Yes, the word 'proper' really need to be defined. To some extent, you're more lucky than me. I just got a Hitachi notebook, nice little cute thing, PII-400 with 128mb, BUT! it came without standard I/O port instead all the external connectivity are through USB, even the external FDD. It works wonderfully under windozZ, but when come to Linux, it can't recongnise the USB (port) printer, and the biggest problem, the ext. USB FDD. :( It has NoGo for Linux at the moment as the only way is to connect it to network. I tried SuSE 6.2 and Mandrake 7b but can't go anywhere. At the end, Bill won this round for now. I fully agreed with you on the 'many' distro and heading everywhere directions. I try some of them (when I have the time, in fact, I am very busy most of the time) but only serious with SuSE, it serve me well so far, although there are still lots of problems waiting to be solved. In the 'free' world, everyone got their right to head anywhere, so I guess it's okay for more distro to pop up, just that if the major applications are focus on the main steam (SuSE included of course), it should be fine. Agree? 63,000 bugs in W2K? how many in NT?? If you are going to hear the music anyway, why pay for it? isn't Linux a better choice after all???? take the saved money and get yourself some better hardware :) Dennis/SG
On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Dennis wrote:
The philosophy I hope to success is: If the hardware is bad, no matter how good the software or OS is, its just going to fail.
Very true.....
I believe Linux can be used for serious work if you have the proper hardware. Cheapo or unmatching hardware simply not going to hold this promise. Agree?
I think a definition of "proper" may be needed. Example, I recently bought a new (actually old one broke and it was cheaper for the store to replace it than fix it) Compaq Presario laptop. It has several new features (USB, better video and sound). For me to use these features will take a lot of work and effort and then they still will not match what the laptop was designed for.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for Linux, and I love the OS. It is very powerful in it's current state. However I am concerned about the number of new and different distributions popping up. I see every company making changes to support "their" distribution and not working towards a common goal of having a strong OS that everyone can easily use. Lets see, if RedHat, Corel, SuSE, Debian, and Slackware would use the same config files and the same directory structure and work towards adding vendors drivers to X and help with Kernel development to support the USB ports and start adding drivers to support vendors Hardware I think we would be much further allong than where we are today.
The Linux machines I used are very dependable, or so they seem. I'm lucky, and most of us are. However, I have some friends who had intermittent memory problems, or other difficulties, which are seemingly hard to diagnose precisely. We just speak of "cosmic rays", then :-). A bit irritating for them, but bearable nevertheless.
My problem is that I am one of those that uses newer hardware and I find that I have a lot of problems configuring to use the newer hardware. This sometimes gets to the point of being stuck with Windoze.
Real people do not take such risks as running important programs on
Intel
machines. Unless they also run Windows-NT on them, of course :-) :-(.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Of course sometimes running NT is a risk itself.
Chris
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