[bg4533]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricP I have given up on Linux, it is absolutely user-unfriendly. I had purchased some cheap hardware to build a server with, the idea being- I stuff hard drives with media on them into it, and it allows my windows-based computer access to them over my network. However, what I did not know is that Linux does not think it necessary to recognize said hard drive. You have to tell Linux (a) what filesystem the drive uses (b) what its physical device ID is and (c) where you want it to show up. Now, in Windows, or on a Mac, I can plug in a hard drive, the machine assumes, beyond all apparent logic, that I want to use the hard drive I plugged in, and displays it and its contents for my browsing leisure. I have had 2 previous attempts to install Linux, and both ended up disasterously. I actually got it successfully installed this time, but it was ultimately useless to me.

Unless you are running some new technology that isn't fully supported under Linux yet this shouldn't be the case. Years ago Linux didn't like my SATA drives, but everything is fine now.

The learning curve for linux is much greater than Windows and Mac. I have found that the more I learn about linux the more user friendly it seems. Linux makes it easier to customize things the way I want them and the command line is extremely useful once you understand it and get in the habit of using it.

 

[cerbie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricP I have given up on Linux, it is absolutely user-unfriendly. I had purchased some cheap hardware to build a server with, the idea being- I stuff hard drives with media on them into it, and it allows my windows-based computer access to them over my network. However, what I did not know is that Linux does not think it necessary to recognize said hard drive. You have to tell Linux (a) what filesystem the drive uses (b) what its physical device ID is and (c) where you want it to show up.

(a) How is this different than windows? Sure, you get more than two choices, but you get it with Windows, as well.
(b) Er, what? You must not be using a desktop distro. Really. If you know your install HDDs size, you can figure out what device it is. If you have several of the same capcity, then you'll have to be more careful. Windows does not differ here, either, though.
(c) Windows can be a royal pain in the ass because of this, actually. Sometimes with multiple drives, you can't make the install be the C: drive. As far as anything else...well, tell it to make it / and be done with it.
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Now, in Windows, or on a Mac, I can plug in a hard drive, the machine assumes, beyond all apparent logic, that I want to use the hard drive I plugged in, and displays it and its contents for my browsing leisure.

If you're plugging one in, just use a decent desktop distro. Ubuntu, FI, will auto-mount it (unless it is NTFS, I think), and stick a shortcut to it on the desktop (hint: a lot like OS X does).

Remember: Linux is just the kernel. The distribution is everything.

 

[thrawn86]

sounds like my experience with linux. I've tried mandrake 10.2 and suse so far, really wasn't impressed with either. seemed sluggish, overly graphical, and then theres the part where I realized I spent several hours trying to get all my hardware working (that already *did* work in windows)

Still haven't figured out what exactly *is* so special about linux.
I suppose its one of those niche things.

Just a tip. partition resizing with knoppix/mandrake/suse doesn't work well, at all. Tried to do a dual boot, ended up having to reformat and reinstall

 

[AdamWill]

mjg: "Mandrake no longer exists" is a bit harsh, we just changed our name. Last time I checked we were still the same company, with all the same people (plus some new ones).

We are a for-profit company and we sell commercial versions of Linux, yes, but we also have the Free edition, which is a complete and comprehensive distro composed entirely of free / open source software that is freely downloadable and redistributable. We've always had this version and always will, and I think more people use Free than use any of the commercial versions. The Free edition of the latest MDV (2006) was just made available a couple of days ago. steel102 gave the download link - http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors . The commercial versions are essentially Free with some added commercial stuff (like the commercial nvidia / ATI drivers, modem drivers, Acrobat Reader, Flash plugin etc), a manual, and basic tech support.

 

[AdamWill]

ericp: btw, building an entire PC running a full-blown operating system is a bit overkill for your purposes. You'd be much better off with a basic NAS device, like the Linksys NSLU2 - a little $100 box with an ethernet port and a couple of USB ports. Plug it into your router, plug in one or two USB disks, and they're available as SMB shares on the network. No fuss, no mess.

 

[EricP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cerbie (a) How is this different than windows? Sure, you get more than two choices, but you get it with Windows, as well. (b) Er, what? You must not be using a desktop distro. Really. If you know your install HDDs size, you can figure out what device it is. If you have several of the same capcity, then you'll have to be more careful. Windows does not differ here, either, though. (c) Windows can be a royal pain in the ass because of this, actually. Sometimes with multiple drives, you can't make the install be the C: drive. As far as anything else...well, tell it to make it / and be done with it. If you're plugging one in, just use a decent desktop distro. Ubuntu, FI, will auto-mount it (unless it is NTFS, I think), and stick a shortcut to it on the desktop (hint: a lot like OS X does).

re: (a)- when I put a new hard drive into my Windows box, it recognizes it and displays it without me having to tell it anything. I don't have to figure out my device ID, I don't have to tell it what filesystem the drive is using, or where to mount it, or whether I want it as read-only or not.

re: (b)- you hit it exactly, as I have 3 identical drives of one variety and 2 of another.

