The only thing that bugged me was how fast we were to judge Linux and how forgiving we were of M$. We assumed that the Windoze box would connect to Eatel, though we saw little more than a "generic pci controller" recognized. This site shows that Windows autodialing is not always auto, http://www.eatel.net/techsupp/inetfaq.htm We do not know what the Windoze system would have done given unrecognized hardware, though we know that newer devices often don't "support" older M$ operating systems. The stock answer to that is to tell the user that they need a new OS or an older modem. When a windoze system gets hosed up like that people do a reinstall without even thinking about it. The Linux system, though confused by dishonest hardware, never crashed or needed additional software that might not be available in the future. While that might not be graceful enough, we never gave the wizard a chance to fix it's own configuration files given a change in hardware. Heck, we could have done a complete reinstall without losing personal data if /home was it's own partition. I feel guilty for letting high expectations for free software get in the way of demonstrating some of it's strengths.
Overall, it was a good meeting and nice work under pressure John! I'm sorry if we got in your way with our negative comments. On 2003.03.26 08:44 Dustin Puryear wrote: > I personally made a few comments myself. Most notably I said that we should > just throw Windows on the box. Sorry if that grated on you, but it was > humor. You have to live it. Also, to be frank here, if Linux wants to be > known as the better OS then it needs to get that kind of stuff straight. If > Linux or Linux-based software bombs out over weird modems then there is a > problem. The wizard should have gracefully recovered. > >
