Why maybe you should bother
On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 11:12:18PM -0800, S Clement wrote:
> I am wondering if I should be sending this to Debian or to a psychiatric facility.
>
> I have just spent a little over two weeks unable to connect to the web. My windows connection went down and I could not re-install it. I figured that shouldn't be a problem, I had Debian 3.0 on the other half of the drive.
>
> After more than a dozen tries, understandable since I haven't installed it for over five years, I finally got it installed the way I wanted it. Then I hit the wall.
>
> I still can't use it to connect to the web. I got to the point where it told me something about a sequence that was not 6-bit pure and the 7-bit was always zero. X would not work. I was told that there were no screens available. The usb connectiion did not work and neither did the printer, an HP Officejet 4110.
>
> I have ordered an installation set for 3.1 to see if it works any better. If it doesn't, I'll have to relegate Debian to the status of toy, somthing to play with. For work I will have to use WinXP. With that I stick the disks in and it installs and works. There are modifications I make, but it works.
I'm writing you directly because you haven't responded to any of the
posts on the mailing list. Mind you, some of the replies you got are
better not responded to. There's a whole flame war going on about
how rude some of the replies were. It makes amusing reading, but not at
all helpful to you.
One problem with your letter is that it tells us your frustration, but
has very few details of just what is going wrong. Without more facts,
we can't help much.
Please let us know whether you are having any success with sarge.
===
Just ao you know you're not alone, let me tell you my problems. (And you
others, please don't respone to *my* problems in this thread, I'll be
starting other threads, with details, fopr the things I want help with.
Save this thread for S. Clement's problems).
I've been using Debian for several years now, with varying success. It
is now the only OS on my main computer, and it's sarge I'm running. I
never got the accelerated graphics working, sound sometimes disappears
mysteriously (I have an idea my daughter's login takes over the sound
card and won't let anyone else at it, even when she's not around). But
debain sarge remained installed and reliable even though I had to
replace my graphics card twice, and my motherboard once (they turned
into smoke). I've installed Windows twice during the same few years,
and last March, Windows refused to reinstall at all. I still have all
my family's Windows files on the hard disk, but I'm afraid waiting for
Windows to be reinstallable is like waiting for the messiah.
I find the big difference between Windows and Linux is this. Both of
them make a lot of demands on the user. But Linux's demands are
up-front. ONce you have it running, it is extremely reliable. Windows,
on the other hand is a breeze to get running on your machine because
it's usually preinstalled, but it's whole user-interface seems to be
designed to conceal its flaws. Then when it finally breaks down (and
despite Microsoft's PR, it *does* break down a lot more than Linux) you
are really up shit creek.
I now have a new machine. I tried installing Sarge. It didn't
recognise my on-board ethernet (so I plugged a fifteen-dollar ethernet
card in for it to use instead). It doesn't really know what to do
with my on-board Nvidia video chipset, although in text-mode it's
fine. I'm having trouble getting X to work. Well, I did get it to
work, but tiny toolbar icons that are a quarter of an inch high
on my older machine are more than an inch tall on the new machine,
and naturally, not much fits on the screen at that resolution. I havn't
figured out how to get it to react to my mouse. I haven't even *tried* to
do anything with sound. And the recend death of my father has put all
of this stuff very much on the back burner.
The root cause seems to be that my machine has new chipsets from nvidia
that are not yet supported properly on sarge -- after all, sarge was
released last summer after about a year of code freeze. So I can't
really expect support for recent hardware.
But I'm not giving up. I hear rumours that etch will recognise
them. So I'll be trying that next. I *know* that I'll get around to
getting it all working someday, and it already does the mission-critical
things -- it's acting as a disk server for my other machines.
===
Woody (version 3.0) is really old by now, and you can't expect it to
handle even slightly new hardware well. You likely only need the first
CD to get things up. It contains all of the essentials. Packages are
allocated to the other CDs in order of popularity.
If you have an inexpensive broadband connection and use the package
manager 'aptitude', it's easier to download the other packages you need
through the internet than to put a CD in the CD drive.
That said, I myself prefer to have a complete CD set as a security
blanket, just in case. But I never seem to use it.
The netinstall CD contains even less than the first CD of the complete
CD set. It downloads just about *everything* it needs from from the
net. Overall, even if you download and burn the CD, it ends up being
less downloading because it only downloads what you need.
Again, please tell us whether you are having any luck with sarge.
And if it doesn't work, it helps us to know just what hardware you've
got, and exactly what the error messages are. When I report problems
during an installation, I copy them literally onto a piece of paper,
and when I'm at my email site, I type them in again.
I hope things get better for you soon.
-- hendrik
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