Perseverance

[nuvan]

I finally got linux working right, and so far, I like it.

First time I tried it was of a slack cd I had burned. took me about an hour after the install to fry it. reformatted/reinstalled.
this time it took 2 hours to fry.

3rd times the charm, they say. that almost held true. I had it for 3 days before i fried it. fortunately i am still dual booting 98/linux so i was not completely stuck. i dl'd a mandrake iso and installed it, and now it works.

i have one more thing to say:
Package Management RULES!!!


btw, i'm posting this from fluxbox, which i think i will like. I must say, it starts alot faster than KDE, which i haven't used enough to be blindly loyal to yet.

[ 18 April 2002: Message edited by: nuvan ]

[z0mbix]

Originally posted by nuvan:
<STRONG>I finally got linux working right, and so far, I like it.

First time I tried it was of a slack cd I had burned. took me about an hour after the install to fry it. reformatted/reinstalled.
this time it took 2 hours to fry.

3rd times the charm, they say. that almost held true. I had it for 3 days before i fried it. fortunately i am still dual booting 98/linux so i was not completely stuck. i dl'd a mandrake iso and installed it, and now it works.

i have one more thing to say:
Package Management RULES!!!


btw, i'm posting this from fluxbox, which i think i will like. I must say, it starts alot faster than KDE, which i haven't used enough to be blindly loyal to yet.</STRONG>

What were you doing to fry your system so often? Slackware can be a bit of pain for real newbies to get to grips with as it leaves everything up to you. You need to know what you want to install and how to configure it. Yes, fluxbox is very cool too :D

[Ludootje]

Originally posted by cheeky_zombie:
<STRONG>What were you doing to fry your system so often?</STRONG>
Believe me, that isn't hard at all :mad:
I lost the count mandrake (8.0&8.1) installs when I was past the 20.

But according to you that's because of my magnetic fingers IIRC ;)

[LordStanley]

just testing :p

[nuvan]

what i was doing...
one time i tried to upgrade netscape to 6.2.2 and KDE to 3.0
and the other times i was just playing around, learning about linux

what more can i say?

[Ludootje]

I always wondered if it was my fault or the distros fault. I only had real problems with my very first distro, mandrake. But that might be too just because I didn't knew anything of linux yet. Anyway, mandrake is a crapdistro. For newbies there's SuSE, mandrake is for letting newbie dislike linux.

[kuber]

Debian.

[Ludootje]

Originally posted by kuber:
<STRONG>Debian.</STRONG>
Does your answer mean I just started a flamewar? :o

[dunbar]

Originally posted by Ludootje:
<STRONG>I always wondered if it was my fault or the distros fault. I only had real problems with my very first distro, mandrake. But that might be too just because I didn't knew anything of linux yet. Anyway, mandrake is a crapdistro. For newbies there's SuSE, mandrake is for letting newbie dislike linux.</STRONG>

Can I join in here?

Ya know, I'm a getting kinda freaked out with Mandy these days, but when I think back to the last time I tried a different distro (slack), I was stuck at 640 x 480 x 8 bit color for X..... and that was 3 installs before Mandy 8.1. Mandy 8.1 gave me the warm and fuzzies because it got X done right for my S3 Savage 4 AGP.... But since then, Linux has been real ... um ... err ... bad.

In less than 12 months of part time mandy usage, I've had to reinstall mandy something like 50 times, due to fsck, kudzu/harddrake always running, tune2fs locking the box, and now I'm getting permissions which start bad after a fresh install of 8.2, then I fix this with su then "msec -1", then they go bad again in a few more boots (then the box gets all locked up, and even ext3fs loses its marbles).

All in the name of installation "simplicity". Arrgh!

If I may ask, since I'm now shopping around for a new distro.... what makes Suse so much better for you?

[Ludootje]

suse works!
Most of the persons who use mandrake use it because of the configuration drakes, and they probably don't like all the problems they get.
so suse is the alternative. it has a wonderful configuration app, called yast2, and it runs just fine. now if only suse used apt... :(

[kuber]

RPMs = bad.. mmk?

[dunbar]

Originally posted by dunbar
[B]But since then, Linux has been real ... um ... err ... bad.

In less than 12 months of part time mandy usage, I've had to reinstall mandy something like 50 times, due to fsck, kudzu/harddrake always running, tune2fs locking the box, and now I'm getting permissions which start bad after a fresh install of 8.2, then I fix this with su then "msec -1", then they go bad again in a few more boots (then the box gets all locked up, and even ext3fs loses its marbles).


I felt that I needed to mention something in this thread, something which I learned some months later....
It seems that a bad CDROM drive can create some of these problems - maybe all 50 installs were due to bad CDROM drive! I'm still testing the second CDROM drive, but having Mandrake install without errors on the first pass was a nice change from past experience with the old CDROM drive.

[anacron]

I can't just let Mandrake get trashed here without jumping in...

