Hi All:
The title of this message was Linux distributions. Based on that and my
current feelings I could not resist in responding.
Last Wednesday at the Tampa meeting one of the strong grues help me with
installing linux on my laptop. I did not want to loose the Windows setup and
wanted this as a dual boot machine. my fear of the then current set up.
More on this latter. As I am poor with names and very good with electrical
drawings I can not name the person but I do wish to express my sincere thanks
for the help I received in learning to split a hard drive.
Anyway back to the Linux techie evaluation.
But! Before I continue there are a number of people who are going to violently
disagree this of this evaluation of RH, SuSE, and Mandrake. Sorry folks this
is my evaluation and my opinion. If you have a different one that is your
right but this is my evaluation.
The first distribution that was installed was Mandrake 8.2. Now, Mandrake
Professional is very fine distribution. I had tried it on my desktop test CD
and found it to be advanced version to the older RH 7.3 but as you should
have guessed by now there were a few problems. One of which is the disk
installs and runs fine but it sure messes up the Windows boot loader. Well
maybe it does; not sure here as I only installed it 5 times. The results were
I could get Windows to boot or Mandrake to boot but not both. There could be
a way to make this work; not sure but if there is it is not immediate
obvious.
Anyway I had a copy of SuSE 8.1 Personal. Now SuSE always install perfectly
and almost everything always does seem to work. It is the parts that does not
work that bother me. First, I have no idea of how to make a win modem work in
SuSE. Yes, I know there are several organizations devoted to winmodems and
drivers are which readely available but SuSE for all its other glories and
leading edge programs apparently does not include those with the
distribution. I find this strange as they have the IBM drivers for laptops.
The computer I am installing this on is a laptop. Nor does SuSE provide a
means to configure a scanner. I have a small scanner catridge that fits into
a Cannon portable BJC-85 printer. To me though the major problem with SuSE is
that I just don't trust them and this goes back to the 5.3 days when I spent
6 months trying to install a modem under SuSE finally switching to RH and
accomplishing the configuration in 15 minutes. Every time I would configure
SuSe they had some program that would immediately change my configuration
back to their settings which brings me back to Win modems..
Then there is the RH 8.0 distribution that I originally purchased to installed
on the laptop which has some sort of weird new interface known only to RH. I
won't express any more of my negative feelings toward this distribution on
this list. I have pretty well been drained on that score on sever other lists
but suffice it to say my best comment on this was that "RH did a hatchet job
on Gnome combined with complete distruction of KDE". Major point here is that
I feel violated for purchasing such trash.
There are several points to this rambling with all three of these
distributions playing a far distant second fiddle to RH 7.2 and Mandrake of
the same ventage. I recall I tried one of Paul's free Mandrake distributions
and liked it as well as RH 7.2 but not having a full box set I stayed with
RH. Some are going to question the RH 7.2 over RH 7.3 but realize here that I
am not speaking of the individual programs but the distribution and its
stability. The programs can be upgraded by download. RH 7.3 is far too
unstable for me. For one thing modem connections freeze up for no apparent
reason. Kppp was stable in RH 7.2 but it is not in RH 7.3. This should have
been a tip off to the problems with RH 8.0 and KDE since I use Kppp for the
modem.
As for attempting to install linux on the laptop. I quite well. I have color
visual screen which to most people would look quite acceptable but here
another problem enters I am color blind - nothing severe - I just can not
tell the difference in paster brown, pastel green, and pastel gray. Well you
can imagine what colors the screen of all three of the latest (RH, SuSE, and
Mandrake) screen appears in. To me it looks like shit when I am being polite.
I can not speak for SuSE but this problem did not exist in the older RH or
Mandrake.
If the screen was all of my discust with these three then the problem would be
one thing but that in reality only masks the real problems. I can not find
Kppp. nor usermount, not midnight commander just to name a few minor things
that have been left out. The distributions have been gutted of many highly
relevant programs. Folks they just are not there.
As far as I am concerned the only folks that would appreciate RH 8.0, SuSE
8.1, and Mandrake 8.2 are folks who think that MS Windows XP is the greatest
thing since man has invented. These distributions have been dumbed down,
stupified, and ioditic to such an extent that I sincerely hope that there is
no one on this list with the exception of the newest of newbies who would
appreciate them.
The problem is that I find this sad as I know that I am not currently up to
Debian but that is beginning to look like the only distribution that has not
been complified idiotified.
As far as my current laptop the situation is exactly what one of my old
professor friends at USF ask me when I was demonstrating my dual boot Windows
/ Linus laptop to him. What does Linux here (on the laptop) bring to the
picture besides a lot of un-necessary problems?
Frankly I have no answer to this question as I am highly considering taking
that trash off my laptop.
Boy, if only I could figure out how to put RH 7.2 on it.
Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:57:32 EDT