[Sussex] What path does one take

[Stephen Williams]

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The path I am taking is one diverging from Windows. I it dominates the desktop, but even here M$ is under threat in my home. I have two PCs running Win 2K Pro SP4. One is an iDeq Mini PC with a 200Gb SATA disk. This requires a driver for the SATA controller on a floppy when installing Win 2K (or XP come to think of it) from CD. The other day this 32 bit driver became corrupted and BLAM!, the PC wouldn't boot because Windows can't find a clean driver for the disk controller, and it won't boot using Int 13 disk access in safe mode. So I have to dig out a spare floppy drive, plug it in, run the repair routine from Win 2K CD and load a new driver off the floppy. Why couldn't M$ provide access to drivers on other media, or off the net?

The other PC boots and halts saying "can't find file \WINDOWS\NT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\summat or other". Now this wouldn't be a problem, but this PC dual boots using grub as the bootloader rather than the M$ Windows 2K "There can't possibly be any other form of boot loader in the known universe" boot system. When you run the repair routine from the Win 2K CD, it baulks and complains that it "Can't find Windows installation" as it can't read grub boot sectors. I will have to repair this by using the trusty Knoppix 5.01 DVD. Now why can't Windows install CDs be more like that. Comprehensive repair and troubleshooting toolkit, as well as complete OS and software suite. The only slight nag is Windows NT filesystem write access.

Sheesh, even Gentoo has gui user-friendly installs now.

However, some Open Source stuff is pretty arcane - can anyone tell me how SASL interacts with Cyrus IMAP and OpenLDAP? Non-trivial but quite enjoyable learning experience there.

Steve Williams.

- -----Original Message-----
From: sussex-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:sussex-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Ronan Chilvers
Sent: 19 October 2006 15:37
To: LUG email list for the Sussex Counties
Subject: Re: [Sussex] What path does one take


On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 03:09:28PM +0100, Geoff Teale wrote:
> The windows server product range (and indeed their programming product
> range) is blighted by a series of big lies - they market their 
> products (as do Apple) on the idea that the fundementals of computing 
> are hard, but if you use their tools it's all easy.  In reality the 
> opposite is true.  Nearly all of the complexity in computing is in the huge stack of
> software between the metal and the user.   They're obfusticating what's
> really happening (making the situation more, not less, confusing) and 
> leading people to believe that the job is done when the wizard is 
> finished.

Geoff - hope you don't mind if I join you:

<aaarrrghhhh!!!!>

Couldn't agree more!! Anyone who has administered windows servers will know the frustrations of cryptic error logs which require phone calls to MS to discover that error code CC5568GG778000-7772-2 means 'you haven't plugged it in'.  One of the joys of Linux to me is not that it never goes wrong - it does. But when it goes wrong it tells you what 
happened!!! There are swathes of logs in plain text waiting to help 
you pinpoint problems.

The secretive, your-computer-knows-best attitude is incredibly frustrating in a workstation environment and untenable in a server environment. I want to know exactly what my servers are doing all the time and I don't want a piece of software doing what it thinks is best without my knowledge and approval. Neither do I want a huge GUI infrastructure eating up CPU cycles that could be better spent on the services the machine is offering.

It seems to me that its all about locking users into thinking you're doing something clever, when you're not really and consequently making them believe they can't do without you. Put together a nice support contract and licensing scheme on top of it and you're laughing!!!!  As you say, Apple is just as bad, if not worse. Administering a small OSX network has proven to be as frustrating in many ways as working with windows servers. A spinning multi-coloured disc doesn't tell me what the problem is, it just &*^^£^ me off!!!!!

</aaarrrghhhh!!!!>

Crikey... must have been a raw nerve!! Enough...

Cheers
- -- 
Ronan
e: ronan at thelittledot.com
t: 01903 739 997

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