From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 21:56 on 28 Feb 2004 Subject: More linux hate Okay, now that it all actually works, I can let go. Ugh. All I wanted to do was switch from SCSI to IDE, because I don't have any viable SCSI drives left (I've still got some functional ones, but they're too loud for my workstation). That's all. On BeOS it's trivial. On MacOS it's trivial (basically). On linux, it's darn near impossible. Oh sure, in retrospect it was easy: Just modify /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf so that the ROOT variable points to the new volume and rerun 'mkinitrd'. Very easy. Except that it took me about 20 hours to figure that out. Because of course, errors like: modprobe: can't locate module block-major-3 aren't very informative. Oh, I finally figured out that it wasn't probing the driver for my IDE drive, and then about 6 hours later figured out exactly how to make it do that the right way (hint: no, specifying it in /etc/mkinitrd/modules, which lists the modules to probe, isn't enough). But really. Just moving from SCSI to IDE. What makes this whole damn thing even more insulting is the Knoppix CD. This is a bootable CD which literally boots faster than my Debian distribution while giving better feedback (and in color), and at the same time autodetects every single piece of hardware I have. Sure, it runs my monitor at 16bit instead of 24, that's no big deal. But it boots up a fully functional, completely detected system. Oh, and it's based on Debian, the distro I'm using. So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this? "Oh, but see, there's this guy who wants to specify everything." Well, fuck that guy. He can go to hell. Let him specify everything. I just want the whole damn thing to work, and I don't want to think about it. Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation. Luke
From: Thomas R. Sibley Date: 00:23 on 29 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate Luke A. Kanies wrote on 02/28/04 16:56: > But really. Just moving from SCSI to IDE. Maybe you're talking about some special situation, and I realize my situation was slightly different than yours, but recently (month or so ago) I added two IDE drives to a system with two SCSI drives already. Besides some problems with IRQs (BIOS fault), it was no hassle at all; I recompiled the kernel with IDE support for my controller, moved the bzImage to /boot, edited grub.conf, and rebooted with the new kernel; it worked great. I don't know why you were even fussing with mkinitrd. > So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this? Yeah, I agree with you there. It's just being stupid. I run Gentoo (which I'll admit has it's shortcomings, just like anything else) and if you use their utility (genkernel) to compile the kernel (which I've only done once; like to do it by hand, personally), it'll automatically add the autodetection support in the kernel it builds just like is in their LiveCD. > Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation. Whatever works for you, but I've had no problem with it on my primary workstation for over two years (since I got this machine). Tom
From: Luke A. Kanies Date: 01:07 on 29 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Thomas R. Sibley wrote: > Luke A. Kanies wrote on 02/28/04 16:56: > > But really. Just moving from SCSI to IDE. > > Maybe you're talking about some special situation, and I realize my > situation was slightly different than yours, but recently (month or so > ago) I added two IDE drives to a system with two SCSI drives already. > Besides some problems with IRQs (BIOS fault), it was no hassle at all; I > recompiled the kernel with IDE support for my controller, moved the > bzImage to /boot, edited grub.conf, and rebooted with the new kernel; it > worked great. I don't know why you were even fussing with mkinitrd. Right, but you're not moving your boot device to IDE, are you? You're just adding IDE. I agree, that's essentially straightforward (although it still pisses me off that you'd have to specify new drivers, much less recompile the stinking kernel (although I know that that's Gentoo's fault)). I'm changing boot devices, which means that the initrd image (because I don't believe in recompiling my kernel) has to be updated to specifically load the IDE drivers at boot time, so it can load the stinking drivers. The problem here is that linux's boot setup crap is all set up so that it allows you to boot the system that's currently booted. Because, uh, yeah, you know, I always have trouble booting the system that's booted. No, see, I'm trying to boot that drive over there. But linux doesn't really support that. Neither LILO nor mkinitrd make it easy to set up another linux installation to boot. Yes, it's possible, but it's not what I would call straightforward or easy, and you specifically have to ignore a bunch of LILO errors. No, the sky isn't falling, I know what I'm doing. > > So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this? > > Yeah, I agree with you there. It's just being stupid. I run Gentoo > (which I'll admit has it's shortcomings, just like anything else) and if > you use their utility (genkernel) to compile the kernel (which I've only > done once; like to do it by hand, personally), it'll automatically add > the autodetection support in the kernel it builds just like is in their > LiveCD. Yeah, that's definitely nice. I'd consider that except my main machine is a dual celeron, and it takes at least 12 hours just to compile xfree86. No thanks. > > Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation. > > Whatever