From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at tsoft.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: MSFT v Slashdot Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 20:09:52 -0700 (PDT)
>From John K:
``Isn't it weird how Linux starts out difficult, gets easier, and then plateaus (and basically, you'll notice that there's a certain level of crap you'll always deal with), but Windows just never really gets much easier than the first few times you install it?''
(hit delete now, if you don't like computer babble)
Yes, exactly. Immediate case in point. Last night I was still fiddling around with the terrible AST 486/33Mhz somebody gave me this week trying to get Win95 to recognize the network card I put in. As I wrote in a earlier post, Winsuck wanted its own driver on disk 12, even though I had installed the card's Winsuck driver--which passed its own configuration test. I think what was going on was that every time you add hardware or software, winsuck wants to update and validate its internal db with a tool that it keeps on its installation disk(s), i.e. never installed. Bill was worried you might get around his validation and userid registration scheme.
It was interesting to wake up somebody else's long dead system--sort of like peeking into a stranger's personal diary. There was a complete history of the computer struggles Donna H (the unknown owner) had gone through as she started off with Win3.1, gotten various programs to run, played games, and then discovered the internet. She must have really been thrilled at that point, because there were all sorts of downloaded shareware and other goodies. I found a great animated icon called `pervert' which showed a woman jumping up and down on a faceless prone man--with a smile on her face. Very dumb, but funny. And there were some e-mails left with various hints on internet games, mostly the older dungeons and dragons stuff.
It was interesting to revisit this world as a lost time capsule. I had completely forgotten all the struggles I had to go through to get all the various versions of winsuck working. Donna H. had obviously followed a similar track. There were the extended and expanded memory managers that strained over the great difficulties of actually providing memory, the disk managers that strained to overcome the great difficulties of providing r/w/x addresses to the whole disk--what a fucking concept--and on and on.
Donna H. had been fighting hard. She had a Win3.1 shareware statistics program with a few spread sheets of grades, so she must have been a school teacher. She must have finally just gotten Win3.11 to work more or less alright, when Win95 came out and she had to start the great climb back up the ladder all over again. She used the upgrade version on 3.5 inch disks, like I had (and gave away so I didn't have infamous disk number 12). But she didn't want to let go of all the old Win3.1 stuff so it was all still there along with a quarterdeck boot disk manager--except Win95 rewrote her MBR so she had to drop into MSDOS mode.
I remembered the trick to kill off Win95's auto GUI boot and found she had tried a similar route, except she failed. The old `read-only' attribute bit defeated her. She had several versions of the msdos.sys file she had set to BootGUI=0 but none of them worked. They were written to msdos.002, msdos.003, etc. God she must have hated dirty little Bill after that. The only way she could get at her old Win3.1 familiars was to run them in a window in Win95. So their icons were littering the Win95 desktop.
So, I recapitulated a few more of these struggles and then I started deleting to see if I could clean up Win95 enough to make use of Office95. I forgot the tricks to get rid of the stupid `inbox' icon, although I did manage to delete the `MSN' icon. Imagine the joy of using mail to mail yourself and your fellows on the LAN a message. Gee, now how do we actually use mail to mail somebody on the internet a message?
See, this was the critical point. The mail system that came with this version of Win95 couldn't be used beyond the local network without some add on or upgrade or trick I forgot. So, then I turned to trying to wake up the modem and dial my ISP. Well there was the fake terminal that echoed the handshaking characters, but no PPP commands to see the route or complete the chat session, so the ISP logged me off. I had forgotten that I had to download the Berkeley Internet Kit (used to be available to anyone) to make Win3.1 and Win95 actually work. It had a substitute PPP, terminal emulation (remember Telix?), Eudora, along with ftp, rlogin, telnet and all the other shareware that asshole Bill didn't include. Donna had gotten around this hole in Win95 by having a monster AOL package she used for browsing, downloading, and mail. None of her Win95 and Office95 applets were ever used to interact with the www. She had gone the AOL route instead.
While I was going through Donna's system, I remembered the months of frustrated efforts it took me, to get all this junk to work together and how it never really worked quite right. One crash and the whole thing went down and I had to re-install and re-configure the whole mess all over again. I found Donna's tortured routes and efforts in these struggles represented as a variety of screwed up config.sys and autoexec.bat files--maybe a dozen of these in the root directory all generated by some configuration tool she had used to try to get this miserable box to run several generations of winsuck.
Well, last night about midnight, I had had enough. I popped in the boot floppy for FreeBSD 3.3 and managed to screw up the disk geometry and slices. The old Conner drive had some kind of disk manager that tried to fool the BIOS to escape that much dreaded 540Mb barrier. Shit, I have forgotten all about that. So I went to bed.
This morning with a clear head, I started over. On this round I configured the disk geometry correctly, mostly because I had managed to erase the master boot record along with whatever Conner had written there to fool the BIOS, and so I got all of the monster 608B available on the hard disk. After that it was pretty routine, except I forgot the network card port address had to be changed to 0x300 with irq 10. I also screwed up the local network addresses which brought several installation crashes. Finally in mid-morning everything was set up right. I started the installation off the other computer's cdrom, since this one didn't have a cdrom. I installed off the system over NFS. It took an hour and half, but I forgot how small 608Mb is and managed to overwrite the entire /usr partition. Shit! Then I remembered the trick to get out of this. You change virtual terminals, log on as root and delete all the sources in /usr/src tree to free up space while the installation is stalled out on the first terminal. And, then you shutdown the system and re-boot and pray that the main system was installed before the directory tree was filled up. It worked fine.
Wild ride, huh? Crash a workstation install from a network and then from the apparently dead station open another virtual terminal by hitting the F2 key; logon on as root, shut the station down and then bring it back up to see if it works anyway--and it does! I mean, it is hard to explain to the Winsuck world why that is such a miracle.
Well it evidently works, since at the moment I am using it to send this--although I am cheating because this is going out through a remote shell (rsh). I haven't configured this station's sendmail, printer, or PPP daemons to use the network server as the gateway.
Chuck Grimes
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