I'm currently running Fedora Core 1 on my AMD Thunderbird 800 MHz system. As always with Linux (at least on this machine), the installation didn't run smoothly. First of all, I managed to burn CD 2 on a damaged CD-R disc, causing lots of hassle. The installation stopped and left the Grub boot loader in an unfinished state, forcing me to reinstall Windows XP in order to even use the computer again.
After this first setback, I burned another disc and decided to test the media before installing. That CD also failed! I was starting to think that it was something wrong with the .iso file I downloaded, but after testing with a CD-RW disc, disc 2 finally worked.
First, I was trying a graphical install, using pretty much the standard options (Personal Desktop, Gnome, Mozilla, etc.). The installer successfully collected most hardware information except the monitor (Iiyama S900MT1), so I had to choose a similar model from the list. It also said I had a generic 3-button USB mouse, when in fact I'm using a Logitech MX-700 with eight buttons. I'm still not sure how to make Fedora utilize the mouse buttons properly to e.g. get the Back/Forward buttons to work in Mozilla Firebird. Any ideas anyone?
When I was finished selecting which packages to install, the installer started to transfer all the RPM's to the disk. Then came the most annoying Red Hat/Fedora (anaconda) installation problem of them all: a message box appeared saying that there was an error when trying to install a package. It said something like "This is a critical error and the installation will stop." How fun! The problem is, this error has occured in the Red Hat 8 and 9 installer too, and even with another CD-ROM drive. Is this a common error of the anaconda installer, or is this in fact a hardware error? Why can't the installer handle it gracefully and simply retry, or at the very least inform me exactly what went wrong?
After this major setback, I tried the text mode installer. I now chose a bare minimum install, unchecking most options except the first "X Window System" and "Gnome" options. Even this setup failed once, and it seems that it fails completely randomly, since it doesn't even fail on the same RPM's. Finally, I managed to get the installer to complete its task and Fedora was up and running.
Knowing that I had deselected all web browsers, I was forced to add these packages after the setup was complete, in order to visit web pages and most importantly, download Mozilla Firebird. So I clicked the Red Hat, chose System Settings and clicked on Add/Remove Software and then added "Graphical Internet", and more specifically, the Mozilla web browser. However, this addition also failed for some unspecified reason. The error message read, basically, "An unknown error occured while installing," and then the whole Add/Remove Software component shut down. Update: Appearantly, this is a known bug in Fedora Core. There is also a workaround described there, but I haven't read about it yet.
Lucky me, I rarely give up. I formatted the partitions again and made a new text based install, making sure I included Mozilla from the beginning. This worked! I have now managed to download and install both Firebird and Thunderbird, plus I've downloaded the source for mplayer and was able to build it! However, that wasn't without problems either. After building mplayer, the graphical user interface complained that the default skin was missing. And indeed, it was not there. So I had to download that separately, place it in the correct folder (using admin rights) and finally, after lots of trial and errors, it is up and running.
By the way, before I could build mplayer, I had to install the application development packages from the CD too. Of course, these RPM's wouldn't install either, and threw the same error message on the screen as the Mozilla RPM did. For some reason, though, the autorun script on the first CD started that Add/Remove Software component differently, and I was able to install the RPM's then.
But, not without problems. :) The packages were scattered on both CD 1 and CD 2, and the installer was stupid enough not to sort the packages, so I had to switch discs at least ten times during the heavy software development install!
After all these problems, and after manually altering the /etc/fstab file to automatically mount my Windows drives on startup, I now have a system that I'm comfortable using. But, the bottom line is that Linux (and specifially Fedora Core 1) is not the operating system for anyone.
If you're tempted to try and experiment with it first hand, be sure to have lots of time, lots of patience and lots of computer knowledge, or you will find yourself crawling back to Windows in no time.
Posted by djst at November 12, 2003 7:02 PMThe problems that you describe with your system may be, as people have suggested, due to that branch of GNU/LINUX not being very solid or stable. It may also, as you suggested, be that your hardware is a bit flakey. I suggest that your bad experience with one GNU/LINUX OS should not reflect poorly on all GNU/LINUX OSses. Try another, or else you should limit your pronouncement of GNU/LINUX limits to the particular GNU/LINUX OS that you chose to try.
I don't know about MS-WINDOWS XP. I've used it a time or two, but never installed it.
