[plug] OFFTOPIC: Help with a Wizard PC

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 12:55:07AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| Interesting. I've only ever had it fall apart, declaring that it can't 
| find drivers for the PCI bus and somesuch. It generally wants to 
| re-install the drivers (same drivers it was using before, mind you) off 
| the CD-ROM again, but can't find the CD because it can't find the PCI 
| bus...

Ohh, yes.  I've had that happen.  Not to mention to blue screens saying
"I don't have a hard drive controller, only I suppose I must really cos
I got this far, but I'm buggered if I know how to keep going from here
without one."  (That's paraphrased, BTW. :-P)  There's magic registry
tweaks that make things work again IIRC.  What's really a pain is when
you shift a card from one PCI slot to another and Windows decides that
it doesn't have drivers for it any more.  *sigh*

| Anyway.... probably not the best forum for this discussion.

:-)  Indeed.  OTOH I don't want to go anywhere near any forum that
/would/ be a good place for this discussion.

| > It strikes me as amusing that people here seem to think that nstalling
| > Debian on a wizard is much less painful than installing Windows.  Not
| > that I disagree :-)
| 
| It is somewhat funny now that I think about it. As it happens, I was 
| cheating and using a pre-installed disk image, but the point stands. I 
| find it easier because Linux seems much less inclined to break when you 
| change the hardware out from under it - this is largely due to the 
| drivers mostly being shipped with the kernel and installed by default, I 
| think.

Yup.  Even without using a disc image, Linux is a lot easier in this
situation: netbooting a Linux installation is trivial; netbooting
DOS/Windows is a bugger.  (Even for simple things like flashing the BIOS
under DOS, I am led to believe :-P)

Linux's general approach of having all of the drivers shipped with the
kernel has its advantages and disadvantages.  It makes it a real pain
when you want to run drivers that aren't part of the kernel tree;
because the kernel's binary interface isn't as well-defined as in other
operating systems where binary-only drivers are the norm, you generally
need to futz around with kernel headers to build the modules, and end up
with .o files lying around that you have to remember to recompile if you
rebuild your kernel.  Yuck.

Cameron.