[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

David Braley davbraley at comcast.net
Mon Dec 11 12:39:15 MST 2006



Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>
> Permission conflicts during the install?  What exactly was that?  Are you
> talking about not being able to chown your DOS partition?
>   

Yes. Thanks again for your help on that.


Chad Perrin wrote:

Speaking of SuSE, and adding in Mandrake, they get into the
distro-specific tools by discouraging use of anything that doesn't have
YAST or drak (respectively) in the name.


Note: I am not trying to start a distro flame war. I am just expressing
my thoughts in as nice a way as I can.

About two or three years ago, Anthony Earl turned me on to Debian. It
was then I realized I was operating Linux under the guidance of tools
like Yast (or Drake when I was playing with Mandrake/Mandriva). Using
Debian taught me a lot. I was forced to open a terminal, learn a text
editor (nano, I'm a light weight), and start to get comfortable moving
around the system and changing configuration files. Sure I was a Linux
user, but I had no clue what I had.

The PROBLEM with Debian was it got me thinking about Linux. I found
myself attracted to learning what was really "going on under the hood"
as one might say (seeings how I am a car guy). Being able to fix things
that are behaving badly and optimizing stuff to perform better is fun!

So when I tried to apply my newly learned skills to Suse (my main
desktop for almost 7 years now), I just made a huge mess of things. Yast
is a very controlling sort of program that does not like you to do
anything without it's permission. There were times when I could repair
stuff from a command line only to have my changes dissipater after a
reboot. It was almost like Yast had some secret cash file hiding on the
system somewhere that would overwrite my system config files each time I
rebooted, nullifying my repairs.

I actually think tools like Yast are a good thing, especially if you are
just getting started with Linux. But, as I have found out over the
years, when a distro ties itself super close to such a tool, and the
tool can not fix a problem, the problem does not get fixed, at least not
easily. It is because of these distro-specific tools, like Chad says,
that started me looking for a new distribution. I have been looking now
for about a year, and it was the whole Novel Microsoft thing that was
the last straw for me.

Sorry if I sounded blasting toward Fedora. I know it is a great
distribution. I am surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever
met that use it, and I greatly appreciate their kindness and generosity
toward me. I will keep plugging away at Fedora and give it an honest
try.   ;-)

That is all. Take care.

David



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