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Re: Why

On 7/12/99 Evan Moore wrote:


I am using R5 right now on my box at home. No seg faults (except in some
crappy c programs i have written).
i suspect alot of the instability to due to booting with bootx and broken kernels for my hardware. 


> aherm well, this blue G3 i try to get GNU/Linux on is a fairly large
> chunk of Linux hostile hardware...  (ATI cards anyone?) so no you
> don't have to deal with finding compatible hardware your just stuck
> with the nice incompatible stuff you get :-)
>
If you want to try that blue G3 again there are now drivers for it.
I have tried them the results are still poor, and its not easy to try the newer kernels because the R5 compiler seems to be broken (i compile the same source with same config as a kernel BenH compiled with the R3 installer his boots my machine mine just hangs...) i have found many other things fail to compile because R5 is broken and has missing .h files all over (despite installing all the proper -dev packages.)
right now i only use the R5 install to try and test the new bootloader as soon as i have that working with a kernel from BenH and i have the time to do the download i am dumping linuxppc and getting debian. the linuxppc-user list compared to the debian-ppc list speaks volumes of the problems in linuxppc. (which could partly be blamed on it being based on redhat rawhide, the redhat unstable branch i would guess...)
besides that i just don't really want to run a redhat distro there are too many things that annoy me about it. 


> one thing that really annoys me is I cannot go to kernel.org and get
> the latest kernel tarball, make config ; make dep ; make clean ; make
> <whatever> ; install and have it work on a PPC like you can on most
> other archs...

i've never tried it with my linux ppc box, but i never though that would
be a problem, i'm looking at the kernel source right now and here is ppc,
mabye someday when i have the time, I'll get around to compiling my own
kernel for my linuxppc box at home.
yes there is a ppc tree in the sources and it MIGHT work for older machines but for the newer ones you have to patch the hell out of it to get them to work, and unfortunately the patches are like running unstable dev kernels (because well when patches are stable enough Linus will include them) but like I said above it looks very much like the R5 compiler is broken in regards to kernel compiling anyway 


Anyways after using Debian/Linuxppc/Mandrake/WinXX(super yuck)/MacOs on my
boxes at home, it was my experience that Linuxppc was the easiest to
install (besides MacOS).
you only have to install once (usually). and for me anyway i would rather a harder install and get something that works in the end then an easy install and something broken. 


As for the Debian/Mandrake install on the i386,
well i can't get X to run at all either because my supper crappy video
card is not supported.
I could not get X to run on this G3 because of the super not supported ATI card, again this has nothing to do with any distro or the archetecture. 

(well i did eventually get it to run, slowly(very), and unstably)


I'v installed debian on many many machines at
work and none of them have been as simple as linuxppc, but i have
installed linuxppc on only one box, so i stand by my point that
linuxppc is easy to install *only* on an 8600 maby other too.
try installing redhat, you will see it is the exact same installer and thus just as easy to install even in i386 (easier in fact since you can actually do silly things like booting the OS on i386 :) ) 


and IMO the
biggest pain in the ass OS to install is WinNT. Whenever the installer
died, it never told me why, just kept on dying.
a good example of why small simple console based installers are the way to go instead of big bloated pretty installers. 

Ethan
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