And your point is??? Jeez dude, get to the point. For what it's worth,
I'm running a dual boot setup with GRUB on a IBM Thinkpad T21 with RH
8.0 and Windows 2000. Everything works fine as it did when I had
Mandrake 9 on this system instead of RH 8.0. It's just your personal
preference and what works best for you. If you can't get the built in
Winmodem to work just get a PCMCIA modem. They aren't that expensive
anymore and are easily recognized by most of the popular distros.
Vince
On Sat, 2002-11-16 at 21:25, Frank Roberts - SOTL wrote:
> 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
>
>
-- Vince Meiste <vince.meiste@gte.net>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:57:37 EDT