Adieu, Fedora

[Timothy Murphy]

Antonio Olivares wrote:

> There is a story at distrowatch comment # 66 about a person who used linux
> for a while and like it still does, but went back to windows because of
> several problems.  Here's link:
> 
> http://batsov.com/Linux/Windows/Rant/2011/06/11/linux-desktop-experience-
killing-linux-on-the-desktop.html

I must be lucky/unlucky, as I am a 95% Fedora/CentOS/5% Windows user,
but find Windows problems take at least 50% of my time.

I spent almost two days installing Windows XP on an HP MicroServer,
where it had taken about an hour to install CentOS-5.6.
The MicroServer has no CD driver, so Windows had to be installed
from a USB stick.
This is several times as difficult as the same thing for Linux.
I used the bizarrely-named USB_MultiBoot_10.cmd,
after trying WinToFlash, the most popular application for this.

When I put in the USB stick and re-booted,
all went well for a few minutes,
and then the machine crashed
with a warning that the problem might be due to a virus.

After reading around, I found that one had to make a change in the BIOS,
specifying IDE rather than Sata for the Sata disk.

After this the machine booted into Windows,
but neither the in-built Broadcom NIC, nor the Intel CT adaptor
that I had installed, worked - though both had worked
without any issue under CentOS.

It was relatively easy to find the Intel driver,
but the Broadcom driver was more difficult.

After downloading them under CentOS I had Windows running at last.

So in this case at least it was Linux 10, Windows 0.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland