[PLUG] Mandriva Installation Woes

[John Jordan]

On 20 May 2005, at 14:08, Elliott Mitchell wrote:

> Yes, but the most recent analysis I've seen stated that it was a *lot*
> better than Windows installation. The reason you notice is because
> you're installing Linux, but most likely have never done a bare
> installation of Windows (a recovery CD/DVD doesn't count).

Actually, I have. Many, many times. I have never bought a 
computer with Windows preinstalled. In fact, the last time I bought 
a computer that I did not build myself was so long ago it was a 
386/25, state of the art for its day.

In the early days (like 3.0 and even 3.1) there were lots of driver 
problems. Unstable is an understatement. To get away from the 
shell crashing all the time I built my first NT computer in October, 
1993, two months after NT 3.1 was released. And there were driver 
problems with that too, for several years. 

Even if there were drivers for NT they frequently didn't work well. 
The problem was that NT required different drivers than regular 
Windows and manufacturers did not want to spend the money on 
producing a driver for an OS until after it had a decent market 
share. (Gosh, that sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?) As a result, 
for the first release of NT the drivers were almosst all written by 
Microsoft. And Microsoft didn't care if they had all the functionality 
the device was capable of. All they wanted was to be able to say 
"why of course NT comes with a driver for your Mark IV BugBomb 
card."

Today those issues are all pretty much behind us for Windows. But 
now I'm trying to go to Linux, and having to go through it all over 
again. But I'm cool with it. With this laptop my trump card is that I 
still have ten days left on my "no hassle" return privilege with HP. 
I'm just frustrated. I *really, really like* this computer. I so want to 
get Linux working on it properly.

As for Mandriva, I did have Mandriva installed on it and it worked 
fine (except the video was wrong and the wireless and firewire didn't 
work). But the version that I had installed was the 586 version, and 
now I'm trying to install .x86_64.

Also, I think the firewire didn't work because Mandriva thought it 
was eth0. The LAN was eth1. And I had to do a lot of fiddling with 
the LAN to get it up so I could get on the internet. Unfortunately, 
every time the window came up eth0 was in the drop down menu 
by default. So most of the time when I made a change I ended up 
trying to do it to the firewire port. Only after seeing the hourglass 
followed by an error message did I realize that, once again, I had 
forgotten to select eth1 before applying the change. So I'm pretty 
sure the firewire didn't work becauses I goobered it up.

(Note to Gnome coders: Make that drop down box "sticky" so once 
the user selects a device it will keep coming up with that device by 
default. Or make the box blink and make loud squealing noises 
until the user selects a device. Or something. It's a user interface 
problem the way it is now.)

As for the wireless, I am sure that can be made to work. Push 
come to shove, I can go to Linuxant and pay a few bux for their fix. 
I never got to the point of trying the faxmodem but, again, Linuxant 
will probably save me if the distro doesn't get it going automatically.

It's the video that may be the deal killer here. But I am still hoping 
that the full 64-bit version of Mandriva 2005 LE will do it. 

I just went out running some errands and had some time to 
cogitate on this some more. I think for my next exercise I am going 
to try a reinstall, but select Ext2 instead of Ext3. Or maybe Reiser. 
And, as Robert suggested, maybe I'll change the partition sizes.

NOT GIVING UP YET!