Re: Priam's screw's loose

On Wed, 7 May 2008 19:43:49 -0400, Wes Groleau wrote
(in article <V8rUj.7788$0L.6712@trnddc07>):

J.J. O'Shea wrote:
Linux will not do what I want to do. Period. It's a non-starter because it
lacks the application support to do what I need. I tried to use Linux over
a
period of _years_, going from Ubuntu 5.x to 7.x, and had no end of problems
getting items as simple as a wireless network card to work properly... and
then, even if I could get the hardware to co-operate, there was simply NO
SOFTWARE SUPPORT FOR WHAT I WANT TO DO.

I have absolutely no problems with Ubuntu. But that's because I only
use it for what it's good at: DNS, caching web proxy, NFS file server,
NTP peer, etc. Frees up the Mac CPU for everything else I want to do.

-)



.... One of the reasons I was looking at Ubuntu was to see if I could
build a server out of it on the cheap. It's not happening. Instead, I've
got
an old Power Mac running an old copy of OS X Server instead. Yeah, it cost
more than Ubuntu... but it WORKED OUT OF THE BOX and I didn't have to screw
with it. I prefer to spend money than time. Money I got, time I don't.

Hmmm. You must expect more from a server than I do.

I expect the server to actually be able to do little things such as
communicate with hard drives, back up, restore, and communicate over the
network. Printing is nice, too.


BTW, the hardware was $120 with Windows XP (I thought
I needed it for work). But I had to re-install a few
times in a few weeks, and after the last crash, couldn't
even re-install. So I installed Kubuntu and moved
my server functions from the equally trouble-free but
less powerful FreeBSD box that I paid $25 for.

The machine I was attempting to run Ubuntu on was a hand-built machine. I
built it, I knew exactly what was in it.

It had a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, a MSI 865 Neo2-V motherboard which came with
10/100 Ethernet, four USB, two serial, one parallel, and two PS/2 ports
installed. It had five PCI slots, an AGP 8 slot, four internal drive bays,
two external 5.25 and one 3.5 drive bay, and three slots for DDR2 RAM. It had
two PATA connectors, a floppy connector, and two SATA connectors. I put in
one 80 GB PATA Maxtor (and later a 250 GB PATA Hitachi) hard drive, a Sony
DVD-reading CD-burning combo drive (and later a HP DVD burner, set up as the
second optical drive on the system) and NVIDIA 4, later replaced by NVIDIA 6,
graphics. (The old graphics card wouldn't be able to hack Vista, the new one
would.) I took the RAM up from a single, and totally inadequate, 256 MB stick
to two 1 GB and a 512 MB stick. I installed a D-Link wireless card, later
replaced by a Linksys card because the D-Link didn't support WPA, and a
FireWire card and a modem. I had a Logitech keyboard and mouse, a Logitech
USB headset, and an assortment of USB2 thumb drives and hard drives, all
formatted FAT32 or FAT16,and some FireWire drives, formatted FAT32, NTFS, and
HFS+. I had a HP inkjet MFD and a Brother laser printer.

The hardware (all of the hardware) worked with XP Home, XP Pro, and Server
2003 by actual test. (True, I had to install MacDrive to make the HFS+ drives
show up, but they worked.) (I had a student license for Server 2003, which
expired every 180 days and I'd have to get a new one, which is one reason why
I was never going to be using Server 2003 for anything but testing. But the
price was right... free, that is.) I could even print to the HP over the
network, though I couldn't scan from it unless it was plugged in by USB. I
put Vista onto that machine, and it works there as well as Vista can be said
to work.

On the exact same hardware, Ubuntu Linux 5 declined to see:

the keyboard, mouse, headset, modem, the wireless card (both the D-Link and
the Linksys) the HP DVD burner, the FireWire card and the Hitachi hard drive.
It also refused to deliver better than 800x600 graphics on the video card...
both of them. (have you ever seen 800x600 on a 19" monitor?) Also, it thought
that the combo drive could only read CDs, not DVDs, and it refused to burn
CDs. Period. It would not print to the HP unless it was attached to a Mac or
a Windows box and was shared on the network. It would not print to the
Brother unless the Brother was on the network directly. Fortunately, as the
Brother shipped with built-in Ethernet, I usually had it set up for IP
printing on the network anyway. I had no end of trouble getting it to see my
keyboard and mouse; I finally had to get a no-name Taiwanese mouse and
Chinese keyboard. That, it saw. The Logitechs were installed using the USB
ports, the no-name units used the PS/2 ports... Hmmm. It _really_ didn't like
USB...

More important, it refused to see most of my USB hard drives. Which, combined
with its inability to see the FireWire card and its inability to burn CDs,
meant that it had zero back up ability... even if it would run something
approximating backup software, which it wouldn't.

Ubuntu 6 detected the Hitachi and the DVD burner, but regarded it as a DVD
_player_, not a burner. It would burn CDs on the Sony, but still wouldn't
detect DVDs placed in that drive. It also could use most (but not all) of the
abilities of the video card (both of them). It declined to see the FireWire
card and most of the USB stuff, including the hard drives. The wireless card
was still invisible, as was the modem. And the HP and the Brother still
wouldn't work if connected by USB.

Ubuntu 7 finally detected the fact that the Sony could read DVDs, but still
wouldn't burn DVDs from the HP. No wireless. No USB hard drives. No FireWire.
No modem. Better behaviour with the video. USB thumb drives work. USB
keyboard and mouse don't. No USB connection to the printers.

Note that I had the system set to multi-boot. I started up using the Linux
boot loader (which recognised the USB keyboard...) and if I selected Linux,
the KEYBOARD WOULD STOP WORKING. If I selected Windows, any flavour of
Windows, including Vista, all worked just fine. Losing the bloody _keyboard_
went _way_ beyond a joke.

The lack of software support started with a lack of driver support for video
cards, FireWire cards, wireless modems, just about anything to do with USB,
and optical drive support, and went on to include most non-command-line
server utilities. Command-line stuff would work just fine... if the system
could detect the devices in question, which due to the lack of driver support
it often couldn't. GUI stuff... no go. Not working. Period.

Meanwhile, the same stuff was working on the same hardware in Windows, and if
attached to a Mac would also work just fine. (Including the keyboard and
mouse...). And I had actual backup software which would actually detect the
drives and back up to them automatically which worked on OS X Server...
Hoo-rah. And the G4 I had OS X Server installed on was long since paid for,
and I'd got it second hand for under $50 'cause it wasn't working (bad hard
drive) and I'd inherited the OS X Server license for little or nothing before
I got the G4 and it had been gathering dust unused anyway... Hoo-rah twice.
Free is nice. Cheap enough, but actually working, beats free that doesn't
bloody work.

Maybe it's just Ubuntu. Then again, after all of that bull*** I really don't
care. Someone else can check out Ubuntu 8. I've had it.



--
email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.

.