I do know that about a year ago, I timed installing MS-WINDOWS '95 on a Pentium II (233MHz). My memory is that getting it installed, going through the product code garbage, and configuring the basic system, plus getting some kind of basic set of drivers (network card, etc.) installed took something like an hour or three. (My memory says 3 hours, but that was a year ago, and seems too high to be believed. Maybe only one hour?) (I was installing MS-WINDOWS on that machine in order to get some information for helping someone else set up and use CygWIN---and the machine was temporarily not needed by myself, so I didn't mind taking NetBSD off of it.)
NetBSD/i386 1.6, same hardware, complete OS install: 15 minutes. (Of course, this isn't a fair comparison. NetBSD doesn't include all of the bloat that MS-WINDOWS includes, like a web-browser, silly desktop, etc. But I did a full NetBSD install, including X and compiler and all of the other basic goodies that come on a complete distribution.)
...of course, one's notion of a "full" OS install will vary. To some, it may include a graphical web-browser and desktop. To others, a GUI may be entirely optional, but software development tools and network server/admin tools are a must...
How fast can you install XP on a 233MHz PII? (Assume 160MB RAM, and something like a 32x speed CD, with an old 4GB hard drive.) Just for comaprison's sake, since someone said XP installed faster than any other OS they'd tried. (^&
More recently, I installed MS-WINDOWS '98 on Bochs, running on NetBSD/amd64 (2GHz). With some twiddling of parameters to cut down silly delay-loop programming, I think that you can do a complete install in about 40 minutes, where most of the time is taken up by reading the CD. (Net performance is hard to rate. Some things felt "okay", others were terribly sluggish.)
My GNU/LINUX experiences (as far as personally installed systems go) have been:
Debian GNU/LINUX a few years ago, shortly after DRI was integrated into the GNU/LINUX kernel. I wanted to play with that, but was disappointed to find that Debian's release trailed a bit behind the GNU/LINUX kernel development, so 3D was no better than native NetBSD. Rather than mess with a kernel upgrade, I just didn't boot that partition much, and eventually reclaimed it for NetBSD/i386.
Then, when I got this new AMD64 box in October or November, I was having some trouble with NetBSD/amd64, so I thought that I'd give GNU/LINUX another shot.
I found ISOs for SuSE (the only GNU/LINUX OS that I could find, at the time, that expressly supported the AMD64 with downloadable install sets/ISOs). So, I gave it a whirl.
My sharpest memory was the *terrible* display support (literally the worst that I'd ever seen in my life). I could see the pixels being drawn in horizontal and vertical lines, in some cases. This was on a Radeon 9200. (I think that there were also some issues about a missing install file or two that spilled over to an ISO that I didn't download. The docs claimed only the first 3 were required, so that's what I got. Disabling some install options bypassed the need for the missing CD.)
Of course, that was with XFree86. NetBSD also had terrible performance, but for some reason (I don't remember why) I had not bothered to run X on NetBSD at that time. (Maybe it was the numerous "not supported" messages I had for hardware on the motherboard? Maybe I just wanted to take the Radeon to play with DRI? Of course, it turns out that the Radeon 9200 isn't (yet?) supported for DRI, anyway, so I'm not sure if I would get any benefit at all.)
The problem, of course, was that XFree86 didn't support the card well, and the autoconfigure made a bad guess. (When installing NetBSD/amd64 for serious use, I played with the XFree86 options and found that the "vesa" driver gave acceptable performance.)
...anyway. As far as people crawling back to MS-WINDOWS: Depends. I came from an Amiga background, came to the PC, and bounced out of MS land in less than a year. The best point is to do a dual-install or have a spare system so that you don't *require* the new system to work. Then you can be adventurous and stick things out. If you run into real problems and *need* something to work, you can take a quick dip back without deinstalling. (In practice, I found that I almost never needed MS as soon as I got NetBSD installed. But it was there, and I could play a few commercial games on it. (^&) If you try to go "cold turkey", that may work, but people always like what they know. IMHO, "cold turkey" approaches work best if you don't really have the option to go back. Otherwise, keeping a more familiar OS install (in your case, MS-WINDOWS) around is like training wheels or a safety net---you can remove it whenever you feel ready, but until then, it lends confidence.
Final side note: I'm considering giving GNU/LINUX another whirl on the AMD64. I'm in the midst of some issues with updating NetBSD/amd64 on this box, and keep getting "internal compiler errors". These could be due to broken tools, or these could be broken hardware. Given that the whole system is less than 6 months old, I really don't need to have things like memory going bad on me...and trying an alternate OS seems like a good test of that possibility. Though since these problems are new with the OS upgrade, I suspect that it's just software problems. I'll probably go with SuSE, since I still have the ISO CDs. I know how to fix the horrid display performance, if SuSE doesn't hide the XF86Config file.