DH Editorial: Installing Linux : A present-day Odyssey?

Zardon

Now that Windows was installed, it was time for me to install Linux. I had a spare 120GB PATA disk, and decided to dedicate it to Linux all by itself. So I took my Ubuntu CD (another change of heart I had lately – I abandoned my sweet Gentoo for Ubuntu, growing tired of long compilation times) and installed the OS. Installation was not a problem here as well; and after a while I rebooted to Ubuntu. That is where the problems started.

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UberLord

Nice review, and very well stated. Some comments

Windows Service packs require a few hundred megs of download from very fast servers. A 90 meg download to get working isn't that bad in comparsion

Instead of doing pidof gdm && killall <number> you can just do killall gdm

X can use plain old VGA mode when configured to use it. Infact, I think that's the default old of the box setting, but I'm not too sure. It can also use VESA modes, but they can get a touch slow ...

I do share your gripe about modems - although that's really down to hardware makers not releasing the specifications to make them work well. Especially WinModems .... which are essentially software modems. As they're software, there's a load of Intellectual Property locked up in the software which companies don't want to be open sourced, hence no driver. This is slowly changing though

Kombatant

As I said in the article, I know there are myriads of things I would/should have done differently in retrospect. The cause of my article was the time and effort it took me to (correctly) install the OS. Maybe MS has raised the bar too high, I don't know, but if it weren't for my Gentoo experience, I doubt I'd be so proficient with the command line in order to solve whatever problems arose (and would probably still be looking at it)

But yes, things are changing. I still remember the time it took to correctly setup my nForce2 motherboard when it first came out, and what kind of support there was for it

Scar_T

While I was reading your article a lot or memories came back to my mind , when I was installing my Gentoo, my nForce2 wasn't recongnized correctly . It is a good distro but definitely I'll never install Gentoo, It took a lot of time to install

It's courious, but I have neve had problems with my modems even though I used to use winmodems, my modems always were in the few ones which had support under linux . heheh

Nice review.

redsolar

I am still sorting out Centrino/Linux problems. The only installation that has worked out of the box on my lappy was SuSE, but due to serious hard drive limitations I can not install it on with Windows, since both my wife and I are using it, and while she is very knowleadgeable in Windows, Linux environment is still scarry for her .

Though in all honesty I have not had a lot of time to tinker with it yet, thanks Panagiotis for a very down-to-earth experience.