Giving up on Linux...

[Donald Correll]

Dear xyzz,
  If it is any consolation to you I salso have had similar problems 
trying to boot from CD on a high pwer AMD system running M$ XP Pro. I am 
sure that it is something I overlooked in the Bios but there will always 
echo in the brain that old saying:' DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run' 
I have managed to get the CD boot on other dual boot machines but this 
current peccadillio is exasperating. I am sure I followed the 
instructions for the Disk (Knoppix, sorry off topic a bit) but with Red 
Hat 9 running on one machine and Suse Pro 9.0 on another this Asus A7n8x 
would be ideal for Fedora Core 2. But then I am forgetting my problems 
with the Nvidia FX 5700 card which I have never got to run with any 
distro no matter what. That is undoubtedly a driver issue but the fact 
remains The World is in the grips of a silent but deadly Cyber War. You 
dare not run the MS Patches, yet you often enough have cause to wonder 
just what else Sore Bill and Micro$haft have packed in there. It seems 
as if the cure for malware and scumware is almost as bad as the worm.
  As to your pesimism concerning the future it is a war and as always it 
is hard to be at peace in such circumstances. I first became aware of 
the problem when DVD's mysteriously failed to run under XP and Media 
Player 9, even though they had previously run well.I guess that in a 
nutshell is my complaint. As long as the Code is closed what do you 
really know about what you are running. I bought and paid for that DVD I 
never, ever have used p2p either so now I am running NEro Showtime and 
other than plugin serial numbers am very happy, it works.
That in essence is the wonder of Linux at the same time as it is the 
bane. You can actually peek under the hood, provided of course you are 
skilled at programming, but when it comes to installing new hardware and 
devices Windows still takes the useability crown.. Isn't it a pity and a 
shame when those you thought to be friends and sympatico deliver the 
lowest blow of all (SCO funded by M$ of course). Anyway to repeat myself 
there is a warin Cyber Space. On the one hand are the powerfull and fat 
coporate cronies who for a mere lisencing fee say every year will be 
glad to fix you up, and the poor but honest struggling Open Source and 
alternate OS crowd who have been so selfless and unbelievably generous 
in offering us alternative codes and apps that as often as not beat the 
heavily favoured expensive bloatware of M$ and thier ilk. Well I see 
this is verging on a rant so let me close by saying I cannot wait till I 
solve my Driver Issue because I am running out of machines for 
experimental OS and still have Free BSD to go.  :-)
Donald in Braselton, who would like to get a big check but is just 
greatful for his place in the Data Center        
http://www.mindspring.com/~dcorrell
PS And btw nestled in amoungst the IBM big iron and the decrepit legacy 
servers we have three Linux servers and I get to fix them on that rare 
occassion when something goes wrong but thanx to Google I managed to 
look great, no money but it was satisfying to find the necessary clues 
relatively painlessly for a change.

xyzzy at hotpop.com wrote:

>... for the foreseeable future on my home system.
>
>My home system is an ASUS PVP800-VM motherboard which has hi-speed USB, ACPI, 
>Pentium IV with hyperthread, S-ATA, Intel Extreme 2 graphics (865G chipset).
>
>I also have an antique Adaptec 2930 SCSI card for my LS-2000 scanner.
>
>Redhat 9 install disks won't even boot on this machine unless I disable the 
>Enhanced IDE (<-- totally bogus!!) ...  Fedora Core 1 is about the same.
>
>I decided on FC1 because it uses a later kernel (2.4.22 ... 24?) which seems 
>to support hyperthread and S-ATA better.  When I finally got FC1 installed (I 
>had to disable Enhanced IDE, install, compile a custom kernel and then 
>re-enable Enhanced IDE), it was horribly SLOOOOOOW... running a shell in X 
>and pasting a long command line took forever to complete.
>
>I figured that this might be due to the graphics driver, so I updated the 
>graphics driver from Intel and then X crashed with a segmentation fault in 
>the closed source part of the driver when attempting to start the X server.  
>Even changing back to the original driver in the XF86Config didn't fix the 
>segfault.  Gotta reinstall?  Who needs this? What a nightmare.
>
>The issue here is that Windows XP runs "out-of-the-box" on this system without 
>problems and it is FAST, once it boots.
>
>I could try the 2.6 kernel (and I have a LOT of experience with computers), 
>but what's the use?  The 2.6 kernel is not ready for prime-time, not by a 
>long shot, and neither, it seems, is Linux in general.
>
>I have seen too many bugs and posts on these topics about SMP/hyperthread/ACPI 
>and other issues that cause the system to lock up after a time of running or 
>not run at all and no fixes seem to be in sight - maybe because these 
>problems are intractable without inside information about ACPI and other 
>things that Intel will give to Microsoft but not to Open Source developers. 
>Maybe Redhat just doesn't care. Who knows?
>
>I pity the average user that tries to install and run Linux on their latest 
>hardware.  If I, as an experienced software engineer, throw up my hands, what 
>would a relative newbie who just needs the system to work do?
>
>I have real problems seeing how Linux is going to make it to the desktop by 
>2005 with these kinds of road-blocks.
>
>Sad.
>
>
>  
>