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

[Brent Wood]

--- Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:

> 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.

No problem, thanks for the reply.
2 different systems. One the old P3, one the new Gigabyte A64 box using the m/b
below. Prob more info than you want, but here is the info :-)

 
> 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. ;)

The GA system:

The LAN "card" was the onboard one in a GA-K8N51GMF-9 motherboard. I didn't try
it in a Debian based distro (I see Mepis 6 is now based on Ubuntu as well).

It all set up as "normal", I entered all the usual details to set it up on my
LAN, but could not get it to find any other system. Just network unreachable. I
figured it might be a hardware fault until Windows worked. Switch LED's & m/n
LED's not even flashing with a ping command. Identical with SUSE 10.1 &
Mandriva 1. WinXP & Mepis worked fine. I'm pretty sure it wasn't me stuffing
things up. Once maybe, but not as often as I tried. 

I have no idea if an Ubuntu distro would have worked. The person I was building
it for just wanted a dial up. Rather than install a serial card & h/w modem I
used a cheap Lucent(Agere) based Winmodem that I've had success using in the
past.

Suse, Ubuntu 6, Kubuntu 6 all recognised the modem & even dialled out, but the
connect string came back with CONNECT nnnnn NoEC. No login prompt etc. Under
WinXP I got a more expected CONNECT nnnnn v44. A bit of searching the net
suggested I needed the new Lucent martian chipset drivers to work with the 2.6
kernels.

Mandriva 1 just said it recognised the modem, but that I had to download
drivers, they were not bundled on the disk. Mepis recognised it & it worked
perfectly. For a semi retired acountant who just wanted better internet
security than Windows offered I didn't want a Linux install that he couldn't do
himself. So far he's more than happy with Mepis.

An internet search for an Ubuntu fix also suggested I downloaded and installed
the drivers. I don't do that. I find a distro that works instead. 
 
> >> 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.  

I'm a PC user. I use applications, apart from Office & internet I use databases
& GIS pretty extensively. I've been totally Open Source in this arena at home &
work for about 6 years. I don't really care which OS or distro I use. It's the
applications I want to use. Philosophically I do stick with Open Source, but if
it doesn't work, I'll pay what I can for a solution that does.

Mandrake & SUSE have had the simplest (perhaps most Windows like) setup &
configuration. Nvidia 3D drivers supplied & installed automagically. I was a
Mandrake club member for several years until SUSE offred a few things I
preferred. 

While Debian users are (justifiably) proud of Debian, I find them all too often
dismissive of other distros and to have a "holier than tho" attitude. It's a
bubble I find hard to resist pricking :-) One such user at our last
installfest, who had been a supporter of Debian, loudly exclaimed, while
watching a Suse install, "My mother could do this!".

I find Debian users assume potential Linux users to be more computer literate
than many of the computer users I know are. There are several distros which I
believe are easir than Debian to install & use. I believe some Debian users
agreed, hence Ubuntu. 

So please take my comment as a tongue in cheek prod at Debian users, rather
than any real criticism of the distro.

I don't care if my software is open or closed source. Nvidia drivers are
available, commercial Linuxes include them. YaST (SUSE) will install them for
you from the Nvidia site. I want a distro that supports ALL my hardware out of
the box. I'm hapy to pay reasonable amounts for this. My idea of fun is
wrestling with projections for a free geospatial dataset, not compiling a
kernel or kernel modules. I'll change distros before I do that.

> 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...

OK, the issues with the pIII. Kubuntu was the distro that seemed to do
everything the guy wanted, & supported all his hardware out of the box. 
USB Sony minidisk, etc... Once there he wanted emacs. I opened the package
mangler, I forget which it was, whatever Kubuntu uses, & searched for emacs. It
found nothing.

I said I'd find the .deb files he needed, & I assumed that sticking them on a
CD & clicking on them from Konqueror would install them easily.

So, I found the URL for the NZ Ubuntu repository. Opened it in a browser
looking for a directory full of .debs. Stuffed if I could find any. I then
searched for emacs, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, deb, debian, repository, etc. Still
couldn't find anything. (This is unusual. I generally find whatever I'm looking
for in a few minutes).

I told the guy I wasn't sure what to do, as I was unfamiliar with Debian based
distros. I couldn't find an equivalent to www.rpmfind.net in a couple of
minutes, so I flicked my question to the list, where Andrej & Jonathan gave
excellent & complete replies that I'm pretty sure will work.  

> 
> [...]
> 
> > 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 found Suse 9.3 excellent. Everything I wanted, 10.0 I've had a few issues.
10.1 a few more. I've had a quick look at a few others again to see if anything
met my needs better than Suse (I'm pretty promiscuous about distros), but it
doesn't seem so right now. So, after I finish some FOSS GIS demo's to some
corporate clients on my current Suse 9.3 64bit workstation, I'll be rebuilding
it from scratch with Suse 10.1 64bit, then compiling & adding Postgres,
PostGIS, GEOS, GDAL/OGR, GRASS, OpenJUMP, QGIS, UMN mapserver, PHP mapscript,
Proj.4, shapelib, etc from scratch to meet my needs. Maybe 2 days to get it all
working as I need, then load up the 30-40Gb of data I'm playing with right now.

I know there is a pretty active Debian:GIS group, but they are not supplying
the optimised 64bit stuff I want, which gives me a real performance boost that
puts commercial/Windows based equivalents to shame.

> 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.

:-) From the merger of Mandrake & Connectiva Linuxes. Tho they still call the
setup tools drakconf, etc, despite the name change!

> 
> 
> [...]
> 
> > 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.  



Yep. ditto ATi, Nvidia, Conexant is worse.....

> 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.

Agreed, or they only include them with a commercial version, where linces fees
are paid. Sweet... 


> 
> 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.

I don't have it, my customer is now enjoying Linux/Windows with no hardware
issues.

Anyway, HTH, if you have any other questions I'm happy to help....


Cheers,

   Brent






> 
> Regards,
>         Daniel
> -- 
> Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
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> 
> 
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