Toolkit

Story: Letting in Linux

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Your article is interesting, although some of the thinking is back to front. I have Windows XP on some of my machines and SuSE 9.1 on others.

I use both platforms in my everyday work as a consultant. I am not a Windows evangelist and I am not a Linux evangelist. They both have their strong and weak points. I use whichever will do a certain job better and more efficiently and also taking into account customer wishes. But when I have to build a system, I am much happier when I have to install Linux - unless I am being paid by the hour for the install.

I have never had any problems installing SuSE on any of my machines, ranging from a 1Ghz notebook up to a brand new AMD64. On the other hand, Windows has always been a complete nightmare to install.

I've never had to specify an alternate driver or had a device wrongly identified by SuSE, usually it recognises my video card and monitor and boots straight into the a usable resolution (either 1024x768 or 1280x1024 depending on setup) for the initial configuration. Likewise, I've never had problems with sound or network cards.

On the other hand, when I installed Windows XP on my machines, the sound card is never recognised, I always have to download a third party driver, video and networking is usually the same as well.

I bought a new AMD64 machine a couple of weeks ago. It uses an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard (on board 7.1 surround sound, Gigabit ethernet, firewire, USB, Promise and VIA SATA RAID controllers), PNY FX5900 video card and a pair of Samsung SATA drives in swappable trays. I plugged in the SuSE DVD and the setup ran straight through, the system was fully patched and online in around 45 minutes. Network, sound, video, well everything, were identified and the correct (or usable) drivers were automatically installed during the initial set-up (and it is a 64-bit OS).

The Windows XP install was a different matter. For a start Windows refused to believe that the machine had any hard disks installed. In the end I had to go back to the shop and purchase a floppy drive and download the Promise SATA drivers from the manufacturers website and copy them onto a floppy and tell Windows to load the special driver at the beginning of the set-up. But unfortunately I had been too clever, I had bought a USB floppy (none of my other machines have floppy drives these days, so the thought of having a drive I could use on any machine appealed). Windows found the drive the first time it looked, but then promptly reset the USB bus and couldn't find the drivers when it looked again and refused to install! Another trip to the shop to buy an internal floppy drive, and the basic installation could continue.

Windows booted up into 800x600 mode, there wasn't even a choice to set the correct resolution (1280x1024) , just 640x480 or 800x600! Oh, well, a quick online update should fix that... Nope, the network adapter wasn't recognised, so, after much CD swapping (5 CD's), I finally had the network drivers and video drivers installed. Using a DSL link, it took another 5 hours to download and install the patches for Windows, IE and Office (another 7 CD's to install first as well).

Witthout 3rd party drivers, SuSE was up and running and installed with Open Office, MySQL, Apache and an assortment of other packages (graphics editor, media player, games, network servers, anti-virus software to check for Windows viruses etc.) in 45 minutes, including all available updates. And that included one soft-reboot.

Windows on its own, couldn't even install itself. Given a little help on showing it how to use a hard disk, it managed to install a system that would not run at the optimal resolution, had no sound and no networking and no applications installed. A further 5 hours and there was a workable system with Office XP installed and Norton Anti-Virus. And that included somewhere between 15 and 20 reboots.

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