I've been using Mandrake for a year and a half now, and it has always been a super easy install, with great hardware detection and installation.

I've installed Mandrake 8.0 & 8.2 dozens of times on all kind of desktops and laptops, and it's been consistently great.

Also, as a newbie, I appreciate how easy and
user friendly the GUI is.

Nope, the Drake hasn't let me down yet...:D

[danrees]

IME (and I'm not just flaming here), Mandrake crashes/fscks up considerably more often than any other distro I have used. I don't know if things have changed much since 8.0, but I couldn't do anything without my e.g. XF86 settings being overwritten. Of course, this probably depends a lot on hardware and package selection.

For some people Mandrake works, for others it doesn't. Keep trying other distros until you find one you like - it's the only way. :)

[blood-stone]

Well I finally took the plunge and installed not one, but two linux systems. with all the complications I had with hardware, I am still very happy with Mandrake 8.2. some of the problems I encountered while installing were, a really screwed up CD-rom drive, it wouldn't read burned cd's hence the install kept asking for the CD when it was in the drive. Frustrating to push the disk back in and click ok. The second problem is that I had to use an ancient video card, that X cant use, and it would just hang on detection. Nedless to say upgrading and installing software on both systems were interesting to say the least.
I havent used Linux before this weekend I had the systems up and running with all the software I wanted running, and using NFS to share out a mount point. Now I just need to figure out how I did it all and write notes to myself....
:)

[dunbar]

Originally posted by blood-stone
I havent used Linux before this weekend I had the systems up and running with all the software I wanted running, and using NFS to share out a mount point. Now I just need to figure out how I did it all and write notes to myself....
:)

Man - I sure hate it when a noob gets it right on the first try.... :D

Good work!
Welcome to LNO, stay a while - teach us all.

[dunbar]

Originally posted by danrees
IME (and I'm not just flaming here), Mandrake crashes/fscks up considerably more often than any other distro I have used. I don't know if things have changed much since 8.0, but I couldn't do anything without my e.g. XF86 settings being overwritten. Of course, this probably depends a lot on hardware and package selection.

For some people Mandrake works, for others it doesn't. Keep trying other distros until you find one you like - it's the only way. :)

I had some major problems (using Mandrake 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2) whenever I tried to 'upgrade' an existing install. I never ever got a stable install that way, tried maybe ten times with various versions.
I gave up on the idea of installing 'over' existing things, and instead, I back up valuable files to a second physical drive.
That way, I can clean install by formatting the first partition, expert install, etc, then simply replace the files from my backup if I need to restore anything at all.

Yes, I also hear that others are able to upgrade their Linux in the proper upgrade fashion.... what I found out was that these people are rather adept at administration and they do not mention the step by step details of what they did. A few have hinted at the details and ouch.... if only I was that good!

Anyway, earlier this month I came to the conclusion that maybe my CDROM drive was delivering corrupted data. I've replaced the CDROM drive and as of right now, I feel that Linux is finally working properly, for the first time in more than 50 installs.... over more than a year, 2 mobos and 3 processors. The same CDROM drive throught all. I still need to give the install some time to reveal any erors, but with the old drive, I wrote bad symbolic links which even root could not use, could not edit and could not fsck (I have not seen any such links so far with this drive!); I also used to have package install errors mid install (and even saw a few reboots mid install!), but there was no consistancy with the errors (5 installs, sometime one package would fail sometimes another package, eventually had one install with no errors during install). Drive always needed 3 ATAPI resets after first booting from installed OS (but why did installer routing never need to ATAPI reset??). At first, I had e2fs partitions which began running tune2fs during X sessions, something the author of the software declared totally impossible.... yet maybe the corruption was still possible a year ago.
So many problems which did not clearly indicate any common causes!!

[banzaikai]

Well, in my case, I had to go RedHat. After getting the ISOs of Mandrake (from Umich.edu - they've got one fast pipeline!), I couldn't get the thing installed. Turned out it didn't like the combo of my aic78xx SCSI and IDE controllers (it would allow me to boot with the aic driver, but would assume my HD was on the SCSI, and tell me it couldn't find any partitions). I gave the CDs to a friend, and he had no problems on his system.
Redhat found, configured, and installed with only one hitch: my S3 Savage card had screwey video, which was fixed by editing XF86config to use the "no_accel" and "sw_cursor" options.
Running things was an entirely different problem, though. After some time, my user accounts got hosed. I made new accounts, everything worked, but they went right back to hosed status. I'm currently able to run as root, and have to keep setting up accounts, and I'm getting tired of coming up with new user names all the time (anyone know how to completely delete a user? RH keeps a log of 'em somewhere, and I have to use different names).
I'm about ready to toss the SCSI and SR9 video card as soon as finances permit...

banzai

[pcghost]

I'll play your distro war game. RedHat 7.3 rules!!:eek: