I know what you mean...I'm hoping that some of this is addressed in
Mandrake 7.2. As you've said it's not the OS proper but rather the
utilities that are handling the hardware ops that are just not up to snuff
yet. Thankfully that is changing though.
And you are correct in what you've said about the CD-RW, but that's
something that most don't know about. I know of one guy that bought one
thinking that he would be able to use this CD-RW like he used the floppy
drive on his machine. It took a little while for me to explain that it
just didn't work that way. There was other software that would have to be
used in order for him to even be able to use the hardware in a normal
fashion with "recordable" Cd's. I myself really prefer the Recordables as
opposed the re-writable CDROM's. Much simpler.
Mark
>
> My biggest frustration with Linux is its lack of maturity in situations
> like this. Not really the fault of the Linux proper as the OS sees and
> mounts the hardware just peachy. What's lacking are the peripheral
> softwares and auto-install programming to allow this stuff to happen
> without spending many hours hunting down solutions and hoping that they
> work. If the distribution producers would spend their time addressing
> these things (and I know they are to a certain extent) as they do
> scraping together a pile of arcade games to include in the distribution,
> we'd all be better off.
>
> Since this will likely generate comment, let's talk specifics. This
> weekend I added a Sony CRX140ECS to my system. After hooking up the
> drive I:
>
> Windows (5 minutes required):
>
> 1) Booted the system.
> This recognized the drive and stuck an icon on the desktop for me. The
> drive was usable as a reader.
> 2) I stuck in the Adaptec CD when it was finished I rebooted.
> This set things up for both CD-R and CD-RW disks and allows my
> 52x CD-ROM to read the CD-RW disks.
>
> Linux (have spent 2h thus far):
>
> 1) Drive was recognized by Linux on boot.
> 2) Had to add stuff to fstab.
> Ah...the drive is mounted and is usable.
> 3) Went running around the web in an attempt to find out why none of the
> CD writer software would recognize it. Read about SCSI
> kludge...followed the implementation.
> 4) Still trying to figure out how to get Gtoaster to talk to the drive,
> deal with permissions, etc. Still can't write to the drive.
>
> Seems to me that there's just got to be a better way. I sometimes think
> that what would advance the cause of Linux more than anything would be
> some "installer" packages, some for hardware and some for software, that
> would push through some of this stuff. One such package that comes to
> mind is the Roaring Penguin ADSL app/install package which works like a
> charm.
>
> Cheers --- Larry
>
>
