Max Sawicky writes:
IMO, Red Hat has a long way to go. I tried to install it last fall. It might have been easy if I was willing to just erase my entire hard drive and blow Windows off my system, but as it was I could never get the partitions set up the way I thought I was supposed to. Even when I got thru an install, then I couldn't get the video working (for X-). Then there were the impossible system lock-ups, on which the Red Hat book was useless.
I also think the hype about free on-line help from other users is very inflated. From what I could see on these newsgroups, there were questions put up which were left hanging. If you use a computer seriously, you don't want to wait a week for an answer to something. Bottom line is you gotta pay, so there is a rationale for Red Hat support. Just the software and only modest computer expertise is not likely to get you through it. -------------------------
I won't argue the FreeBSD case too strongly here, but... I did get it the unix part up and running after a couple of days of fiddling around in the evening. The first success was a mangled installation--all sorts of things I didn't need, and a few missing pieces. But once it was up, it ran without crashes.
My real problem I had was X-windows. There is no way to get over on this sucker. You absolutely have to know and understand your display card so you can configure it correctly or it will not start up. However, once you figure it out, it is a very amazing system since you can literally paint whatever look and feel you want with it.
Of course different scenes are different scenes. But the FreeBSD newsgroups were pretty good. I needed help on setting up the modem and dial up script and got it within a day. I stayed subscribed for several months just picking up information. I noticed of course I wasn't the only one having problems with configuring PPP (the modem--dial up program).
It took a long time to see this, but I finally decided that most of the problems I had or read about from the newsgroups reflected the level of user ignorance. In other words, the systems worked fine, the people (like me) just didn't know or understand how their equipment worked. Most of the news group help took the form of explanations on equipment and how a particular program dealt with the hardware. I think your problem with partitioning the hard drive is an example.
My particular problem with drives was understanding that the BIOS interrogates the master boot record (MBR) for the location of the boot startup files to load. What MS does is overwrite any existing MBR on the absolute presumption that MS is the only OS on the system. So, you have to install MS first, then over write their version of a MBR so that your BIOS will read the revised MBR and find the location of, and load one of the dual boot programs.
More anon. Gotta go to work.
Chuck Grimes