Debian/Ubuntu as cruelty? (was Re: [wellylug] ubuntu help.... & SimplyMEPIS Linux)

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Thu Aug 17 13:37:32 NZST 2006


Brent Wood <pcreso at pcreso.com> writes:

G'day Brent.  I hope you don't mind my asking this; feel free to
disregard the questions if you don't want to answer or whatever.

The reason I ask is that I really want to understand what the problems
you ran into are, so I can feed them back into the distribution and,
hopefully, Ubuntu and Debian can eventually fix them. ;)

>> My apologies for misunderstanding your question. Have fun with Ubuntu and 
>> Emacs.
>
> (No problem, thanks for taking the time to respond!)
>
> EEEEEK!!! Not me!!! That's undeserved cruelty!!!! I'm not the
> brightest bulb around, and occasionally delve in masochism, but I'm
> not quite ready for Debian yet!

I would love to know why you say this.  You have obviously had issues of
some sort with Debian (and/or Ubuntu) that make you feel they are
... rather challenging to use.  

For background, my personal experience runs in roughly the opposite
direction: Debian and Ubuntu are consistently easier to maintain and
manage than the various RPM based distributions I have used, notably...

[...]

> I'm still a SUSE/Mandriva lad by preference :-) 

...SuSE (Enterprise Linux 9 and OSS 10.0) are currently being a royal
PITA to work with.  

I don't know much about Mandriva, these days, although I think it
derives from the old "Mandrake Linux", yes?  That probably shows how
long it has been since I looked anywhere near that, eh.


[...]

> Windows install went fine. However, various versions of Mandriva,
> SUSE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu all failed to support either the LAN or modem
> properly (internal Lucent winmodem).
>
> I threw SimplyMEPIS 3.4 at it, & EVERYTHING WORKED PERFECTLY. 

Support for the Lucent WinModem is going to be spotty all over the
place, because of lawyers.  

Basically, using them requires doing things that many IP lawyers
consider violating the terms of one license or another.

As a result various distributions do, or don't, ship the support for
them at all, or ship it outside core, or whatever.


None of which makes it much fun for you, of course.  

The LAN hardware, on the other hand, should have "just worked" these
days.  What is the network card you have in the machine, if you don't
mind my asking.  An 'lspci -n' of the specific item would be fine.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707        email: contact at digital-infrastructure.com.au
                 http://digital-infrastructure.com.au/




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