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On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Thomas R. Sibley wrote: > Luke A. Kanies wrote on 02/28/04 16:56: > > But really. Just moving from SCSI to IDE. > > Maybe you're talking about some special situation, and I realize my > situation was slightly different than yours, but recently (month or so > ago) I added two IDE drives to a system with two SCSI drives already. > Besides some problems with IRQs (BIOS fault), it was no hassle at all; I > recompiled the kernel with IDE support for my controller, moved the > bzImage to /boot, edited grub.conf, and rebooted with the new kernel; it > worked great. I don't know why you were even fussing with mkinitrd. Right, but you're not moving your boot device to IDE, are you? You're just adding IDE. I agree, that's essentially straightforward (although it still pisses me off that you'd have to specify new drivers, much less recompile the stinking kernel (although I know that that's Gentoo's fault)). I'm changing boot devices, which means that the initrd image (because I don't believe in recompiling my kernel) has to be updated to specifically load the IDE drivers at boot time, so it can load the stinking drivers. The problem here is that linux's boot setup crap is all set up so that it allows you to boot the system that's currently booted. Because, uh, yeah, you know, I always have trouble booting the system that's booted. No, see, I'm trying to boot that drive over there. But linux doesn't really support that. Neither LILO nor mkinitrd make it easy to set up another linux installation to boot. Yes, it's possible, but it's not what I would call straightforward or easy, and you specifically have to ignore a bunch of LILO errors. No, the sky isn't falling, I know what I'm doing. > > So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this? > > Yeah, I agree with you there. It's just being stupid. I run Gentoo > (which I'll admit has it's shortcomings, just like anything else) and if > you use their utility (genkernel) to compile the kernel (which I've only > done once; like to do it by hand, personally), it'll automatically add > the autodetection support in the kernel it builds just like is in their > LiveCD. Yeah, that's definitely nice. I'd consider that except my main machine is a dual celeron, and it takes at least 12 hours just to compile xfree86. No thanks. > > Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation. > > Whatever works for you, but I've had no problem with it on my primary > workstation for over two years (since I got this machine). s/works/doesn't work/ Oh, I can make it work, it's just that when something goes wrong, it's nearly catastrophic to fix. I run BeOS on the same machine, and every time I have a problem (such as replacing a boot disk, changing video cards, or moving the boot disk from SCSI to IDE) I boot into BeOS just to remind myself how it really should be, and that I'm really not being unreasonable. I've never, ever, ever configured a single damn anything on BeOS. Yeah, I've _installed_ drivers, but I've never specified that they be used. BeOS just figures it all out and everything just works, essentially immediately. And yeah, with linux, I can get it to work eventually, but goddamn if it isn't a big pain in the ass. Part of it's just shitty x86 hardware (nope, never buying an Abit board again, nor an Award BIOS again), but most of it is linux's belief that I should figure it out my damn self. The fact that I have to configure my stupid monitor in XF86Config-4 even though the XF86 log specifically shows all the details it autodetected from my monitor just drives me insane. Insane, I tell you. -- There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network. -- Guy AlmesThere's stuff above here
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