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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (1883)	11/29/1999 1:37:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2615

I also found that Slackware setup script has its problems installing software off the CDROM and keep itself unconfused. I began to think that it was my computer that was causing the problem. Sometimes you blame software and it is hardware. Not likely on three different machine though. But, Slackware 4.0 seems nice but it installed the entire thing and some programs had errors that were flagged. They had to be installed again. Then it forgot to install the swap space or to turn it one. Nothing wrong with the computer. Brand new everything. Somehow you could install swap and go round about again and it wiped it out. If you did not get it right the first time it would take you back to zero without a warning. Thigs ran kind slow until I figured out that /etc/fstab had some missing components delineating swap. While I am carping I could mention that it would seem that some drivers in Linux are far from perfect. I suspect that the linux aha1521 driver cannot handle DMA properly with all drives. It also does not do synchronous negotiation (multi task writing and reading, not spindle sync) which the aha1521 is supposed to do. If you made a list of drivers and their deficiencies you would have quite a laundry list of hardware that doesn't work right under Linux. Of course there are good reasons sometimes. But often the writers refuse to reverse engineer properly as that is the only way the thing will get written. The Slackware 4.0 setup manual is about 200 pages. But if you look in the index it is quite comical. All the index entries are wrong. Not one entry will take you to the right page. I thought there might be some kind of formula which would give you the page, but I am mystfied. They are just plain wrong and finding the topic is hard. Better to read the whole book and make your own index. There is a powerful lot of broken software and and broken hardware out there. I like to say that ZIP is the only piece of software I ever used that worked exactly as advertised, worked well and never gave a moment's trouble. In DOS, you connected two computers by parallel port with a null modem cable and the software would connect the two and transfer files at 115,200 baud. Freeware. 12 bucks for the cable, 90 cents for the disk and you had the $110 dollar lap link beat. And it worked easily and intuitively unlike Microsoft's rendition of the same thing. There are a few others that are old faithfulls. Pkzip, Winzip are two. Perhaps others could add some good programs that have damn few bugs and have always "been there". I could mention quite a few DOS programs that did not let me down but they were so primitive and feature free that it hardly seems worth it. EC<:-}