Andreas K. Foerster wrote:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 05:35:29PM +0600, Day Brown wrote:No, I was quite sincere Andreas. I am a big frog in a small pond, and locals are beginning to look into windoz alternatives. The local small town, Leslie AR, ISP has had increasing problems with their win NT servers. Mac and Linux users moving into the area cant logon. I prolly was the only one who liked using dos/arachne/nettamer, and I couldnt make them work either.
Anyone care to suggest what the percentage of downloads need to be compled vs just extracted to the appropriate directory and run? Anyone care to offer how often this needs to be done in dos,... drdos, romdos, freedos, msdos?If Linux is too complicated for you, then just let it be.
But there are people, who need more than just Dos!
BTW. I think I had much more trouble with installing some Dos programs,
than I had with installing Linux programs.
Being stubborn about not using Microsoft software, which I have not used since I got COMPAQ DOS 3.31, I started getting, installing, and trying Linux distros. BSD, COREL, CALDERA, DEBIAN, MANDRAKE, SLACKWARE, STORM, SUSE. SUSE 6.4 finally did get past the 'connect'.
And, along the way, got a pretty good notion of what Linux installation has been like. (and let's not get into the BSD thing again. Unless you love BSD, you really dont giva rat's rectal orifice). My experience lacks some continuity cause my house burned down in 96, but in general the install scripts have dispensed with much more of the arcane trivia and PnP detected correctly much more of the hardware as time went on.
But I was looking for wider input than my experience, and yours is certianly hopeful. Which distros have you used? I found COREL to be appealling to windoz users, but I could not get anything installed on it beyond what came on the CDs (the DELUX has WORDPERFECT, PHOTOPAINT, & WINE)
which was considerable, and adequate for most folks. But COREL's PPP driver wont get past the 'connect' any more at our ISP.
Then, last month, SUSE wouldnt logon any more. But I'd already received a
new REDHAT [PINK TIE], and that did the trick. And in my email, a note from the ISP that they'd 'upgraded'. This issue may get into a whole nother thread, been seeing snippets of it around.
But I can see where the distro outfits might want you to havta go back to them for 'upgrades' (and more money) to keep up. And to do that, make it harder to install other things. The REDHAT RPM, for instance tells me that it 'will not install anything from an archive with a major number higher than 3'. I dunno if I can blame that on CHEAPBYTES.COM. I do know that the MANDRAKE 9 they sent dont install. And dont tell me to go to the original distro. I got REDHAT 5.2 soon after the fire, and spent a couple weeks fussing with CDs that had 'corrupted RPM' all over them.
But of course, people who dont have trouble, dont post here.
One of the things FREEDOS could be good for is a boot disk that could get a system online to download whatever patches are needed to get it up and running despite CD file read errors. I think I recall one of the Linux distros mentioning that faulty archives would be logged, and then the correct ones downloaded later. Which wouldda been nice for MANDRAKE, but it didnt get installed far enuf to get online.
In general, I dont see the error recovery option vaible in Linux, whereas it is always duck soup to use a boot floppy in FREEDOS, and once you have an operating system on the screen, try to figure out what the problem is. In general, what I have seen in many Linux install scripts, is that the only user option is to abort, and discard the wasted hour(s).
But in any case, I am being confronted with the choice of which distro to put on new and used computers in the area, and I'd rather not get calls for 'support' if I can help it. Having all the bells and whistles takes a back seat, cause most of these Arkie users dont have that much experience to know how to use them anyway.
But if Microsoft is true to it's reputation, it is deliberately trying to sabotage the non-win system logon process. I know of two Mac users who now have win NT/XP machines. And if this be so, then all of us dos/linux users will be confronted with ppp drivers that dont work. How to download the patches without an isp? seems like back to the basic BBS system.
Does FREEDOS still have a support BBS?
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