Complaint number one... why the hell would I want 3 or 4 different media players, 2 Different office environments and duplication of all kinds of applications??
You probably don't, but without trying how do you know which one you like the best?
It seems like someone has put a lot of effort into creating a desktop that looks and feels just like windows!
Use something else. Blackbox is one of my favorites. w9wm is pretty neat, and what I'm using on my PDA at the moment. Very not Windows like.
Then after 30 seconds I started to get a headache, and from this point on I realised really how terrible Linux is with hardware unless you are using some ancient laptop.
Granted, my hardware isn't brand spanking new, but Linux supports most of my machines quite well. Everything from Dual athlons, to dual p3s, to single athlons. I said most of my machines because I don't know how well it supports sparc4m, sparc4u, and various PPC hardware.
At which point I hit problem number two... my wlan NIC doesn?t work and thus no internet access
You must have gotten a bad card. Typically chipsets from the US aren't supported well because the companies that produce them are ridiculously stupid. Support Taiwan, use RALink based cards. They work well under Windows too.
Oh, and as I'm sure you gathered from your research ATI sucks. Their drivers are ass. I prefer to use free drivers, and nVidia's free drivers are decent. Their unfree drivers are supposed to be good too. Avoid ATI, buy nVidia video cards (not nForce motherboards, that's another story).
Good job I know how to use the awful 'vi' text editor from my Unix experience eh?
When I started using vi I hated it. While "on the job" I learned a trick or two that saved me literally DAYS worth of work. Now, I love vi. :heart:
Installation was a breeze and actually better than SUSE's even though it wasn?t graphical.
OpenBSD's installation is, IMO, the best out there. It's as far from graphical as you can get without it being aural.
Also I really like the Gnome desktop - much cleaner and snappier than the KDE one in SUSE and things are looking up!
Last time I used Gnome, it acted about the same as KDE. Little menu in the lower left hand corner, taskbar like thing, etc...
It turns out that natively, only a select band of wireless chipsets are supported and most of them are 802.11b notebook cards. Some of the more common G cards are supported, but certainly not anything like the Pre-N PCI cards I use for their fantastic range and rock-steady connection under Windows.
You got a card that doesn't follow a real standard and you wonder why it doesn't work? The companies that produce the chipsets aren't releasing information for F/OSS programmers to make drivers. Blame the companies, not Linux.
NDISWRAPPER is an abomination and should never be used. Buy better hardware and you won't have a problem.
However I have had all kinds of DNS resolution and other very slow browsing to deal with due to the stupid insistence on Linux distro's to insist on using IPV6 even though virtually no hardware outside enterprise level routers and switches support anything other than IPV4.
Um, Linux doesn't insist on using ipv6. In fact, you'd probably have to tell it to use ipv6.
... plus your mouse (which is going through a KVM) will be completely uncontrollable and randomly clicking on things. Scratch that one ? if they can?t get the basics right!
If FC4 had that problem for everyone there would be a huge stink about it and a quick fix. It's you in this case, sorry.
And finally went back to Ubuntu (32 bit this time as app support for 64 bit is still shaky so much so that you cant even get flash for firefox!).
Not having flash is a feature.
And that would be Macromedia's fault anyhow, not Linux's.
The new WLAN NIC was detected out of the box but only worked without any form of security such as WEP or WPA
WEP is known broken, and WPA is fairly untested. Use IPSEC.
The only solution was to disable the AC97 in the BIOS (and thus have to re-enable it for windows sessions).
There is probably a way around this, but that's the besst way to ensure a system doesn't use AC97.
After much reading around I find that in fact ALSA (one of the gazillion sound protocols in Linux it seems) ...
I'm pretty sure it's the official sound driver stuff these days.
Turns out that formats such as MP3, WMA, ATRAC and other of the most popular formats are not supported out of the box and now I have to go and hunt for a grand total of 15 different packages and apps to get to such a stage.
mp3 and WMA at least aren't free. There are licensing issues with both. Including support for them in a distro could be disasterous.
unfortunately a lot of the necessities such as flash, java and others out in the wilderness of other repositories for compatible packages and dependencies.
JAVA and Flash also aren't free and have their own licensing issues.
I had thought things had started to get a bit sluggish and some digging around found that the i386 architecture only supports the first 900mb of RAM!! Thus I needed to install a new kernel based on the i686 architecture.
Are you sure you didn't just have to have the big memory option (I can never remember the name of it) in the kernel? I don't think the cpu matters much there since the over all arch is the same.
WineX is a windows emulator ...
No it isn't.
But still overall the choice is limited, and if it comes from the EA stable ? don?t even bother trying!!
Aren't we still boycotting EA?
Certain brands like Belkin and until recently ATI were best to be avoided as there is less support for them.
And this is the fault of those companies. If the setup is too complicated, blame the companies that created the crap driver instead of releasing specs.
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