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Sunday 1/14/2001
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No entry.
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Monday 1/15/2001
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Well, I finally tried to install Mandrake 7.2 on my home PC (AMD K6II-450, 128MB, 12GB) over the weekend. Booted from the CD, tried Customized install, crashed hard when trying to detect the old Diamond A50 video. Tried again with Recommended install... ditto. Hauled out a Caldera eDesktop 2.4 CD... ditto some more. Even a slow guy like me can begin to grasp the broad outlines of the picture which was shaping up at this point: Video Card Bad. Do Not Pass Go, etc. I was pretty sure that it was the same card as I have in my work PC (PIII-600, 128MB, 13GB), but turns out I was wrong. The work clone has an old ATI Rage II or some such. And then I recollected having read on (I think) Bob Thompson's website that most ATI cards are supported
in Linux distributions (when I get better with Linux I'll call them "distros" like the cool guys). So my plan is to scrounge an ATI Rage-something-or-other and swap it in , then have at it yet again. Hardware Compatibility Lists are our friends. Here's Mandrake's. Here's Red Hat's. Here's Caldera's. I plan to spend a little time with them today, and prepare to break out the plastic if necessary. I know my brother-in-law just bought a 16MB ATI AGP card of some sort for about $70 retail.
Yesterday in BJ's Wholesale Club I saw a little Lexmark Z-32 (I think) printer marked at $49. I bought my daughter one not too long ago (for more like $89 or so), and I was truly surprised: 1200x1200 dpi, very nice output on plain paper. Gee whiz, man! But presumably no Linux support. And I'm truly underwhelmed (yet another word I had to add to my spell checker; I expect to use it frequently) with HP's inkjets. Some of the little Canons have four ink cartridges, like the BJC-3000. I've bought new printers for family members, but I myself am still crawling along using an appallingly obsolete Okidata OL400 LED printer with, get this, the original 512K of RAM. I picked it up on the side of the road and replaced its guts,
and it just hasn't quite died on me. Piece of junk when it was new, and hasn't improved with age. But as I say, refuses to die. More research to do...
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Tuesday 1/16/2001
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I scrounged an ATI Rage 128 AGP card that ought to work for Mandrake. We'll see. RSN, of course... I did a little research on the web, and found out that the little Lexmark Z-32 printer is one of the very few for which Lexmark has actually written a Linux driver. I downloaded it and burned it to a CD-R. I have a largish "Download" folder at work, which I periodically burn to CD for portability. Fat pipe at work, skinny little buzzy pipelet at home. Anyway, I called BJ's and had them hold the last Z-32 (the display model) for me, and I popped out at lunchtime and picked it up. So we shall see. It would be nifty if I could solve both my Linux video and printing woes so quickly and cheaply. Hey, it could happen, right?
So I installed the printer under Win98, no problems. Man, I gotta tell ya, 1200x1200 dpi color is suh-weet, even on plain paper. And for $50? Where ya gonna go? And of course there was no problem installing the ATI card in Windows, though if it runs true to form I should probably check ATI's website for the latest Windows and Linux drivers. Don't miss the next exciting episode...
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Wednesday 1/17/2001
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Well, Linux is kicking my behind yet again. I put in the ATI Rage 128 AGP card and installed the Win98 driver that came with it. All well and good so far. Then I got tricky and installed the latest driver from ATI. Very bad. The farthest I got towards booting with that driver was a black screen with a large hourglass on it. After maybe an hour and a half of farkling around, I eventually got the old driver reinstalled. To quote Tom the Cat, "Ack!"
Then, not having had enough aggravation for a single evening, I fired up the Mandrake 7.2 CD, confident that at last I had removed the final barrier to success. Wrong again. Crashed at exactly the same place in the install. I wish I could remember just what it said, but one thing Linux error messages are not is terse. There was a whole screen of small print, but I remember a few things: something about "no video accelerator present," "standard VGA," and "unable to open" some file that I should've written down, if only to complete the experience. "Ack!" some more.
But because I've always lived by the principle that there's no better remedy for a whopping failure than to find a new and if possible previously unsuspected way to fail, I whipped out a Red Hat 6.2 CD and began again. This basically got me through choosing my monitor, an old Gateway CrystalScan 1776LE (which was specifically offered), and choosing a default resolution. I foolishly chose a resolution that works fine under Windows: 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz. I clicked the "test" button and it switched perfectly to the chosen resolution. I clicked "OK" and it switched back to the former screen, but with a difference. Now the screen was smeared, as if it had been stretched out horizontally and then folded over. And "Ack!" yet again.
So this morning I brought it in to work with me, to see if I could come up with any new and entertaining ways to fail. I bet I can. For this morning's flavor of frustration, I've selected Caldera's eDesktop 2.4. I chose the VESA install after a brief foray into the recommended installation, which lasted only until I got the now-familiar smeared screen after what looked like a perfectly good video mode test. The VESA install gave me two nifty 640 x 480 choices, which I blew past without testing. We'll see what happens. But I'm betting whatever evolves from this situation will involve my credit card and my screwdriver. You think?
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How 'bout this? I got Caldera eDesktop 2.4 to install by picking 1024 x 768 @ 60 Hz, and then not testing it. Fires right up when I log in. But I want Mandrake. I like the little DrakConfigs and stuff. My take on Linux in general is that it still bears too many marks of having been assembled by a committee, and anything to centralize all the admin junk is probably A Good Thing. Anyway, emboldened by my success, I tried the Mandrake install one more time, and it bombed again in the same place, without ever giving me a chance to make any video choices. So I'll install eDesktop again, and meanwhile I'm downloading Red Hat 7.0, both CDs. That's gonna take a while.
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Thursday 1/18/2001
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Looks like Red Hat 7.0 installed perfectly, selecting Rage 128 (generic) video and the generic SVGA 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz monitor. Installation only used the first of the two CDs I burned; what's on the other one? We'll see. Red Hat fires up OK, though the display is a little choppier than under Caldera's eDesktop. Different revisions of XFree86?
My standard practice when I'm installing a dual-boot Win/Linux system currently is to boot from a DOS floppy after the Linux install, then run FDISK/MBR and SYS C: to make the system forget that Linux is there. Sometimes I also have to use FDISK to reset the active partition to the primary DOS one. Then I use the Linux boot floppy I created during installation whenever I want to get to Linux. Hey, I've also used LILO and PowerQuest's BootMagic, which comes with Partition Magic. They all work. But I hate boot delays, so I prefer to simply blast into Windows as my default. YMMV, of course.
First impression? I still like Mandrake a bit better than either Caldera or Red Hat (in fact, I'd rank the three in that order), but of course I have as much right to an opinion about their relative merits as I do about those of this year's crop of thoroughbreds, or six randomly-selected single-malt whiskies. That is to say practically zip, since I neither drink nor follow racing. But unlike those fields, I do intend to become better-informed about Linux. I want to become able to do my Windows-normal stuff, which includes word-processing, spreadsheets, email, downloading and installing free junk from the internet, burning CDs, and communicating with NT servers. Not much gaming, because I'll never have that much free time. I used to enjoy Doom, but real life is getting too violent as is.
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Friday 1/19/2001
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Didn't care for the way Red Hat displayed, so I went back to Caldera. I've given up on Mandrake, at least unless I decide to buy a new video card. But I still have Mandrake on my work PC, so I can keep tinkering with it there. And so it goes...
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Saturday 1/20/2001
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No entry.