Re: Don't Waste Your Time With Linux

From: Jean-David Beyer (jdbeyer_at_exit109.com)
Date: 06/14/04 

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:48:04 -0400

Lamar Rustin wrote:
> After enduring years of painful computing with Windows I decided to spring
> for SUSE Professional at $109.00 on Amazon. All I can say is DON'T waste
> your money on this pile of half completed garbage. I have a mainstream
> Asus P4P800 Deluxe Intel mother board and virtually nothing on this board
> worked.
> My RAID controller, a VIA 6410 did not work. Sound did not work. The giga
> ethernet did not work.
> SATA did not work.
> My scanner was not supported (Canon). My printer was not supported
> (Lexmark). My mouse extra buttons do not work (Logitech).
>
> My advice is to avoid Linux all together and use Windows XP because at
> least it works with all my hardware.
> Lamar

I have installed various releases of Red Hat Linux on 5 different machines
with various hardware on each. Three of these machines were mine, and two
belonged to friends. In all cases, the installations proceeded normally
and the stuff all worked (sometimes after a little twiddling -- the first
time I tried to configure a real PCI modem I messed up and it took a while
to figure out what I did wrong. Windows reported the modem was on COM4 and
it worked under Windows, so I told Linux it was on /dev/ttyS3 and it did
not work at all. Well it turned out it was on /dev/ttyS4 on Linux). I am
not pushing Red Hat, but it is the only one I am familiar with.

My oldest machine has a Quantum Designs P5I430TX TIB motherboard (I never
heard of it), a P166 processor, 256Meg RAM, ATI PCI video card, and
everything else (U.S.R. dial-up modem, Soundblaster card, Intel 10/100
NIC) is ISA. Two hard IDE hard drives.

The middle machine has a Tyan S1832DL Tiger 100 motherboard, two 550 MHz
Pentium III processors, 512Meg RAM, Matrox G200 video card, ISA
soundblaster card, ISA U.S.R. real dial-up modem, PCI Intel 10/100 nic, a
Symbios 8951U Ultra 2 LVD PCI SCSI controller driving two Quantum Atlas
10000 rpm hard drives and an Exabyte VXA-1 tape drive. Another Symbios
narrow PCI SCSI controller driving a Plextor 12/10/32S CD-ROM burner.

My newest machine has a SuperMicro X5DP8-G2 motherboard with two 3.06MHz
XEON processors, 4096Meg RAM, built-in ATI video controller, two built-in
Ultra/320 SCSI controllers (Adaptec AIC-7902 chip), two built-in Ethernet
controllers (Intel 82546EB chip), a USR real PCI dial-up modem, a PCI
soundblaster.

The other two machines are both by Dell and are a Dimension D200 (old) and
a Dimension 2100(I am not sure of that number). The D200 has all the
memory it will hold -- 64 Meg -- and it swaps a lot: drives me crazy, but
it runs Mozilla OK and abiword, and that is all the owner wanted. Hard
drive seems to have died and the new ones all test dead as well. I fear
the IDE controller may be bad, but I have not finished with that.

The new Dell has 256 Meg RAM and works fine.

I have been frustrated a lot by tedious configuration problems because I
could not find the required documentation, but usually I have been helped
by people on com.os.linux.misc and related boards, usually very promptly.
What drives me crazy are the problems that take me months of part-time
effort to solve only to find out it was a simple misunderstanding.

But none of the problems have been show stoppers: getting gnucash to run
took a long time. Getting the lm-sensors stuff to work was driving me up
the wall for a couple of months, but they seem to be working after a
fashion now. And none of them come close to the aggravation I had when I
really tried to use Windows 95. I gave that up in early 1998 because those
problems were insoluble and were show stoppers: three BSODs per week on
average, different Microsoft products requiring conflicting versions of
.dll libraries, etc, and dozens of crashes per day of programs mostly
provided by Microsoft. I could not live with that. 

-- 
   .~.  Jean-David Beyer           Registered Linux User 85642.
   /V\                             Registered Machine   241939.
  /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey     http://counter.li.org
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