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Re: Debain on the rise ! - However ....



Kent:

At 01:43 PM 2/2/04 -0600, you wrote:
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Wrong, IMO! I think it is quite arrogant to dismiss a "newbie" list because of an attitude that "newbies would be too dumb to find it!"


Perhaps it is arrogant, but I agree with the person referred to above as "you" (Monique maybe?). Even experienced users might have a problem deciding which list to post to. For example, I'm printing to a network printer shared off an NT server; is my problem related to the printer driver, or to Samba setup, or to domain authentication, or to a firewalling network issue, or what? If I post to Debian-Printing, the person who knows that the answer is Samba-related may be the person who never hangs out on Debian-Printing. So not finding an answer on Debian-Printing, I either get frustrated and give up, or I cross-post to ten different Debian lists, increasing the noise on several lists, and making it harder to search the archives for answers.


Point taken.


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And what about discretization in other areas? I asked a question about the Debian install (3.0 r1) not recognizing my HDDs connected to a Rocket-133 PCI-IDE card (a few days ago---titled "New Debian install + Rocket133 = no HDDs! (Please help..."). I followed-up my first post with some details I forgot (like the version of Debian and the fact that I tried *all* the installs, starting with the 2.4 kernel). I included *lots* of detail---as much as I reasonably could. Please look! I spent a *long* time composing the e-mail, so that I could provide a reasonably-well-formed question. The result? I got *one* reply (thank you!), but it suggested: (1) use the "bf24" install---which I was already doing, and (2) build a new kernel for the install---an issue which I had addressed in my follow-up post (basically saying that I'd never compiled a kernel before, and even if I *did* compile a new kernel, I didn't know how to use *that* kernel for a Debian installation).
Sadly, it appears that no one knew the answer to your problem. This does sometimes happen. I for one have never even heard of a "Rocket-133 PCI-IDE card", and wouldn't have the first suggestion for you. Thus, I kept quite.

If you have on-board IDE controllers, you might try plugging your hard drive into that, just to see what results you get. I suspect that the Rocket-133 card simply isn't yet supported by the standard kernel drivers. Perhaps RedHat included third-party drivers. This is one of the advantages of using a consumer-oriented distro. Unless this driver is "Free", it's not going to show up in Debian, and if a Debian developer doesn't have this card, he's not likely to spend time/effort to develop a Free version of the driver.

I understand it's frustrating for you, but as a general rule, the more rare that a piece of hardware is, the less likely it is to be supported.


Well, I'll tell you the frustrating part. The frustrating part is that I actually *went* to the Debian site to find which IDE controller might be best supported! I think that I then went to www.linux.org, and maybe the LDP. I forgot what supported-hardware page I fiannly found, but it had IDE controllers listed by ATA speeds, and under ATA133, it said something like "pretty much any ATA133 card". I noticed under ATA100 that some "Rocket" card(s) was(were) listed---from Highpoint (www.highpoint-tech.com). The Rocket-133 is just a cheap, plain-Jane ATA133 controller. No doubt, I missed some "official" list of supported HW, but I did *try*!

And thanks for your kind reply!

Bruce.

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