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Re: Back to Windows??



> At 09:04 PM 2/18/2001 +0100, A. Demarteau (linux rules!) wrote:
> >On Sat, 17 Feb 2001, Jan van Veldhuizen wrote:
> > > This afternoon I bought a box with Suse Linux 7 and a set of books.
> > > It took me 2 hours, but now X Windows is running properly. But my 
> > printer is
> > > not supported, and I have not yet configured my ISDN modem.
> >That's often the problem with first having the hardware and then deciding
> >to install linux on it.
> 
> Heck, hardware's not a problem as long as 1) you write all your own 
> drivers,

not always possible:
	* HP omnibook 600 PCMCIA bay. forget it.
	* I stopped counting how many winmodems are out there, and the
	  hours of coding life poured into these brain damaged devices 
	  is amazing.  Good thing these guys think playing with telco 
	  protocols is fun, because *I* sure couldn't do it... and it's
	  certainly taking *them* longer than a week or two.

> or 2) you don't buy anything manufactured in the last 2 years.  Of 
> course, even this doesn't hold for video cards.  

more coders get given recent video cards to beat up on ^H^H^H play with.

> Unless you have free year 
> to tweak the X config, you're going to have black bars all around the 
> screen (although truthfully, I've never seen an installation that didn't -- 
> on Linux).

There are standard VESA signal levels.  If you don't want to play beyond
MS' "plug and pray" mentality, you can get exactly the same results they do.
Pretty much with the out of the box XF86Config file, too.

If you do play with it, you can get effects like I have on my desktop (about
12 different size selections) or even curious aspect ratios (give yourself
an HDTV optimized screen, even though you have a 3:4 normal panel like the
rest of us).

Linux allows for different definitions of "works" from its users... but 
there are different distros for "I stick the CD in and it just works" than
debian.  Most of them don't write to hard disks, and aren't much more useful
than an internet coffee shop kiosk. 

The problem that everyone new has stepped into is that freedom with so many
choices leads to a requirement to *choose* ... which is work.  Further,
we have our configurators, our helpful hints, or GUI wizards in a few cases...
and how is a newbie to know what these are called?  If one configurator
doesn't work (a) it can't usually tell so (b) it can't suggest that you
try its buddy instead, or even tell a script to do that.  Debian's packages
make this easier, because debconf can provoke configurators, and apt can
suggest related packages, but it still comes down to *some* trial and error.

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...



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