Rex Johnston wrote:
Robert Fisher wrote:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 09:23, Rex Johnston wrote:
My advice to you is to leave the space free, grab a copy of those SuSE disks, find someone who is sufficently clued up to understand the guides http://www.tuxmobil.org and try again. You'll probably not get the printer working, but you *can* print to a file on the windoze partition for later printing when booted into windoze.
Cheers, Rex
I successfully loaded SuSE onto a PC yesterday for Ralph. We got his Canon printer working fine, in fact it was auto-detected.
Well, there you go. I'd not like to guarantee that it will work, and SuSE has modem drivers on the 5th CD.
It could work straight out of the box.
<rant>
I don't mean to bitch and whine, but the small amount of Mandrake i saw yesterday was hopeless. The nvidia
module would not load automatically on boot, god only knows where they've hidden the kdm startup (inittab?), the
hardware detection seemed pretty average, and rpmdrake seemed to have bits missing, like, where do you specify
the installation sources? It should be right there as a menu option, like on YaST, so you can unselect a network install
of some RPM, then the punters can actually *use* the disks provided without it rushing off so some server that is
no longer available.
Installing linux is a very time consuming job, and the brilliance of a decent installer, like SuSE, is the sheer amount of
work that has gone into it. They've checked which version of all the driver works with *their* kernel, and included it
with the install.
If i'm going to go to the trouble of grabbing drivers from all over the place, i may as well install debian. At least then i
get a whizzy package manager, and i never have to (re)install it again.
</rant>
I talked myself raw with one guy (Allan) who asked me heaps of decent and pointed questions. I'm still croaky this
morning.
Now, where did i put that flame-proof suit?
Rex
Hi Rex,
I only partially agree with your rant. Obviously you're very happy, and familiar with SuSE and the way it does things. However, it has it's downside, too... like needing to be pretty good understanding german for in-depth support. And the mention of a 5th CD makes me wonder...! ( Not that I'm mentioning Debian here (: )
Mandrake works fine - and with the Nvidia drivers ( if it doesn't load on reboot, adding 'nvidia' to the base of /etc/modprobe.preload should do the trick )... mind you Fedora and NVIDIA... now there's another story.
What I'm saying is that once you get used to doing things one way, then some of the differences seem to be like changes for changes sake, and are very frustrating. However, Someone used to mandrake will say the same about the YaST2 quirks that he would find.
I reckon that if there was one clear 'best distro', then the majority of people would be using it. However, there isn't, the way that people use linux varies massively, so the tools they need are different, the mindset of users varies greatly, so does the best solution. For example, I use Debian, Fedora and Whitebox here - each for valid reasons ( workstation, database server, mail server ).
I'm not sure about the comment about 'If i'm going to go to the trouble of grabbing drivers from all over the place, i may as well install debian'. Why? All my drivers are from the standard sources via apt.
$0.02
Steve
