to the appropriate directory. It does it's thing, and "my new hardware is now ready for use." So I pop the card in (it's PCMCIA), and everything appears to go great. But no workie-workie. Winipcfg shows that it's got a valid DHCP lease, and everything should be going fine, but nothing is going. It boils down to this, if the machine is rebooted, and the card is plugged in, it will acquire a lease (usually), and if the very first thing I do is try to ping a host, exactly one packet will get through, and then networking fails altogether. If I just try to surf, I get nothing at all. So I attribute this to general suckiness, so I do the typical Windows solution of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. 69 reboots later and still no workie-workie.
At this point I give up on Windows 98 (all the 9x Windows sucked anyway), and look around for a better option. Just to see what would happen, I give installing Windows 2000 a try. The installed filled the 1 gig drive up with about 450 meg of crap (I'm guessing; usage was about 575 or so, but Win98 was some of it) and then decides that it won't go since it need 600 meg free to install. Well, I guess it's unsurprising. It would have run pretty damn slow anyhow. So I try Windows NT 4, which may be the best option, as it should be the best option as it's a non-sucky, kernel based Windows (at least as non-sucky as you can get and still be running Windows). I'm now on my third install attempt. I've just now figured out that I need to create a temporary partition for this thing to put its files. Unfortunately, I've only learned this after I've gotten through all of the time-consuming things that the NT installer wants to do (like create boot disks and copy about 115 meg of files to the hard disk) before the installer fails. Every time this happens, I end up having to start from scratch. Booting from a Windows 98 startup disk (which, to Microsoft's credit, is a pretty handy utility disk, with fdisk and format and other stuff, not to mention CDROM support, on one floppy. Then I reformat the hard disk (I'll need to repartition it next time), and I do the requisite reboots (because MS fdisk won't re-read the partition map without a reboot). Then, maybe if I'm lucky, I can boot using CDROM support from the 98 floppy, start the WINNT installer, and go through the floppy creation process yet again (never mind that I have three perfectly good floppies already), and copies a zillion files back on to the hard drive.
Anyway, all I'm really trying to say is that Windows has just as many gotchas as Linux (or other open-source software) does. But people don't really think about it because they've been investing the time learning them without even thinking about it. It still sucks, though. For the life of me, I have no idea why people pay money for Windows (yes, I even mean Win 2k and Win XP). GNU/Linux has gotten really damn good in the last few years. The only place I think it's behind in is a consistent desktop appearance (where the general feel or windowmanager or whatever of GNOME doesn't change with every new RedHat/SuSE/Mandrake release; this is really more a fault of the distro maintainers). The only other place where OSS seems behind is laptop support, and that's going to be a difficult battle. Perhaps as the uptake of Linux continues in the far east, the Taiwanese manufacturers of everybodys' laptops will start to be more forthcoming with their hardware specs.
Bias
I hate losedows as much as any linux zealot, but come on... the vast majority of sheep out there use windows that's preinstalled no matter how poorly configured or suited it is to the machine they're using. Yes I know it sucks this and blows that but the general pubic (sic) don't install operating systems.
a good point
You're right, most people just use whatever crap comes with the machine. But damn, I had problems even with my Windows XP install on my laptop out of the box. I know I can't be the only one that has bizarre unpredictable problems. And I've never seen a device driver failure cause a spontaneous reboot in Linux. The only times I can remember seeing kernel panics are do to bad hardware (semi-fried processor; happened ONCE), and the other times have all been non-mounted or hosed root filesystems. The main point is that the pragmatism argument for Windows is largely going away. Another thing I think could be done better for Linux is better "plug and play" support for hot swappable devices (like USB jumpdrives and the like). They work fine, but only after scripts are installed or they are manually mounted. What would be really cool is some sort of central database that the kernel could look at to see what a newly plugged-in device was, and what to load to make it work, and then just go to it.
Automounting USB devices
I might be wrong (I'm still really toying with USB stuff in Linux), but I'm sure that when you plug a USB device in, it detects what device has just been put in, and then runs the script for that device. Now, if you know your USB key device is always going to be mounted at /mnt/mykey, put in at the bottom of the script "mount /dev/usbkey /mnt/mykey -t fat32" or whatever the device is called in /dev and what fs you've got it written in.
Of course, as I said, I might be very wrong, and I'm basing this on some very bad experiences with a not-quite-working USB WiFi device :(
JonTheNiceGuy (jontheniceguy@opendiary.com)
sic
Clever use of sic, whoever you are. Not entirely correct (sic means literally "so" or "this is the way it was," and so necessarily only applies to a quotation), but I admire your creativity. Much more subtle than saying "pun intended."
Your Editor
hardware
As far as I'm concerned, the only real feature winblows ever had over Linux is support for various cheap hardware. Winblows seems to have some sort of driver that sort-of works for damn near anything you drop in, without the required 10-day research project and 40% price hike usually associated with buying something you can actually use on a Linux machine. It's like trying to get parts for an odd-ball car.
In fact, I'm used to all that with the Opel, but running a winblows machine is more like driving a K-car, you can pretty much stop anywhere and put in whatever crap you get there and expect it to work. Sure the whole car sucks, but if you don't care to look under the hood or how well or fast it goes, it sure is nice to be able to not care for a while. Same with winblows, sometimes it's nice to not have to care.
