2002-08-14 01:17 UTC This should not be so hard
I hate installing UNIX.
- Debian on my HPXU 5/90C
Can't recognise the network card. It's an HP J3171A 10/100TX DeskDirect PCI LAN Adapter. Apparently, though, I have to know the exact name of the driver as well as what command line options to pass it (!). This is the 2002. The card should be autodetected, as it was in Windows, 7 years ago.
- Mandrake 8.2 on my HPXU 5/90C
Not enough RAM to install by HTTP. (The CDROM drive is broken, so that's not an option.) I tried installing it over NFS, but it locks up while partitioning the disk.
- OpenBSD on my HPXU 5/90C
That actually installed fine. Except this has got to be the most arcane UNIX system ever. I gave up trying to install Gnome on it. I need to find some other UNIX distribution which can install from a couple of floppies (which can be rawwritten from a Windows box) and complete its install using HTTP or FTP over the network. Any suggestions?
- Debian on my Inspiron 8100
Can't even boot the "rescue" floppy. That reminds me -- who came up with the idea of calling the installation disk the "rescue image"? What next, are we going to call a calculator program "xcalc" and have two separate web browsers called the same thing, such as "lynx" and "links"? Oh wait. Silly me.
- Mandrake 8.2 on my Inspiron 8100
Hangs on boot while trying to bring up the network on my 802.11b card. Not to mention that it totally failed to detect my GeForce2Go (no, calling it a GeForce2 DDR didn't do the trick). At least I can boot into single user mode. But come on. INIT: Going single user is beyond geeky. And the fact that I had to press ESC and type linux 1 to enter single user mode is more than obscure. It's embarassing.
Then again, so is Mozilla's pref panel.
Having said that, I like the default boot screen of Mandrake 8.2. Even if the font changes subtly at one point and the modules and boot scripts are inconsistent in how they report errors.