> works with windows to help on a newsgroup. They want you to buy a book
> or get MCS-idontrealyknowwhatsup-E certified. You'll find people that
> will help, but not to the same degree as in the open source world -
> where people just want to help for helps sake - it more of a whats in it
> for me ($$) kind of thing in windows land.
I've just had the opposite experience. We're porting an application from
ASP/Windows to SUNWAS/Linux. We bought RedHat Enterprise Linux. We had a
pretty hard time installing it as it turns out almost none of the hardware
that we commonly use is supported (SATA, IDE RAID, etc.). That's our fault
for not investigating it first. However, we were using commodity hardware so
we really didn't expect there to be an issue.
Getting all the relevant services up and running (the SUNWAS, FTP, etc.) was
a nightmare, mostly because of obscure configuration settings. Sites like
the VSFTPD seem less concerned with documentation and examples and more
concerned with attacking the security history of other FTP daemons.
We had always been used to searching the news groups and the Web for
solutions to our problems. We rarely have to resort to calling tech support.
However, Web searches generally produced nothing but MAN pages, which are
more like hints than actual manuals. They generally assume that you already
know how to do something but need to be reminded of a switch. There also
seems to be some unspoken rule that a MAN page should not include any
mention of syntax or a working example.
News group searches were down right frustrating. Attempts to figure out how
to set up the SUNWAS as a service on RedHat produced one argument after the
next. Most were flame wars between RedHat and Debian users (ostensibly),
arguing over which distribution's utility for managing services is better.
In the end, RedHat Linux was pretty much installed via trial and error. I
was able to set up SUNWAS as a service by copying other service scripts and
changing them until I found a magic combination that seemed to work. Most of
my Linux experience was that way. I found very little help on the Web or in
the news groups. We spent much more time on the phone with RedHat than any
other vendor.
I'm sure there are good resources out there. I'm also sure that, after
spending years working in a largely Windows world, I'll need to learn the
vocabulary of a new operating system. After all, it's difficult to search
for a solution if you're using the wrong words to describe your problem.
Nevertheless, this first attempt was a pretty disappointing experience.
Ben Rogers
http://www.c4.net
v.508.240.0051
f.508.240.0057
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