On Thu, 2002-02-21 at 18:54, Gordon Pritchard wrote:
On Thu, 2002-02-21 at 12:47, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
I bought the boxed 7.3 Pro set, and I tried to ask a support question. It seems I'm not registered.
Uhm, did you register your product? I don't think SuSE 7.3 shipped with the mind-reading module; that's for later.
I believe I said that the online registration form (at the same URL you give below) refused my ID number. I tried laboriously typing it in from the label on the SuSE 7.3 Pro box, several times. I checked and triple-checked, including verifying that I had left no inadvertent spaces at the end of the number. I tried WITH intergroup spaces and I tried it as one, long, space-free number. Over and over, the SuSE registration form would reject it, saying it was not a valid number. As I also mentioned, I purchased directly from SuSE, so I don't think there was any middle-man giving me a bootleg copy of the boxed set. I did not purchase an "Update". I purchased the full stand-alone boxed set. Full price, plus shipping and currency exchange.
you can't buy SuSE in Ottawa, ON, Canada anymore).
Bummer :-( I was born and raise in Ottawa (Nepean, actually). I find it hard to believe that *no-one* carries SuSE in the Nation's Capital, when I can get it in small-town White Rock, BC. (in my case, retailer != support).
Well, I've bought several, since version Five.dot.something here in Nepean (now Ottawa... we've been assimilated...), but now all the Linux-selling shops tell me that the regional distributor is no longer carrying SuSE, so they can't get it. I mean, they could order direct, just like I did, but then they'd have to charge more to make it worth their while. I'm sure the political/commercial situation will get sorted eventually. Somebody in the local LUG will make sure that *somebody* picks up the distributorship.
There is no doubt in my mind that the user-installation and breadth of support for devices is very high in Windows. In part, this occurs because Microsoft is a front-line participant in developing emerging technologies (I'm personally familiar with their involvement in USB, right from the get-go). This formative involvement will *always* allow their products a running head-start. That is a fact of life.
My choice is to live with bumpy initial support for my leading-edge hardware, knowing that the Linux community will catch up.
Leading-edge?!?! This is a 2+ year-old laptop from DELL. Do you know what that is in computer years? :-) It's not quite "trailing edge", but it ain't far off. The modem was the same standard USR/3COM PCMCIA card that went into hundreds of thousands of laptops, if not millions. For many years, now, modems have been like video cards. They may have fancy features, but they all present a basic, common feature set, with basic, common interface. If you can make one work in default fashion, you can make another work ... in default fashion. It's only in the fancy stuff that they depart from standards. Hell, there were literally only three chip-sets in 95% of modems sold (Rockwell and I forget the other two). Their basic command-sets/interfaces did not change; only the few fancy features required special treatment. If all you wanted was an ordinary dial-up connection, there wasn't anything special. Just like mice. If you don't care about the fifth and sixth buttons or the force-feedback, then pick a generic mouse and you'll at least have two buttons and cursor movement. My brother, new to configuring computers, found that Windows gave him a sense of "place", as in "here's the place where you set up an internet connection". Also, while he was in that "place" the questions that it asked him seemed understandable and related only to the immediate task. Unlike linux, when Windows wanted to configure an internet connection, it asked questions that let you decide between some options at each step... and then it only presented further questions that related to the path you had started down. It didn't keep throwing up questions like "Start grfbnitz with snaggle2 or snaggle3 (Note: snaggle1 is for people with older NVidea chipsets; snaggle2 is best choice with SMP; snaggle3 is alpha release and best not to use unless you are expert. [Continue] [Abort]" "Note: if you abort, the current configuration attempt will be abandoned, but some items will be partially changed anyway, and we are not telling you which ones. Go look it up in the /etc directory ... or perhaps the /opt directory, but we also aren't telling you which files will be affected. You should already know." "What??!?? I'm trying to configure a friggin' MODEM!! Why do I need to know about video chipsets (I've got ATI) or Symmetric Multi-processor? Or, is this somehow still about communications, so SMP is a typo that should have been SNMP... oh, god, all possible decisions are wrong... aaaaargh!" The above slightly-tongue-in-cheek sequence was not an exact reproduction of a session with YaSTn. It was merely representative... SuSE/Linux, on the other hand, would LET you configure all kinds of things, but it assumed that you already understood WHICH dozen separate things in which dozen separate menus (or config files) you had to modify, and WHICH combinations might work together. And god help you if you TRIED modifying things one at a time. You got no clue as to what you had broken. With Windoze, for example, it would help you set up a LAN internet connection, or it would help you set up a dial-up internet connection, but it would not mix up the two. One worked, or the other worked. You might have to think a bit to have it store TWO possible setups, so that you could use one at the office and the other at home... but it would still keep them separate and complete.
Sorry to hear of your bad experiences. At the end of the day, I completely agree with your assessment that the tool that works is the one to use. Some of us do need to do productive work with our PC's, and keep a roof over our heads. For a few, that "best choice" will remain Windows; for others (even non-geeks), Linux has a lot to offer.
Yah, but only the geeks (and the masochists) have the motivation. For the rest, Linux is where Windoze was in Win 3.1 or early Win 95 days. You mostly wanted to have a roomful of IT people down the hall to make things work, so you could do your job. If it broke, you called them to fix it. The problem is that Windoze didn't have entrenched, ubiquitous competition. When Windoze was falling on its face (and you had to call IT for the third time today), you didn't have a working example of something solid to point to. Yes, there were UNIX systems in a few companies, but they were 50-thousand dollar workstations on a few engineers' desktops. Today, when Linux falls on it's face (and don't tell me that it isn't broken, it's just a config problem or an X problem.... it still needs intervention by a geek to make it work again... so, effectively it's broken), people can point to mature Windoze that they've worked with for years. Unlike Windoze in the early days, Linux DOES have something to compare to, on the ordinary desktop. Linux geeks forget that a non-geek user does not make a distinction between "broken" (Word crashed again and I had to reboot Windows) versus "went for a long break and took the X server with it". A naive Linux user doesn't care that a guru could press a mysterious key combination to open a text screen, log on with an "administrator" password and maybe restart X and the apps. Lacking that guru or the guru's knowledge, the naive user gets to press "Reset" and flush his work, just like in Windoze (and Windoze doesn't do that *nearly* as often as it used to do). As a matter of fact, having failed for three weeks of evenings and weekends to discover how to re-instate my eth0 device at home, this nearly-naive user is just about to perform a full "like new" installation of SuSE 7.3... wiping all my config and various bits of stuff from several months. In fact, I can't see from the SuSE install that there is ANY way to put everthing in from the CDs without formatting the partitions. It looks like all or nothing. I may try to backup my e-mail and some data, but I dare not attempt to save any tiniest aspect of configuration... because I don't know what- ties-to-what and might corrupt a new install with whatever has killed my eth0 device and my sound device. Windows, at least, would have told me "Are you sure you want to uninstall your sound module and your ethernet device?" and I would have said "Hell, no!" YaST just went ahead and did it when I tried to back out of dial-up configuration without saving... Once I saw the conf stuff begin to scroll past, I knew I had done something, but I didn't know how thoroughly bad it was. The least YaST could have done was to say: "Hey, girly-linux-naif, by attempting to escape from dial-up config, you are telling me to rip the Ethernet device and the sound module right out of the kernel. I give you no graceful option to evade this, but you could at least try to press Reset ..." But no. Only when it was too late was I told that YaST equates modem config with killing ethernet and sound. Is there a club, with special initiation, where they tell you this stuff? Hmm. I wonder if anybody would sell me Windows 2000? Several people did offer single bits of advice, but none of them worked. Thanks anyway. /kevin