Ubuntu included instructions in the FAQ on how to mount both NTFS and FAT drives, so I have to assume that it will not auto-mount either. As NTFS is by far the better and more ubiquitous FS, I can't imagine why Ubuntu would make FAT "easier". Also, you have to specify whether you want it as a writeable or read-only drive, this is a mandatory extension or the mount command won't execute. Believe me, I spent a good 6 hours trying to figure this out both in the FAQ and online, and I'm not exactly tech-illiterate. I gave up at that point, as getting brand-new, formatted hard drives to display seems like it should be an extremely simple task, and I had several more complex tasks to do (setting up VNC as I don't have a kvm and setting up the hard drives as network shares, as well as getting a PCI IDE card to function). I just went and bought another Windows license, and what do you know, I installed it, it recognized my hard drives, and one simple, obvious right-click (Sharing and Security) and the drive is network-shared. I really wanted Linux to work, and I feel like I have given it more than a fair shot, I'm just fed up with it because my experience with 3 different distros (Red Hat 7.1, Mandrake back in the day, latest Ubuntu) has been that it is laid out and operates in a way that makes sense to programmers and not to end-users.

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Originally Posted by Zanth Completely untrue. What IS true is that this is DISTRO dependent. What ones did you try? Some distros have better hardware detection than others.

Ubuntu, which is supposed to be the user-friendliest distro out there. It's not that it didn't detect my hardware (I could see the drives in Drive Manager), it's that it wouldn't let me use them without additional configuration, configuration that I couldn't figure out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdamWill ericp: btw, building an entire PC running a full-blown operating system is a bit overkill for your purposes. You'd be much better off with a basic NAS device, like the Linksys NSLU2 - a little $100 box with an ethernet port and a couple of USB ports. Plug it into your router, plug in one or two USB disks, and they're available as SMB shares on the network. No fuss, no mess.

Except that the celeron 1.1/mobo/256mb ram I bought cost me $30 shipped

, and I don't have to buy USB enclosures (usually $40 or so) for the 5 drives I have.

 

[bg4533]

Linux does not fully support NTFS yet. I believe Microsoft has refused to release the NTFS specs so the linux people are reverse engineering it. Read support is fully functional, but write support is buggy and not recommended.

Getting a "windows formatted" drive mounted in Linux is generally very easy. -Make a new folder where you want the drive to be mounted.
-Open the /etc/fstab file and add the drive in. There are tons of things online that tell you how to do this. Generally I just copy an existing command and replace the current drive with the new one.
-Mount the drive. Many GUIs do this when you just click on the drive.

The whole process takes around 30s when you know what you are doing.

 

[wallijonn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EricP You have to tell Linux (a) what filesystem the drive uses (b) what its physical device ID is and (c) where you want it to show up. Now, in Windows, or on a Mac, I can plug in a hard drive, the machine assumes, beyond all apparent logic, that I want to use the hard drive I plugged in, and displays it and its contents for my browsing leisure.

That may not be entirely true. If you install OSX you have the option of formatting it in Unix or Mac Extended. If you ofrmat it for Unix you will have mount points to contend with along with not being able to install MS Media Player.

And to get there, to actually be able to select the drive, you will first have to start the Disk Utility, which will allow you to format it, partition it, erase it, add OS9 drivers, etc.

Adding an HD to an existing WXP OS will probably necessitate knowing about the boot file, doing a BOOTFIX, FIXMBR, etc., along with setting the block size larger if you are going to be doing a lot of video editing, and whether or not you wish to format it in NTFS5 or FAT32.

But since Linux is based on UNIX you will have to give some thought as to how you want the drives formatted, partitioned, mounted. So one does not just add 4 HDs and expect them to come up. No way. For all I know you may want to create a RAID 5 volume, or move temp / swap space to another drive, or have one drive for an OS, the next drive for DATA (usually /usr), a drive for print spooling, etc.

For most people I suggest that they install SuSE as their first Linux distro because it will allow you to auto mount USB, DVD, CDs, floppies, instead of having to do it manually. Unlike WXP, Linux will not automatically create accounts with Admin (root) privs and tends to lock down the desktop much more.

Linux is still pretty much old school, while it has PNP it basically just works when you first install the OS. If you go and start swapping sound cards, video cards, NICs, etc., it may not work. In the case of SuSE, if you want to change your monitor it is much better if you run SaX2 BEFORE you swap it out. Otherwise SaX2 may not even run when you install the new monitor. And forget about the latest and greatest Creative sound card...

