[Glastonbury] Just a little idea

[Sean Miller]

> Sean, I got a brand new copy of SuSE 9.1 professional off the front
> cover of the Linux Magazine yesterday.  It wouldn't install on my disk
> (which already had a Windows XP partition) though the claim was there
> that it would. It wouldn't recognise the time zone immediately.
> It defaulted to DHCP and wouldn't allow me to sort out my network card.

I don't actually like SuSE much, to be honest... far happier with Red
Hat/Fedora these days... it does have a good installer normally, though...
why would it not install? Was it searching for non-existent contiguous space
or something? Or was it NTFS? That would make it harder, that's for sure...

> Once I'd sorted that lot out, it then wanted to download about 300M of
> updates from an FTP site in Kaiserslauten (WTF - _all_ the useful mirrors
> are in Germany). The machine has ended up relatively up to date -
> but only has
> one user. Time to install a "non-expert" default install - about
> 2 1/2 hours.

Hmmm... you're saying that the default install didn't allow you to add
users, either from KDE or the command line? I do not think I shall be using
SuSE 9.1 in that case...

> Do I rant and rave about how SuSE is total rubbish and how you can't
> get the support for it on this LUGOG list and how when you do you get
> crap advice from zealots who should know better?
>
> No - I dig in, use my general knowledge and fix it. If you can't fix it
> - learn to ask sensible questions and to listen to the answers.

I didn't say that Debian was total rubbish... I said that it was not for
everybody... I struggle myself to get things working, like wireless network
cards and sound on DeMUDI etc.... and I am happy to keep experimenting with
such things... but at least with other distros one seems to be able to get
the machine 90% correct "out of the box", whereas with Debian my experience
with the one attempt to do it is that you get a machine 50% correct "out of
the box", and then have to learn in-depth Linux config principles to move it
further forward... you only have to look at what a Linux guru Tim Hall has
become having used Debian for a while to see that it is a distro that
teaches you a great deal about internals, and appears to require that
knowledge to get the best out of it... I bet he would not have the knowledge
he does if he'd used Red Hat 9 from the start... this is great for Tim, but
I don't have the time to do it... and others are the same... hence the
frustration at this attitude that moving to Debian would be great for
everybody... I am not sure it would, though it may be that the product has
now become better in this respect....

> Zealotry usually requires me to be provoked by an idiot or two :)

I was not the person who effectively told Steve that his Mandrake setup was
rubbish and should be replaced... I had not even contributed to the thread
when that particular bit of "zealot" activity started...

> There is always a choice: you can be smart and learn, or you can be
> dumb, arrogant and self confident in the extreme.  Generally, the second
> choice leads to lots more (unforeseen) opportunities to try out the
> first choice :)

One of the things I am not is self confident in the extreme, as anybody who
knows me in person will know.  I can problem solve (I do it as a career),
but I'd rather not have to if I can help it -- especially when I have tight
timescales to get something achieved... surely you can see this point of
view?

Sean