What put me off, though, was my inability to fix them. I normally laugh at IRQ conflicts, and giggle like a girl in the face of IO address clashes. In these cases, I was stumped. The errors had few clues for their rectification, and browsing online forums only revealed other people piteously reporting the same. Each time I tried to get Linux running, I seemed to end up at the point of going through the source code before remembering that I gave up writing operating systems some years ago. It didn't help that the friendly Linux experts I drafted in to help also ended up stumped: "It does that with that chipset sometimes" is not a song to lift the spirits.
There was always the feeling that with a bit more work, a little more fiddling and card-swapping, a few more midnight stints, I could have got things humming -- but with age comes impatience. Faffing with hardware for its own sake is less fun at thirty-something than eighteen, likewise learning fifteen incomprehensible command syntaxes before breakfast: besides, there's a whole Internet of good things to play with once you've got your browser going. Why wait? No matter how you cut it, Linux at home meant an anorak in the wardrobe.
But now there's Knoppix. The promise, as always, was tempting: download the disk image, burn it onto a CD-ROM and reboot. It will sniff your hardware, configure itself and just run. Instant Linux. Nah, I thought. I've been caught that way before. Still, I've always been good at letting faith triumph over experience.
The only remotely technical things involved were finding a way to persuade Windows XP to burn a bootable CD-ROM -- a tiny utility called ISO Recorder did the trick -- and setting the BIOS to make my computer check the CD-ROM first before booting from hard disk. Those done, the disk was burned, the computer restarted and three minutes later I was running a Linux desktop. You know, that mythical beast wot don't exist.
Talkback
Glad you have finally got Linux running, sort of... I've not had any real problems, I've installed it on several machines around here (laptops, desktops and an old Pentium 133 is acting as a firewall running IPCop).
I've installed IPCopt on various pieces of old kit with no problems. And once up and running (about 10 minutes to install and configure), it just sits in the corner and runs and runs. I only shut it down when I go away, and apart from one update and a dead netwrok card, I've not needed to restart it.
Having said that, I fully agree with you on the state of the Linux desktop and utilities. When I started working on Linux administration tasks, my first thought was "come on guys, it isn't the 1970's anymore!" A lot of the configuration is very archaic and could do with a modern revamp, although a lot of Linux enthusiasts take umbridge when you point out that editing a text file with mnemonics in VI isn't the done thing these days... Saying that, it isn't too hard, I guess we've been too molly-coddled by modern graphical OS's over the last 20 years... :-P
Is that article a joke? Must be, sure made me laugh.
Ah, but the whole point of config files and VI is that you can SSH into a remote server using your laptop and a mobile phone in data mode. With 9600 baud tops, and 250 km from the nearest land line, I'd rather be administering a linux server than a Windows 2K one.
For a local desktop you can always use kate, kwrite, gedit, etc etc.
It's easier to tell someone to 'edit /etc/conf.d/kdm and change xyz=true to xyz=false' than it is to get them paging through the registry, looking for a particular key.
Cheers
Simon
Hmm, you have a point about the remote admin, but for the local user, who isn't an Unix/Linux Admin, there should be an option to open a GUI app and click on a check-box or something to change the setting.
Also depending on the distribution, the config files can be in different directories or named differently and even in a few cases have totally different syntax!
The sooner the Standard Linux distribution becomes "the standard", the better... Until then, Linux has an uphill struggle. And in this modern world, Linux should allow both traditional admins and normal users to configure Linux the way that suits them best. We have a generation of user now who haven't even seen a command line, and would have problems editing the relatively easy Config.sys file from MS-DOS, let alone all of the little files tucked away in odd corners of the Linux world.
Think we should find a forum for this discussion ;-)
David