More linux hate

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From: Luke A. Kanies
Subject: More linux hate
Date: 21:56 on 28 Feb 2004
Okay, now that it all actually works, I can let go.

Ugh.  All I wanted to do was switch from SCSI to IDE, because I don't have
any viable SCSI drives left (I've still got some functional ones, but
they're too loud for my workstation).  That's all.  On BeOS it's trivial.
On MacOS it's trivial (basically).  On linux, it's darn near impossible.

Oh sure, in retrospect it was easy:  Just modify
/etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf so that the ROOT variable points to the new
volume and rerun 'mkinitrd'.  Very easy.  Except that it took me about 20
hours to figure that out.  Because of course, errors like:

modprobe: can't locate module block-major-3

aren't very informative.   Oh, I finally figured out that it wasn't
probing the driver for my IDE drive, and then about 6 hours later figured
out exactly how to make it do that the right way (hint: no, specifying it
in /etc/mkinitrd/modules, which lists the modules to probe, isn't enough).

But really.  Just moving from SCSI to IDE.

What makes this whole damn thing even more insulting is the Knoppix CD.
This is a bootable CD which literally boots faster than my Debian
distribution while giving better feedback (and in color), and at the same
time autodetects every single piece of hardware I have.  Sure, it runs my
monitor at 16bit instead of 24, that's no big deal.  But it boots up a
fully functional, completely detected system.  Oh, and it's based on
Debian, the distro I'm using.

So, I ask, WTF can't Debian do this?  "Oh, but see, there's this guy who
wants to specify everything."  Well, fuck that guy.  He can go to hell.
Let him specify everything.  I just want the whole damn thing to work, and
I don't want to think about it.

Linux is not long for this house, at least not on a workstation.

Luke

-- 
Death and taxes are inevitable; at least death doesn't get worse every
year.

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