R
Richard Steven Hack
Flat-panel monitors are relatively new. If you buy hardware which is
less old than a recent distro, this sort of thing can happen simply
because a lot of companies do not write drivers for Linux and you have
to wait for someone in the community to do so.
Case in point: Nvidia. They've got new boards coming out every five
minutes, it seems like. There's no way Linux can keep up.
On the other hand, it is likely that an older driver for the same make
might drive the board at some lower capability. Then you can wait for
a new driver to take advantage of the full capability.
NVidia tends to be a problem, again because even though they actually
write drivers for Linux, it's an afterthought and it seems they write
it in such a way that it's reliability varies from distro to distro.
That's an NVidia problem more than it is Linux - although of course if
you want your NVidia board to work, it becomes a Linux problem.
The answer, again, don't buy a machine with the absolute latest
hardware and expect it to work flawlessly when there are no drivers
for the Linux distro you've obtained. Get it to work as much as
possible, then wait for an updated driver.
And always get the absolute latest distro you can. I see people
trying to install distros from a year or two ago on cutting edge
hardware - that's obviously going to be a problem. I installed Red
Hat V7.3 (from back in May 2002) on hardware I bought in November 2002
- which, however, was pretty standard no-name clone stuff from a local
store. Everything worked fine from day one, once I switched from the
OSS to ALSA and went through the CUPS configuration process and
figured out how to configure the NIC card for my DSL (I understand
Mandrake will detect a NIC hooked up to a DSL and configure it
automatically, supposedly, now).
And the latter was a problem because I failed to read the Red Hat
docs, and relied on older documentation on setting up DSL - after all
that, I discovered Red Hat had command line scripts set up to do it by
just responding to some prompts. Read the distro documentation,
especially the release notes and distro specific stuff!
And Mandrake and SUSE are better at detecting hardware than Red Hat.
Good point. Be prepared to search through ten or twenty pages of
Google results as well - don't limit yourself to the first couple of
pages.
Ah, yes, the famous Windows error message:
Error 6969: Not enough reboots. The system will now reboot.
That percentage is way too high. The odds are probably closer to 90%
that the install will be flawless. The usual things that cause
problems are oddball or integrated NICs, oddball or integrated sound
cards or chips, new USB devices, and the like. And the video card
since X can be hard to configure if it's not a "standard" card.
When I installed Red Hat 7.3, I knew beforehand that I would have to
screw around setting up the ALSA sound system and the CUPS printer
system to get my Avance 97 integrated sound chip working and my Epson
Stylus C60 working. I knew in advance - at least with regard to the
Epson - because I checked www.linux-printing.org for compatibility
before I bought the printer.
It's not entirely necessary, depending on what you want to use the
machine for, but it does help if you're WILLING to learn.
Although I learned UNIX on the command line over the last year or so,
I would not recommend being command line bound in learning Linux.
Linux is intended to be a modern OS with a GUI. A lot of stuff that
used to have to be done from the command line is now done with GUI
front-ends to the command line tools. When I'm in a hurry and want to
do something NOW and don't want to take the time to learn a GUI tool,
I drop back to the command line. But my goal is to install all the
stuff available that makes that unnecessary. Then I'll use the
command line where it's really useful - in scripts that automate
things.
