Re: Another Linux Myth Exposed - Hopeless at playing music ..

Paul J Gans wrote:

David Wright <david_c_wright@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
It depends on what tasks you are talking about whether Windows or Linux is
more friendly. And yes, I agree in some area Linux has to improve, but in
others Windows has some catching up to do. They aren't necessarily idiots,
but they pick areas where Linux is strong and Windows is weak and gloss
over the areas where it is the other way round.

<snip other stuff on comparrisons between XP and Linux>

I agree with most of this. I have done two installs of 10.0,
each one taking about an hour all told in the end.

But I can't get sound working on either machine. I can't find
any help or clues either.

What sound cards do you have and what errors if any are you getting
(probably better to start a new topic)? I have an Audigy, an Audigy 2ZS, an
Oak, SiS and whatever Acer Centrino notebooks use and they have all come up
working after the first boot...

And I can't get my wireless card working on my laptop. It
is a Linksys with a Broadcom chipset. I'd be happy to buy
another card if somebody would give me a clue as to what
works out of the box with 10.0 and what doesn't.

Can't help with that I'm afraid, my laptop has the Centrino b/g chipset and
entering the WPA2 key during installation was all I needed to do...

Configuration is another problem. Yast has gotten very good
but I'd guess that novices would have trouble.

Some of what SuSE does is just awful, such as breaking the
Apache configuration files into many segments. I know why
they do that and it is laudable. But since detailed configuration
has to be done by hand, they certainly have not made *my* job
easier.

But by and large it is a painless install compared to Windows XP.
I've installed that about a dozen times, eight of them on the
same machine...

---- Paul J. Gans

I have to agree in part on this. I haven't played around much with Apache
configuration, but if they haven't put the changes back into the standard
apache tree, they shouldn't be using them. Reading a howto on configuring
apache only to find it bears no relation to how apache is installed on your
machine is frustrating to say the least.

Saying that, it is getting slowly better. But I still hate reading Linux
books which have caveats like "If you are using Debian, type command a (if
you have Red Hat it is a with this parameter, if you are using SUSE it is
command b and Mandrake use command c)." As I said, it is getting better,
slowly, but the different distros still have too many quirks. The standard
directory architecture is a start, but it still allows too many quirks
along the way with different ways of configuring modprobes and init scripts
for example.

This is probalby the biggest plus Windows has at the moment, if you want to
install a new application for Windows, you go to the website and download
the installer (it is also Windows biggest downside, because you can go to a
site and have some intrusive code installed behind your back :-( ). With
Linux you have to either be lucky and it is in one of the existing
repositories, the supplier offers the application in a package for your
distribution, or somebody else somewhere has, otherwise it is downloading a
tar file and trying to install and configure it manually.

SUSE, along with the Packman and Guru repositories are doing a great job
(and to be honest in the last year I have probably downloaded two packages
that weren't in the repository, plus a handful of Superkaramba widgets).
But until there is a universal Linux installer that works for all
distrbutions and the only thing you have to worry about is downloading the
version for your processor platform,it just insn't reaching the
friendliness that the masses require.

If the application runs on Linux with KDE, if those two components are
installed, double clicking on an icon or executing a shell script should
automatically installs the application, regardless of the underlying
distribution. It should be a Linux install script, not a
Debian/FC/Gentoo/Mandriva/SUSE/Ubuntu install script or package...

Some of the package managers are very elegant solutions these days, and if
the software you want is in the repository list, the install is usually
smoother than with Windows, but if the application isn't in the repository
you can have lots of "fun". What we need is for the different distributions
to stop bickering over which package manager is better and to produce a
global *Linux* package manager, not a RH, SUSE or Mandrive one...

Just my 2c.

Dave
.

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