frustrations and excitement

[CMonster]

I cannot begin to say how excited I am to be in on the ground floor of something as revolutionary as the LinuxOS. It has come so far so fast and the end is nowhere in sight. I forsee the day when even microsoft will bow down to write programs that run on Linux (certainly not for free), in order that they may make money from both ends.

My first "cold turkey" exposure to Linux was Caldera OpenLinux version 1.3 and RedHat 5.1. I ahd been a stone Windows user with little OS experience, period. At that time I had only CL & Xwindows with my Linux, not KDE or gnome or the like and it was hard enough to get Xwindows up and running!!@! Then I decided the first easy thing would be to get my cheap generic sound card working...Three months later...I bought an actual Sound Blaster and got it working, thanks to the growing bald spot where I had pulled the hair from my head- had to compile sound support into the kernel with Caldera...but RedHat5.1 took only a minute using sndconfig once I tried the genuine SB card on it. A month later, and one bottle of Tylenol later, I got the cheap sound card working by initializing it in DOS and then soft-booting into Linux.... It was a difficult learning curve but now I am getting the hang of it.

Next I decided to tackle the modem - wow, it took only a few minutes!!! and I thought I would be in for another three months of torture.

Now I have all new sound cards, video cards - hey upgrades happen - and all new Linux.

At first there is so much reading to do ---learning terms like "tar" and "rpm" but soon enough you get it.

My advice, hang in there. I think we will be able to say someday that we were there when the revolutions started:

Watch out Microsoft!

[Dominus]

Thats one weird thing.... sound cards can be murder in linux, but modems, as long as they're hardware modems, are a breeze. I also had a ***** if a time trying to get both NICs to work in linux, turns out one wasn't supported. Now that the desktop environment is all worked out (beautifully, I might add), the only thing keeping linux out of the average home/office is hardware support and ease of hardware installation. Once that's fixed, I'd recommend Linux to anyone.

[cobain1crt]

Install is still a pain. Linux needs to be FAT32.

[Dominus]

How in the world do you expect that to happen? Isn't FAT32 owned by MS? They won't take kindly to other OSes using their filesystem, even if it was possible.

The easiest way for the Linux community to make installation easier is to use the LIZARD approach, where there is a windows install option, and a scaled down Partition Magic util bundled with it.

[Joel Kleppinger]

Actually (though I do not claim AT ALL to know much about Linux), if I am not mistaken, Linux has an FAT32 driver/daemon (whatever ).

I have never installed this on my two Slackware installs, but I seem to remember it because of some possible troubleshooting... you can hook an FAT32 drive up to a Linux box to do all sorts of troubleshooting (Again, I could be lumping it in with NTFS which I *know* has Linux support - NT Hackers love Linux because it is easier than anything else to compromise NTFS security).

This is all off of memory, so I could just be spouting off, though I don't think so.

Joel

[Dominus]

You're absolutely correct on that point, but I think my cobaincrt means installing to a FAT32 partition, not just mounting a FAT32 drive or partition.

[CMonster]

Linux can be installed onto a FAT16 drive, and the newest versions do have kernel module support for FAT32 and can read and write to a FAT32 drive. I do not know if Linux can be installed on a FAT32 partition or not, perhaps the newer version can but why would anyone want to? The FAT file systems are inefficient for Linux and it makes Linux seceptable to damage from DOS virus that attack the disk FAT or delete files.

I share files with my FAT32 Windows partition just fine, on the contrary, where is the Linux file system support in Windows?

[Joel Kleppinger]

Actually, I don't even want (and definitely don't expect) Linux file system support in Windows. If I want anything from Windows it's for both OSs (NT and 9x) to _both_ support _both_ FAT32 and NTFS. Sure, you can buy a driver for NT4 to support FAT32, but I want native support. I hate MS beauracracy.

If Win9x would support NTFS, I'd convert all of my partitions in a heartbeat.

Joel

[CMonster]

NTFS a bit more efficient than FAT is it?

[Joel Kleppinger]

It's more efficient, resists fragmentation better (though it still creeps up), it's faster (at least in NT.. dunno about Linux), and it has security controls.

The biggest reason is simply that it supports drives into the terabytes while not having cluster size probs as you would with FATxx.

If Win9x supported NTFS, then we could all run NTFS and then run NT and Win9x allowing them to share apps without having to mess with FAT at all. It is a pretty nice file system.. rough equivalent to the Linux file system in features and speed.

yet another reason to hate MS.......

Joel

[SoopaStar]

Windows 2000 will support (and does support) fat32. in case anyone cares

Paul

[philipg]

I have a question since you are all talking FAT.

Can Linux run in a win98 (FAT32) dos box or from a dos prompt (crazy thought, just curious)?

I HATE windows but I still think its a pain in the next to reboot each time I want to run windows/dos games that are not supported in Linux.

Is there an emulator out there that emualates the Linux Fat system?

Thanks for all replies and Laughs.
HAHAHAHA Windows SUCK THIS!!!!!!!!


LINUX RULES!!!!!!!!!!

[Joel Kleppinger]

philipg, I can't say I know for sure, but I REALLY doubt that's possible. However, I do run both at the same time, accessed from the same machine.

The program is called VNC and it projects a desktop from one system to another, much like PC Anywhere. However, it's free and works pretty well. The only thing about this setup is you have to have a box dedicated to Linux. Then, from your main machine, you can telnet into the box for command line access and/or you can run the VNC server on the Linux box and the VNC client on your Windows box.

It REALLY is a nice way to go about it, and not have to dual-boot, get a switchbox, or have multiple keyboards, mice, etc. In fact, my Linux box has two wires coming out of it - the power cord and network cable. That's it. It really is a beautiful thing.

[RobRich]

Linux Slackware can be installed to a FAT32 drive with use of a modified UM-DOS setup. It's for new users to be able to determine of they like Linux enought to start repartitioning hard drives and making system changes. The majority of Linux installations that I've done has been through UM-DOS, since most people I deal with are afraid of losing data through disk partitioning. This still performs great, but you do lose about 10% speed in disk transfers and accesstime as compared to the native Linux file structure.

[Moe]

I'm just now joining the Linux Crew, and I am also going to go for NT4 (plus one of my friends is bugging me to run Solaris, quad boot anyone?)

Anyhoo, I read about a program that lets you run linux from an NT4 window! Has anyone tried this? I'm not sure about the name of the program.