Re: The Microsoft stranglehold on its users....



On Wed, 16 May 2007, morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On May 16, 7:40 am, Straydog <a...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There is a book out there, "Linux from Scratch" that has all of this
described in infinite detail. I was thinking about going this route, but
I've got too many other things in life that I want to do, too.

I've read the online version of Linux from Scratch. It makes
everything a lot easier these days.

I copied the whole thing but can't find where I stored it. Now, you have to buy the book (if you can find it [I have not tried]).

I was doing the "from scratch" thing back in the mid 1990's, when
there wasn't as much documentation about it. In those days I was just
building up everything for Linux on an MS-DOS partition, and using
loadlin to boot up linux manually by hand from DOS.


I found that to be the best. LILO had bugs and it was a trap because to uninstall LILO you had to get a successful boot into Linux and uninstall it from the utility. You could NOT just blow the partitions and reformat. Same problem with System Commander. Probably all of the boot managers use tricks to defeat default boot records. At one point I had to use a disk editor and just zero out everything at the master boot record area of the disk.

The latest Red Hat Workstation Linux just loads everything on your box with little or no choices (like before version 9, and even partly version 8) and then around version 7 they started to include CDROM drivers for the new, not the old CDROM drives. So, you're shot dead in the water if you have old hardware. And, I tried the trick of using the old Linux install to mount the new OS software CDROM disk, copy the whole disk to a different partition, then run the install and that would not work either.
The workstation install manual had at least four or five really major errors or misleading pieces of information and it just blew me away to think they did this through incompetance or legal help for the purpose of forcing people into this: I had this dirty feeling that they did this deliberately to get you to make that $/min phone call to them which like lots of "support" today does not work. And, their free 90 day support led me to a technician in India (yes) who could not "tune in" on my problem. So, its a dirtier trick than Microsoft (they are all a bunch of crooks, now)! But, I bought a legal copy of XP (I hate it: $185) and you should see
the lies (my definition of a lie is when the instructions [the very thin
comic book inside the box along with the CDROM disk] don't tell you the
truth about how to install the OS, and what is outside the box is
misleading, too). So, I finally figured out how to do it, prayed and sweated (since I was guessing about whether the hardware was compatible) during the install. I did get one error message, and I'll give MS one little gram of credit for making it possible to hit enter and ignore the error and it goes on (sometimes the install errors are fatal and you can't go on) and I got an install that did boot up. And, for what we needed it for (a version of Acrobat Reader that would not run on anything before XP), it worked. But, this is where the whole SW culture is going: forcing you to spend more money on things you don't need, or should not need, and guarantee revenue (socialism for the corporations, but not people) through actions on their part to foist this *** onto the rest of us.

Welcome to the modern 21st century where the economy is based on "spinning your wheels" rather than real productivity (i.e. making things that work or services that serve).

The best distros were the ones that came in the back of thick books for the same price as the shrinkwrap (which only gave the comic book) but gave a lot of details to help you. One was a very good book for BSD, and another one was the "dumb" McMillan book for RH 5.2 but while the OS was stable, the web browser (Netscape 4.0x) was crash-prone and won't work on today's websites an the file manager is not drag-and-drop. Also, if you forget to unmount the CDROM drive, it crashes the shutdown and it won't boot anymore. Lots of this got fixed by 6.2 (esp the automount function) and 6.2 was pretty good. 7.3 was the best in terms of tradeoff, at least for me but it might not run StarOffice for Linux because of the c-libraries.

I could write a whle book, myself on Linux and SW experiences. But, on the whole, SW is the first commercial business in history to come out with something that you pay money for and what you get is at least partly *** for your money.
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