It may not seem worth it, but just compare a webpage on WXp and one on OSX and Linux. I have always found Linux to be prettier, sharper, more contrasty, having better formed fonts, etc. It isn't even close - Linux blows away WXP (with or without ClearType enabled. In fact I still prefer W2K to WXP when it comes to web site viewing. And don't even get me started on LCDs...)

 

[AdamWill]

eric: btw, I don't know what distro you're using, but if I add an internal or external drive to my Mandriva systems it's automatically recognised and mounted, either immediately (for an external USB drive) or when I boot the system (for an internal drive). I'm confused as to why any distro would need you to tell it what FS the disk is using, since it's trivial to auto-detect and mount can do it for you (by 'you' I mean 'the distro maker'), all you have to do is set the fs type to 'auto' and mount will usually mount the device perfectly. I guess you were using a distro with an intentionally 'hands-on' philosophy, like Slack or Gentoo?

BTW, FAT is far more widespread than NTFS, since FAT is used on the vast majority of pre-formatted USB drives, memory cards, digital cameras, music players...

 

[EricP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn Adding an HD to an existing WXP OS will probably necessitate knowing about the boot file, doing a BOOTFIX, FIXMBR, etc., along with setting the block size larger if you are going to be doing a lot of video editing, and whether or not you wish to format it in NTFS5 or FAT32.

Demonstrably untrue in my (pretty large) experience with WXP. Every hard drive I've ever put in, both IDE and SATA of varying capacities, speeds, and brands, has been immediately useable. The most I've ever had to do is format a brand new drive, which is again a simple right click context command (rather than an unknown shell command with multiple unknown extensions). That is one of my main problems with Linux- the command line is all nice, but where do you start if you don't know the command to do something? -help your way to insanity? Heck, I couldn't even figure out how to format one of my new drives once Ubuntu was installed, with extensive use of -help and the FAQ included. The command was continually rejected. The only slightly difficult hard drive experience I've had in WXP has been installing the OS on a SATA drive, where you have to manually load the driver from a floppy disk.

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So one does not just add 4 HDs and expect them to come up. No way. For all I know you may want to create a RAID 5 volume, or move temp / swap space to another drive, or have one drive for an OS, the next drive for DATA (usually /usr), a drive for print spooling, etc.

This aligns precisely with what I said about who it is friendly for. The scenarios you have presented are by far in the minority, and all of them are a secondary concern to most people who are putting in a hard drive simply for additional storage. If I want a RAID array, I can configure that later, but I couldn't do anything with the drive if it was unmounted. Another one of my base problems with Linux- it is vastly more powerful and flexible, but there is no simple way to do the most common applications of a command. Is it possible I want to do something other than just use a volume (RAID arrays, etc)? Sure. Is it more likely that I just want to use it? Absolutely, and mounting it and making it useable doesn't preclude future different applications for the drive.

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Originally Posted by AdamWill BTW, FAT is far more widespread than NTFS, since FAT is used on the vast majority of pre-formatted USB drives, memory cards, digital cameras, music players...

I am talking about hard drives, external media compatibility was not part of my decision to give up on Ubuntu.

Windows 2000 and XP are in the majority now, I believe that Win98 has been dying an increasingly fast death over the last year to 18 months. Heck, WinXP had a 20% marketshare (compared to ~35% for Win98) only a year after its release.

 

[wallijonn]

Eric,

You're absolutely right about Linux, it really isn't all that friendly, with SuSE probably being the friendliest distro out there. But there also the purists out there who do not want to see Linux dumbed down to Windows standards.

But I've had plenty of problems with formatting a brand new drive under most OSes, W98, W98SE, W2K and WXP. (Remember the 128GB limit on old BIOSes?, the installing the SATA driver from floppy (which is kind of hard to do on units that no longer have floppy drives. So you had to format it from the IDE drive, then ghost it, then remove the IDE drive.)

So, yes, Linux isn't for everyone, especially for people who are used to double clicking an .exe file and having it install almost automatically. It certaintly isn't for most gamers since they'll probably have to learn how to use WINE. But for people who are very secuirty minded it does have its advantages - fewer viruses, almost no trojans, BHOs and spyware since most are written for the Windows environment. But someone who isn't comfortable using accounts (instead of having an Admin account on WXP) will probably not take to Linux. Ubuntu tried to get away from root accounts and people still complained. Heck, even OSX will ask you for the root password even when you are logged in the root account.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with not going with Linux. There's MS's Windows for the rest of the world. What I am waiting for is for DRM to be fully implemented and hoping that Linux will get around it some way. (I see no reason why I should have to download a certificate to watch a DVD movie I own, nor do I wish my viewing habits to be harvested in a database, like music statistics are presently done.)