works for you, but I've had no problem with it on my primary > workstation for over two years (since I got this machine). s/works/doesn't work/ Oh, I can make it work, it's just that when something goes wrong, it's nearly catastrophic to fix. I run BeOS on the same machine, and every time I have a problem (such as replacing a boot disk, changing video cards, or moving the boot disk from SCSI to IDE) I boot into BeOS just to remind myself how it really should be, and that I'm really not being unreasonable. I've never, ever, ever configured a single damn anything on BeOS. Yeah, I've _installed_ drivers, but I've never specified that they be used. BeOS just figures it all out and everything just works, essentially immediately. And yeah, with linux, I can get it to work eventually, but goddamn if it isn't a big pain in the ass. Part of it's just shitty x86 hardware (nope, never buying an Abit board again, nor an Award BIOS again), but most of it is linux's belief that I should figure it out my damn self. The fact that I have to configure my stupid monitor in XF86Config-4 even though the XF86 log specifically shows all the details it autodetected from my monitor just drives me insane. Insane, I tell you.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 02:19 on 29 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate > I'm changing boot devices, which means that the initrd image (because I > don't believe in recompiling my kernel) has to be updated to specifically > load the IDE drivers at boot time, so it can load the stinking drivers. I first ran into this with Dead Rat 4.1, where they started leaving drivers out and loading them later to save space... unfortunately they forgot to include the Adaptec SCSI drivers in the floppy image (apparently everyone at Red Hat at the time was on Buslogic) so I had to get a special version. Up until recently, there hasn't been a problem on FreeBSD because while it supported loadable drivers they're not loaded by default. That's changed. It's still saner than Linux in that you can gen up a custom kernel with the drivers you want and you know they'll be there, AND you know you'll be able to gen up the same kernel next time... but it's not just a matter of "doconfig...copy...kernel... to...root..." any more. My software hate for today is loadable drivers. I suspect that compiling in drivers for 80% of the cards out there would probably add less bulk to the kernel than the loadable driver support. I know I have never had any problems with the size of a "Christmas Tree" kernel. I mean, there's people doing things like putting JVMs in the kernel to run Java drivers or some damn thing, all the generic chipset drivers can't possibly be enough to worry about in that. But there's some damn "loadable drivers are good" meme out there that goes along with the "IPSEC is perfect" and personal firewalls and I'm sure I can suck Microsoft in here as well but I'll let it all peter out now... > Yeah, that's definitely nice. I'd consider that except my main machine is > a dual celeron, and it takes at least 12 hours just to compile xfree86. Wimp. Last year I installed Mac OS X on a Powermac 7500 with a 132MHz pre-G3 processor and 96M RAM, and then tried to compile Tcl 8.4. Just to see how bad it was. The install took 20 hours. I gave up on the compile.
From: Matt McLeod Date: 03:30 on 29 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate Peter da Silva wrote: > But there's some damn "loadable drivers are good" meme out there For the most part I agree with your rant. There's one exception, though: my experience with IDE DVD-ROM drives on Linux has been that the driver sometimes gets "stuck" -- you can't eject the disc, and you can't read it. Being able to unload/reload the driver in that case has been immensely helpful to me. There are a few other devices I've run into where being able to completely reset the driver by way of rmmod/insmod (the em8300 driver for example) has saved a reboot. At any rate, I find Linux a whole lot easier to deal with if you completely ignore the distributions' attempts at packaging the kernel with fancy stuff and just build your own. Then it only matters what they've done to it when you're doing the initial install, and for Gentoo at least even then it doesn't matter -- if you can boot *something* and get a shell you can install. Matt (still really likes the visual config mode of the FreeBSD kernel.)
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 11:45 on 29 Feb 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate > Being able to unload/reload the driver in that case has been > immensely helpful to me. I find the idea that you can unload a driver for a device in an unknown and possibly unstable state a little disturbing. If the driver is so far around the twist that it's not accepting a reset any other way, who knows what it's done to other kernel structures.
From: Arthur Bergman Date: 11:14 on 03 Mar 2004 Subject: Re: More linux hate On 29 Feb 2004, at 02:19, Peter da Silva wrote: >> Yeah, that's definitely nice. I'd consider that except my main >> machine is >> a dual celeron, and it takes at least 12 hours just to compile >> xfree86. > > Wimp. Last year I installed Mac OS X on a Powermac 7500 with a 132MHz > pre-G3 processor and 96M RAM, and then tried to compile Tcl 8.4. Just > to see how bad it was. > > The install took 20 hours. > > I gave up on the compile. > I have one of those, runnong the original 100 mhz 601 CPU, it took just 8 hours to compile perl on it (running debian) Arthur
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