RE: Why do I need to be a %^#$# programmer to use Linux?
Nate,
The pcmcia issue sounds familiar - there are two types - 16bit and 32bit.
If it's an xircom card (now owned by Intel) you will need to enable either
16bit or 32 bit in the bios of the laptop. Xircom cards are easy to tell -
silver strip at the end that goes into the laptop port means 16 bit. Gold
means 32 bit. That can make a difference when installing drivers for xircom
cards i've found (I used to work at Toshiba on their helpdesk and i've seen
this happen quite a fair bit).
As to drivers from the Intel site, it's really badly organised now imho.
The old xircom site was much nicer. Best way (and i'm sure you've most
probably done this already) is to find the model name (something like
RBE-100) etc etc and do a search via that. I DO presume you downloaded the
right driver though (last sentence was a "just in case").
As to Barry - don't give up. As Nate has said (and i'm finding myself) you
do tend to learn more about how things work, and why with Debian. Redhat is
OK, Suse I cannot stand for a variety of issues I will not name here.
Enough of that, i'm not going to enter into a distribution flamewar. A lot
of stuff goes over the top of my head, and some stuff I look at and go "but
I did it RIGHT, why isn't it working?" and then I jump up and down at my end
lol.
Nate, I think (if memory serves me correct), Win 95 supported around 3000
devices, win98 around 4500, win me around 8000, win2k around 7500 and win xp
around 11000 devices. I'm not sure how that compares to linux support. And
- why use staroffice 6 - Openoffice does wonders :-)
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: nate [mailto:debian-user@aphroland.org]
Sent: Friday, 13 September 2002 7:01 AM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org; David Pastern
Subject: Re: Why do I need to be a %^#$# programmer to use Linux?
deFreese, Barry said:
> I am no programmer and have no way of tracking this shit down. Why
> should I have to? I would love to be a programmer but that ain't my
> baliwig, I am mainly a hardware/infrastructure guy and this kind of stuff
> is frustrating as hell.
I think you are greatly overstating things, I do not (personally) know
many Linux users who are programmers(the only ones who are do UNIX
programming for a living). I know probably a dozen or so Linux users
including my mom and sister who are not programmers. I've been using
linux since 1996 and I am not a programmer(even my shell scripting skills
are pretty bad).
Some hardware works better in linux then others. For the least headaches
use well supported software. Modern linux distributions contain WAY more
driver support out-of-the-box then any version of Win32 I've seen(I haven't
used WinXP so maybe things are different). Once you get beyond the
out-of-the-box support things can get significantly more complicated as
you have experienced.
Debian is for sure not for newbies, and for the most part I wouldn't
reccomend redhat either. SuSE would be the distro of choice I think if
you want the most drivers and most support. Redhat is good for those
commercial apps that need it, but for more exotic hardware I strongly
believe that SuSE is the way to go if you want more of a painless install
and configuration(at the expense IMO of less flexibility which is why
despite using it off and on for the past 7 months I can't stand to use
SuSE on my systems but I bought it for my mom and sister).
A similar experience I had on a user's win2000 laptop.. I gave him
a Xircom 10/100 NIC for his thinkpad 600 running win2000. He used to
work at MS and is probably a MCP at least or something, he spent a good
30 minutes trying to install it, gave up, I took it spent another hour
trying to install it. I am *POSITIVE* I used the right drivers(downloaded
from intel). but every driver I tried to use Win2000 "this doesn't seem
to be the right driver so I won't even bother trying it, pick another".
Believe me, it is at least(if not more so) frustrating then what you
may have gone through. At least on linux, I can recompile the driver,
or recompile the kernel. With Win2000(in this instance), There was a
choice of 2 different "unified" drivers from Intel, and neither worked.
By the time I was done I wanted to throw the laptop out the window. Of
course putting the Xircom card in a linux laptop resulted in immediate
detection & configuration without having to load drivers(thanks to
pcmcia-cs's inclusion of so many drivers). I replaced the Xircom in the
win2000 laptop with a 3com and it started working right away. I think
the problem was that win2000 detected the card and then added a couple
high ascii characters to the end of the name(e.g. Unknown PCMCIA card(small
black box)(small black box)) then when I tried to load the driver it
looked for those small black boxes(which could be anything), and couldn't
find them so it puked.
And this is using Hardware and software that is SPECIFICALLY designed
for windows!! Most linux drivers are mere snips of code that are generally
unsupported by the hardware vendors, and yet the drivers work better in
many instances..
I highly reccomend SuSE 7.3 Professional(SuSE 8 to a lesser extent),
it runs about $75 for the full boxed set or you can get the "upgrade"
(which is a full version minus printed manuals) for about $25. For
another $25 you can get a full copy of Staroffice 6 in SuSE "format".
Really worth it if you want such a "ease of use" setup.
nate
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