[tlug] What to do when a hard disk goes during the rainy season

[Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com>]

 Time to try a new Distribution?

I had to replace a hard disk on a notebook that has been running 
RH8 and decided that this was as good a time as any to try out 
other distributions. The machine is a Compaq Presario 1216JP. 
Athlon-4 CPU. ACPI and the very problematic Conexant LANfinity 
Ethernet card are two hardware challenges. 

I had recent Gentoo and Debian CDs thanks to Ulrich and Shimpei, 
respectively. I also got set up to try network installations of 
Mandrake and Debian. 

For some reason, I couldn't get Gentoo to compile on the 
machine. Tried all stages, and various things for about 
two days. But the machine shut down in the middle of the 
operation each time, for some reason. This was quite a 
pity, as it is a time-consuming process and I was certainly 
looking forward to getting it going. Still, it was good to 
learn about CFLAGS, etc., so all was not in vain. 

Woody installs with no problem. I tried to install it with 
the 2.4 kernel, and apt-getting the 2.4 kernel after a 2.2 
install, because I want to run that. However, Woody 
with the 2.4 kernel kept hanging when it came to the Conexant. 
Same for Mandrake and RH8. I could run any of these with nousb, 
but I want to use that ethernet card, if possible. I spent 
lots of time with the tulip code that is supposed to run with 
it on 2.4, but couldn't get that going after more than a day. 

* Back to RedHat

In the end, I went with RH8 again, for three basic reasons. 
1) I am already familiar with RH, and haven't run Debian very 
much. 
2) Compared to Debian, RH gives me good out-of-the-box 
support for multiple languages. Not sure if it is the way 
RH has the fonts or locales set up, but something makes 
it easier to run kterm, xterm and mlterm, and get yudit, 
pine, gedit, etc. to display the characters properly. 
(something is still wrong with my xterm; it doesn't 
display utf-8 data properly, itself). RH also succeeded 
in probing the sound card; I don't think Debian hit it. 
3) other things seemed easier with RH (this may have 
to do with point #1, of course). In particular, I have 
a need to have multiple users run Mozilla on this 
box (not just root). xhost + localhost makes that 
possible on RH8, but not on Woody. With xsu on Woody, 
one can run various programs on X as root, but it is 
a bit of a hassle (though much safer, apparently) and 
it only works for root, not for other users on the 
box. 

I also tried to move from Pine to Mutt, but I am not 
dissatisfied enough with Pine, nor impressed enough 
with Pine (in the multilingual setting) to make the 
switch. After a few hours, I went back to the tried 
and true in that department, as well. 

* Debian and Gentoo vs. RH

I liked the feel of the install of both Debian and 
Gentoo and will try those out on other machines 
sometimes. While RH allows one to update software 
via network updates, the Debian and Gentoo methods 
for doing this are less intrusive, more flexible 
and simply more pleasant, I think. So, I be looking 
for excuses to try out those distributions, particularly 
on machines that I won't be using every day. 

If another hard disk bites the dust when I have a 
few days to spare, I guess I will attempt to "migrate" 
again.