RE: Linux and firewire drives...

["Ian" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From: Stuart Grimshaw [mailto:stuart.grimshaw@xxxxxxx]

> What you say can equally be applied to any Microsoft OS.
>
> Your arguments are right, Linux can be a bitch to set up if you don't
know
what your doing,
> or you can't call on someone who knows what they're doing, but the
same
can equally be
> applied to Windows, especially NT4 as that's now unsupported.

No, really, it can't - not because of any kind of notion of OS superiority,
but simply because you are dealing with different beasts - there is one
version and one version only of each MS OS product. The answer to weird
hardware problems on an MS OS is - get a newer driver, apply latest windows
service pack, and that's it.

http://technet.microsoft.com
contains the complete knowledge base for all
Oses, searchable and available free of charge to all users. NT4 may not be
supported by MPS anymore, but all of the knowledge base for NT4 is still
available online and searchable.

The problem with Linux (although, arguably, it's one of it's strengths) as
I
see it is the sheer variety of possible versions of kernel, gclib, etc etc
etc - all of which mean that any given box might behave in a subtly
different way from the next. You can't get the all-encompassing single
point
of documentation and backup that you get from technet, because no-one can
agree on what is the "right" version of any given module, and you
certainly
can't adopt a position of "get the latest" as this will routinely
break
older software and lead to a wonderful circle of "rpm hell" as
you update x,
which depends on y, which breaks z, which needs a different version of x,
etc etc etc.

> To say that Linux is a labour of love without a support network is
equally
applicable to
> Windows, if not more so. It's very unusual to have any Linux product
that
doesn't have an
> active community supporting it.

Well, that's a question of personal experience - I have had absolutley
ridiculous problems finding support for linux based systems in the past -
and almost all of them come down to subtle problems between versions of
certain modules or kernel versions.

It has been my experience that people give *much* more leeway when dealing
with Linux, and spend a lot onger trying to fix an issue with dependencies
or module versions etc, whereas with MS, the solution is more often a quick
(and easy) re-install.

Ian.

Ps> just to re-iterate, my problem is not with Linux here - I just
cringe
whenever Linux is painted as a rosy crash-free alternative to MS, that's
better just because it isn't Microsoft!

If people go into this with open eyes, knowing what they are getting into,
great - it can be a lot of fun learning the whys and wherefores of finding
the source for a driver, compiling a module, compiling a new kernel,
finding
dependency problems, compiling another kernel, etc etc.