Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 15:15:07 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Haikal Saadh <haikal@freeshell.org> Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: A FreeBSD User Reviews Mandrake. Let the flames flow. Message-ID: <20021204131506.GB4377@gothmog.gr> In-Reply-To: <000001c29b84$9a400370$9802a8c0@warhawk> References: <000001c29b84$9a400370$9802a8c0@warhawk>
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* Note: I don't like Mandrake Linux, but the original post isn't quite
objective about the relative advantages and/or disadvantages that
Mandrake might have over FreeBSD, and I hate seeing people bitch about
something just for the sake of bitching... This makes FreeBSD look
bad too :-(
On 2002-12-04 21:02, Haikal Saadh <haikal@freeshell.org> wrote:
> I want a flavour of unix simply because, well, to bullet it out,
> O I hate windows 9x/ME, and my laptop's really too underpowered for
> 2k or xp.
Make note here. "Undrepowered laptop" means that this laptop has too
many things to do and too little power to actually go on doing them.
> Base Requirements:
> O No Bullshit setup/configuration.
This is too vague to be of any use to someone who's trying to promote
either Linux or BSD.
> O Must work with my digital camera.
Later on, you described that this worked fine. Linux seems OK here :-]
> O Must be able to get on the web with a Mozilla-type browser.
Mozilla is a resource pig. If your laptop cannot run Windows 95 or
similar without crawling to its knees, I seriously doubt it will be
able to run anything Mozilla-like without being slow.
> O Must run evolution. Sorry, no other mailer will do.
Sorry this mailer is not slim, small, powerful and less of a resource
hungry beast than most of them GUI mailers out there.
> O Must be able to get on ICQ,YM,MSN, and IRC.
I only use the last of these, and even then I have noticed how
difficult it is to be on IRC and do *real* work. You will almost
certainly find programs that let you use all of them though; both on
Linux and BSD.
> O Must be able to do stuff while listening to mp3's off an smb
> share.
It's an overworked laptop. Don't expect it to be a fast performer if
you load X11, KDE or Gnome, Mozilla, three of four chat clients, and a
host of other tools and *then* start playing mp3 audio :-/
> Super Extended Requirements
> O Must be able to run Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia flash (or
> equivalent) (dream)
Do these even run at all under Windows emulation? If you really need
these, and a few other MS-based tools that you mentioned, and you
absolutely cannot do your work without them... is BSD or Linux the
best choise for you? I'm not sure.
> Package installation was a royal pain, as it was slow as, and in
> grand linux fashion, insisted on crapping shit all over my harddrive.
> The final install weighed in at around 2.5 gig, as the installer did
> give me gnome and kde, and I did not make any efforts to stop it.
I haven't installed Mandrake Linux lately, but are you sure you had to
install both KDE and Gnome? As a matter of fact, do you really *need*
X11 at all? I don't install anything X11-related to machines that are
relatively slow or have limited resources.
> The installer itself, I found too colourful for my tastes...as if it
> was aimed at 7 year olds or something.
Taste is really something that no installer can satisfy for *all* the
possible users of today and ever after. The fact that you didn't like
the looks of the Mandrake installer should be considered in the same
context as something that you mentioned later:
> FreeBSD's /stand/sysinstall, like the installer, may not be
> pretty, but it works. Everytime. And you have no other tools to
> confuse you either.
If the looks of the installer don't matter, why are you bitching about
the looks of Mandrake's installer?
> The first few hours...
> Were spent in frustration because my network card was not being
> detected. After much frustration at google and google groups not
> being able to answer my question, I finally set the bios setting to
> use 16-bit cardbus, and it worked.
You need to rebuild a kernel with support for 32-bit PCMCIA cards for
this to work. I remember this from a while ago that I was reading the
PCMCIA-HOWTO. You can find the PCMCIA-HOWTO at:
http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/ftp/doc/PCMCIA-HOWTO.html
The relevant part reads:
Include 32-bit (CardBus) card support?
This option must be selected if you wish to use 32-bit CardBus
cards. It is not required for CardBus bridge support, if you
only plan to use 16-bit PC Cards.
Sorry, but not looking at the existing documentation is not a very
good excuse for complaining in a "this sucks" manner.
> No mention of this setting having to do anything was mention on the
> web. (And google is the web as far as I'm concerned).
Google is not ``the web'' but, putting this aside, you shouldn't have
started on the web; the documentation of your distribution is a better
place to look for hints about problems. The HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs of
Linux are installed as part of the system install by most of the Linux
distributions I know of. These documents are an invaluable resource
of information both for Linux users and users of other UNIX-like
operating systems. Do not *ever* underestimate the number of mistakes
that you can avoid by reading the documentation of your system :-)
> Right, anyhow, once I got the network card fired up, it didn't do
> anything. Didn't try to get a dhcp lease or anything.
Why should it? You hadn't configured it to do so.
> I tried listeing to mp3's over thenetwork with xmms over an smb
> mounted share, and it crawled. Sound drop outs everytime I tried to
> do anything, like copying files from cd or network.
You have a laptop system that is twice as fast as my old Pentium 133
machine. I could play mp3 audio on *that* machine, and have a kernel
compile running in the background even in the days of Linux-1.2.13.
There's nothing wrong with Linux or its applications. There *is*
something wrong with the way you work though. You're constantly
complaining why the fancy, picturesque, resource eating, GUI programs
that you insist running have eaten all your resources and brought your
machine to its knees. That's not Linux's fault, sorry.
There are mp3 players out there that don't need X11 to run. I have
used mpg123 for a while, and I quite liked it. audio/amp works fine
too. Even audio/mp3blaster is better than loading X11 just to listen
to a song!
> Oh, and even though CD's were automounted, I had trouble reading
> one...it had file names with spaces in it. Nah, refused to copy.
You have forgotten to write "how" you tried to do the copying and what
the error messages (if you got any) were. Are you sure it's not some
mistake you made in your haste to copy the files?
> Moving on, I tried to install the flash demo from the cd under wine,
> but the thing crashes after installshield finished extracting, and
> that's the end of that.
Flash isn't exactly my idea of a program for resource limited computers
either. But I should stop saying that old, same story about small
computers and programs that are big, slow, demanding monsters. It's
going to get boring in a while.
> Maybe I shoulda RTFM, but really, after the xmms test and the cd
> read fiasco, I wasn't going to try.
Yes, you should. Always start at the manuals. That's why they are
written. By not reading any of them, not only do you put yourself in
a position where you can make many mistakes of varying significance
(mistakes that can cause a lot of trouble and make you waste time and
efforts), but you also offend the people who are trying to write those
documentation texts by your acts. It is just like saying to them:
"I don't care about the time you spent to write the documentation.
It's all crap that I won't ever spend a minute reading, and you can
write all you want. I don't care about it."
> So now...
> I'm installing Redhat 8. Will it be good enough to make me not
> overwrite it with FreeBSD once 5.0 comes out? Stay tuned.
What's wrong with FreeBSD 4.X then? Why are you trying to use Linux?
Is FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE or 4.7-STABLE inadequate for your needs? If
yes, how?
- Giorgos
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