Linux is more for the dedicated tech geek than mom and pop. But unfortunatley places like Fry Electronics likes to sell their cheapest computers with Linux because they know that it'll add another $100 to the price tag. These people may like MS's proposed new free WXP which is Advertisment driven, a subscription OS. Will it ever happen? Wasn't only a few years ago that people were buying into Ad driven browsers, even Opera? But can you imagine Ad driven Vista with DRM? hmmm.

 

[cerbie]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn (snip) So, yes, Linux isn't for everyone, especially for people who are used to double clicking an .exe file and having it install almost automatically. It certaintly isn't for most gamers since they'll probably have to learn how to use WINE.

Mounting a drive on a server distro (as an example from EricP) is nothing compared to getting WINE working for modern games. It's worth dual-booting just for that. Even Crossover Office can't quite manage it well enough (based on using the one that comes with Xandros 3).

The nice desktop Linux distros are there for typical office/web use (if you need to share anything over the network, you're into power user territory), but not-quite-Windows-emulation for CD ripping or gaming...an OEM copy of XP Pro is only $140, and Home $90. Compared with the time needed to get WINE working for games that it hasn't really been tweaked for, that's a bargain.

I like Linux (I like OS X, too, though), especially the newest Ubuntu (the first text-file-editing-free install I've had!), but there are still some things that you really have to be a masochist for, and, IMO, WINE for gaming is one of them

.

Quote:

But there also the purists out there who do not want to see Linux dumbed down to Windows standards.

Zealots suck. I like Linux. I'm typing this on Windows 2000. There is no perfect. IMO, as long as it does not become riddled with holes, like Windows, Desktop distros should aim to be dumbed down. I can do an 'apt-get install xmms', but even so, I like being able to go to 'Add Programs', and click a check box for it

. As long as all the same stuff is under the hood, there's no reason not to make the interface as idiot-proof as possible, and as easy to use as possible, even concerning changing system settings.

Apple really had the right vision for it, IMO (but are just a little too controlling). Don't get in the way (like Windows XP), but don't hide stuff. Warning and asking for a root pass is cool. It's striking this balance that is taking time, because of zealots on both sides.

 

[EricP]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wallijonn Eric, You're absolutely right about Linux, it really isn't all that friendly, with SuSE probably being the friendliest distro out there. But there also the purists out there who do not want to see Linux dumbed down to Windows standards.

But this is exactly the power of Linux! They can have their confuddling distros, but there's nothing out there for people <=me in terms of tech ability. It's perfectly OK with me if the OS makes a few assumptions and holds my hand a bit along the way. Windows makes a lot of assumptions, but it also gives me the power to change them. There isn't a distro that does this. Part of it is probably because of the immense programming project that is Windows. It's in a refining process for a long, long time now, and unlike (most) Linux distros, they have a massive paid staff to tweak it.

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These people may like MS's proposed new free WXP which is Advertisment driven, a subscription OS. Will it ever happen? Wasn't only a few years ago that people were buying into Ad driven browsers, even Opera? But can you imagine Ad driven Vista with DRM? hmmm.

I am both scared and saddened by the distinct possibility of something like this. It seems very logical for MS given its large-scale piracy issues and also very profitable- who wouldn't pay to get their ads in front of a potentially huge userbase? Personally, 2000 and XP offer everything I need in an OS. Unless Vista has some really, really compelling features (and I haven't seen any yet), the drawback in terms of increased DRM lockdown is not worth it for someone who is media-centric like I am. I am not a music or movie pirate, but yet I am treated like I am by every DRM scheme out there.

 

[mjg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdamWill mjg: "Mandrake no longer exists" is a bit harsh, we just changed our name. Last time I checked we were still the same company, with all the same people (plus some new ones). We are a for-profit company and we sell commercial versions of Linux, yes, but we also have the Free edition, which is a complete and comprehensive distro composed entirely of free / open source software that is freely downloadable and redistributable. We've always had this version and always will, and I think more people use Free than use any of the commercial versions. The Free edition of the latest MDV (2006) was just made available a couple of days ago. steel102 gave the download link - http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/downloads/mirrors . The commercial versions are essentially Free with some added commercial stuff (like the commercial nvidia / ATI drivers, modem drivers, Acrobat Reader, Flash plugin etc), a manual, and basic tech support.

Hey,

well i was kinda shocked to see the mandrake.com domain empty, and just some misinformation i guess, i thumbed through the site quick and didn't really mean to seem as if i knew what happened (jsut a name change etc). Sorry if i offended you.

 

[AdamWill]

mjg: no offence taken, just wanted to correct it so the right info was available. The name change was partly forced by a trademark infringement court case we lost (against Hearst, the owners of the Mandrake the Magician cartoon strip...no, I'm not kidding), we had to turn all the mandrake-related domain names etc over according to the settlement in that case, so we couldn't maintain them as redirects to the new addresses. :\