Why most run Microsoft, not RedHat

[Ingemar Nilsson]

"Tomas Larsson" <tomas at tlec.se> writes:

> Until that time that Linux installs as effortless as Windows, without any
> tweaking, linux will be a nerd-os and nothing else.

I have the opposite experience. Windows XP is not simple to install, while
Fedora Core is.

Last december, I bought a new harddrive. I plugged it in, booted, and
started the install program. My first gripe is that the installer plainly
refuses to load a SATA/SCSI/RAID driver from anything else than a
floppy. It also offered no way for me to tell it what directory on the
floppy to use, so unless I had put the correct file layout on the floppy,
it would refuse to load any drivers (many drivers are downloaded in
packages with multiple architectures, and I had to copy a specific
subdirectory of the winxp directory to the floppy for the installer to
recognize the disk).

I then chose to create a Windows partition, which I assumed would be called
C. I chose the NTFS filesystem. The installation went through as smoothly
as a Windows XP installation ncan be. Upon first boot, I noticed that it
had named the Windows partition J, since I also had another drive in the
machine with Windows partitions on, *despite* the fact that the new disk
was on SATA channel 0 and the other on channel 1. The partitions on the old
disk was named C-I, with CD and DVD drives interspersed.

I was quite unhappy with this layout to say the least. So I powered down,
disconnected the second hard drive and rebooted with the install disk,
thinking I would reformat the recently created Windows partition, and
reinstall. Once again, I had to insert the floppy for the SATA driver, and
chose to reformat the Windows partition and create a new NTFS filesystem on
it. The installation went smoothly again, until the last 5% of the file
copying in DOS mode. It claimed that it couldn't read files from the CD,
and those were important files that I could not skip (such as NTLDR).

I rebooted and tried the same thing again, at least 10 times (no, I'm not
exaggerating). Always got stuck at the same read error. Then finally, I
thought that I should try with FAT32 instead of NTFS when I created the
partition, since you never know what convoluted dependencies Microsoft
software contains, but I didn't really expect that it would work. To my
surprise, it did. It installed without a hitch.

I figured that I could now use the convert tool to convert the C partition
to NTFS. It didn't work. The convert process froze a minute or two into the
process. I reinstalled again and let it stay with FAT32. I successfully
created other NTFS partitions on the drive from within Windows after the
installation.

Fedora Core, on the other hand, never caused any problem whatsoever on
install. It recognized my SATA controller and disks without prompting for
additional driver floppys, and it never complained about damaged files or
did any other strange things during installation.

> I use XP because it gets the work done, with a minimum of work, I dont want
> to spend days trying to figure out on how to read from a CD or weeks to
> figure out why my network-card does not work.

You can probably imagine how many hours I spent trying to install Windows
as described above.

MVH
Ingemar