I understand
I'd like to think I've grown. I do enjoy getting under the hood of the PC's in the bordone-world and I had a great time upgrading hard drives this weekend (I'd have to had loaded some POS bios layering software to install the 160 on Bill's OS) and you can in windows too but it's not so well documented as to what some of those registry hives do. I'm not going to patronize you, hopefully you know you can call me when you need a hand just like I rely on you at times to get me over a hump.
Do you have a wired connection (built-in to the LT) that you can do a windoze update? What about another nic wired or not? Were you using 98 or 98SE? (Anything but ME!) Anyway, you know how to troubleshoot and I'll leave it to you. But yes, Linux is in my home to stay and Google is the network admins/pc repairmens friend.
There was a thread on this a few days ago on Evil Avatar (I'm a fag gamer too, as Sean would say, so I'll be at MS's whim for awhile).
To be honest I'm doing just as much research setting up my active directory environment here as I do when I want to take on a new *nix project. To be honest if I didn't have friends that work there I wouldn't have upgraded to XP on all my workstations and wouldn't dream of running an AD with Exchange, it's just too cost prohibitive. I'd love to get into a position somewhere where I have the power to recommend a linux box over MS because I'm still too low on the pole to have any sway right now.
-Les
-Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
wi-fi
so have you gotten the pcmcia wi-fi card of yours to work on that linux running latptop? did u Mr. Gotchas
wi-fi
ill tell you, no you didnt because it NO WORKIE-WORKIE. ive never seen more no workie-workie in my life than on linux. It has support for nothing and cant make drivers in time for the hardware to work before it has become outdatted. so if all of you gotchas wanted standarized hardware why didnt you stick with apple or sun from the beginning as there are no gotchas there. ill tell you why you didnt because its too expensive or too proprietary well guess what this is no different because it has no support for cheap hardware which makes up for 98% of the hardware out there not to mention that many expensive hardware manufacturers just stick their names on cheap hardware. the linux kernel is a piece of genius allowing it to run on anything buts right where the benefits end and running on something as if it was a virus (since viruses dont give a damn if your hardware no workie-workie) is much different than an OS which actually cares to make hardware it claims work actually work. i dont care for linux simply because a jackets a jacket what makes it $150 north face jacket rather than the normal $50 is non of my concern so to bring it closer to your head a wifi card is a wifi card i dont care why its a $90 orinoco instead of just about every dollar under that including 0
dont brag about wind0ze logo: Put in Some crap and hope it works
My comp is technically no crap, i used wind0ze which came with the comp for quite some time, and yes, ALMOST every thing was workie-workie, but i moved to linux and every thing is workie-workie even more!(ie. what ever was workie-workie on wind0ze, no mention of the tons of other great software that helped me alot) plus I really love to look under the hood and do some tweaking rather than go around in a crappy car and NO i'm not using lots of high-priced stuff , just normal stuff, cuz the kernel can get anything workie-workie , if that thing really is workie-workie and complies with the standards, But having idiots manufacturing your stuff,I dont think everything is gonna be workie-workie. For example you get one of those "WinModem" (who invented that CRAP!!!, why not just have everything on the standards!) and want it to workie-workie very well on a linux, well then..., WAKE UP, get to your couch, pick up the phone, dail that number on the back of your "WinModem" package, and get ready for a long talk with those idiots on the other end telling them to make a real modem next time.
Windows STILL sucks
I've gone through all of the incarnations of Windows from 3.1 on. The hrype is heavy, the performance is light. I can say I'm a lot happier with Win XP due to it's improved stability but over 85 or so 'services' sucking up my CPU cycles? C'mon.
What is pissing me off right now is that when I try ot change hardware using the same HD and Win install, it tells me it needs the install numbers then tells me they won't fly. At least with Crash 98 I could reinstall as many times as I wanted.
Now with Winders Genuwine Disadvantage we are totally screwed. I managed to install a copy on anothe computer I use for A/V production, it took the number, I use it in the same house that I use my main computer but I cannot update it or I'll get stuck with another $100 charge from those greedy pricks at Microslut.
Vista? i would like to say they can kiss my ass but I'm sure they'll blackmail me into that one sooner or later.
Lousy bastards.
Windows DOES Suck
I have to just say to you guys that I am a proud Linux user. Faster, more reliable, more secure, and less headaches. Yeah, most ppl are used to Wincrap but guys, give Linux a chance here. It really has come a long way and is much better than Windows ever was or ever will be (and even supports new technologies such as SATA much better than Wincrap). Am I saying it's perfect, no. Am I even saying it's for everyone, absolutely not. But I have found that with a lil time and patience, you'll find that Linux rocks. Vista is nothing but a glorified FLUKE and I foresee Microdork going into the backlines of computing soon if they keep up their crap (think about it, somethings got to give eventually... You really think ppl are going to ALWAYS put up with their computers breaking at the drop of a hat due to a shoddy OS???). Everyone here makes a great point but let's not slight Linux. It may not be mainstream but I've got to say, I'm impressed :).