[plug] 64 bit machines

[Chris Caston]

On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 12:11, Onno Benschop wrote:
;snip

> My single biggest reason for using Linux, with all its imperfections,
> its frustrations, it's lack of completeness and its vagaries, the shitty
> hardware support, the poor copy and paste, is the support I get. And I'm
> not talking about phone numbers and experts and shops etc. I'm talking
> about methodology.

1. In many ways the hardware support for Linux is much better.

As a call-out computer technician I often come up against driver issues
with Windows. I know that if it were Linux I could use Kudzu or insmod
or the gimpprint drivers for CUPS. Whereas with Windows I'm at the HP
website and realising that the 100mb HP print drivers and software
download isn't going to happen soon on the customers dial-up so I need
use putty to ssh into a machine to download the drivers and then mkisofs
before I drive all the way home and burn the cd and drive back to the
customers place.

And I recently had to install the ATI Cataylst drivers for someone which
required booting XP in safe-mode with VGA support and lots of rebooting.
Also when I first got there the whole fonts system was completely
stuffed. It only had Merlott and everything looked like wingdings and
reinstalling all the fonts didn't fix it. It required a repair install.
 

2. And you could also argue that in many ways Windows is incomplete. 

Although you can install the command line device manager and cygwin or
SFU 3.5 you need to install this. It doesn't come as an underlying part
of the system.

Cut and paste works fine in X. It's not like a problem with Linux it's
more likely with Gnome and KDE apps.

;snip

regards,

Chris
-- 
Linux is ready for the desktop like a Boeing F-22 is ready for the
run-way.