RE: tlug: Linux on the university Win LAN

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "FB" == Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com> writes:

    >> Hm.  I don't think it's that bad,

    FB> Still, there are lots of little gotchas that can crop up, even
    FB> after you've gotten things tamped down.  One thing that bit me
    FB> was that after I got a few terminals set up nicely, I
    FB> encountered a set of machines in the lab that had network
    FB> cards for which I couldn't find a driver.  We solved the
    FB> problem in the end, but if you ran into that at the beginning
    FB> of a class session on someone else's network, it could pretty
    FB> well ruin your day, I would think.

Yes, indeed.  I don't mean to minimize that kind of setup issue.  Eg,
I have at least two different CPUs, network cards, and video cards,
fortunately all in matched sets, I believe.  But that means two
different boot floppies, at least, and different XF86Setups, etc.
(You could probably jury-rig something with modules and initrd to
handle the network cards, but you really do want kernels optimized to
the CPU when you're dealing with '386 and '486 machines.)

I just meant that once you got effectively all of those issues worked
out once, adding new machine types and upgrading the software
shouldn't be as tough as dealing with a full distribution, even a
compact one like Green Frog.  Heaven help you if you decide to switch
distributions, or your distribution changes its initrc, though.  :-(

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