On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 14:29:44 +1130 Mike Andrew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2001 13:18, Michael Scottaline wrote: > > > I recently installed RH 7.2 on a sony Vaio laptop (FX340). I'm afraid I > > had no problems, thus none to share. Absolutely everything worked right > > out of the box, NIC, video, audio, CD (burner and DVD, though I haven't > > tried in that mode yet). > > Mostly same here. It was an even better install than the 7.1 and I was > impressed enough with that: mostly due to kudzu / anaconda. A quick note on > a CD burner gotcha is that you *must* fire up xcdroast as superman first > (then as a mere mortal for evermore). Redhat/ kde have an unpleasant habit > of forcing kdesud (you keep typing your root password to do simple things > like kppp. Ditto cd burning.) There are ways of dealing with this, detailed > on the SxS site. I'm not having the kdesud problem here, for whatever reason. I just ran xcdroast as root and setup my 'mere-mortal' user as a user of xcdroast and I've burned *many* copies of RH7.2 to pass out at the college - as 'me' not 'root' - since then. > --- > I did a custom install on an old ext2 partition reformatted to ext3 (by the > installer). I strongly suspect that for the first time ever, if I had chosen > 'workstation' I _probably_ would have got exactly what i wanted and saved > myself a lot of finger picking. Redhat have dropped the 'powertools' approach > and supply dual cd's. This means that the days of 'install everything' are > probably over since there's now just too much stuff you'll never use. You > really do need to pick thru, or at best, use the workstation/server type > bundles. For hardened penguins, the Gentoo or Linux from Scratch distros > where you minimalise the lot is a better option. I was hoping for a minimal > install select on RH72 but didn't find one (unless you assume 'custom' means > just that). RH73, or for that matter SuSe 74 should look at that 'feature', > it's becoming a necessity. Once you install a kernel, an xfree, and a few > admin tools, that should be good enough to boot and do the rest later. It > took me over an hour to go thru each package I thought I wanted *before* > continuing the install, this is frustrating because (as we know), you > generally install twice due to boo-boos. I did much the same for the first go around, except I kept it ext2 and did an 'expert' install then chose 'custom' and selected the groups I wanted. After about a week I nuked my win2k install and converted the drive (40GB) to ext2 with a 1GB swap partition and the rest for /home. This time around I nuked all the partitions from my original linux drive (15GB) and made a 50MB /boot partition and the rest went to /, all converted to ext3. > --- > When partitioning (by whatever means), be *very* generous with your swap > space. The installer screams and screams if you have less than 2 x ram. =) > Ditto my usb mouse. It auto detected correct make, buttons, and model. Again, > an impressive hit on how far usb has come (remember kernel 2.2.x?) and again, > not bad RH for integrating it. Still on the subject of usb, the pace is > furious. The /etc/hotplug directory contains more than 7.1 Again, this > is not kudos to RH but a comment that after what? 4 months? RH72 was sorely > needed to account for the rapidly expanding devices. 7.2 detected my hotplug > camera, 7.1 did not. You get the feeling that the dot com bubble blowout is > over, and it's back to business as usual where we all expect a distro, any > distro, to keep pumping the releases within a few months (just like > "the good old days'). A few months ago most of us were despondent about the > Linux desktop, it seemed to have run out of steam. The RH72 release serves > notice on Windows that Redhat, at least, have picked up the cudgel and are > running hard. My USB mouse was detected as a 3 button, but there's only 2... not really an issue ;) As a note, my keyboard (also USB) hasn't skipped a beat yet under Linux, whereas win2k 'lost' it with alarming regularity. I definately have to second the kudos to RedHat on this release, they did an excellent job IMHO. > kudzu / anaconda gets betterer each time. This release, it autodected my > vibra128 (ensoniq). Rh7.1 had a series of common sound cards it couldn't > detect. The consequences of that lack is there was a lot of > /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ browsing. The big problem with sound is a *lot* > of post and pre-install statements are required in modules.conf for nearly > any sound card. I'm happy that kudzu figures them out because I can't. The > vibra128 is hardly a new sound card, but it's good that obviously more > common hardware is getting sorted. (I also installed RH72 on a system with > AWE64, sans problems, same results) I've installed it here and at the college with the same results. > Ditto, it detected that I had a cd-rw and correspondingly put the all > important append= statement in lilo.conf. It gave the impression of a few i's > are being dotted and t's crossed. Ie some completeness in the install process. well, it got my burner but missed the dvd in the append statement, I had to add it but that's about all it missed. > ----- > One gotcha carried thru from 7.1 is #@$)(&)$# paths. The bash script gives an > eminently sensible $home/bin directory. Ie, plunk whatever you want to run in > ~/bin. There is no ~/bin directory. You have to create it. yes, you do have to create it but isn't that 'normal'? > Similarly, there's a really irritating su. It retains your user environment, > it doesn't replace it with superman's paths. Thus, if you want to lilo/ > modprobe, or just about any other su thing, you have to > > /sbin/thing > > this is irritating. The fix is > > su (dash) > > it's a cure, but an irritating one. again, I thought this was normal?? > > The printers available this time are hellishly impressive and seriously > lots but it falls over, badly, by giving you multiple choice cryptic drivers > for each type (hp laser4 eg). Unless you've been there previously, there is > no way of discovering what an STC500UP.DLL is (epson 400 if you ask). You > select and pray. Printing in Linux is a continuing and unecessary pain in the > rectum, they just made it harder. Again. I had no problems by using the "kde control-panel" (not that one, a different one) which is just like it's windows counterpart in that there is a printer-setup selection along with network and internet and services etc... > I've claimed previously that RH stole the install process directly > from Caldera COL 2.2. That was *the* benchmark of how to do it properly. Col > 2.2 pulled Linux out of the grunge ISP market and into the user's home. It > inspired Corel and TurboLinux. RH saw the light so to speak when they > followed in with KDE as the preferred desktop, It seems that RH have gone > further by selecting Grub as their preferred boot loader. (Truthfully, I > can't see the point behind that). I don't like squirming bugs... > ----- > The readme notes are WORTHWILE. There's a lot of interesting information you > can browse thru while waiting for the install to complete. Notably, the heavy > emphasis on Athlon processors, and, interestingly, the deprecated items, Top > of that tree is linuxconf! =) =) -- Myles Green Calgary AB Canada Alberta Linux Step by Step Mirror: http://www.telusplanet.net/public/mylesg/ _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
