On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 02:21:09PM +0000, Anthony Anson wrote:
The message 20051105141123.GJ20752@pitr from Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk contains these words:
... unforunate side effect tends to be that it's installed, and not keeping up to date with security holes, etc... this is one of the few things that Ubuntu have actually got right, IMO. How many people do you actually know that have installed a modern windows operating system rather than it coming preinstalled?
Well, here's one - I've installed DOS 6.22; Win 3.11; Win 98; Win 98SE; Win 2000 Pro - usually with no problem. The *ONLY* problems I've had were in installing Linux of various - er - distress.
Have you noticed that the CDs that tend to come with new hardware are "rescue" cds, and tend to just copy a bunch of files in to the right places rather than actually running through an install process? Windows + Drivers == major headaches.
Never had problems at all. Plug in hardware, feed the floppy drive or CD ROM with the driver disc, tell Windows roughly where to look, (CD, Floppy, or sometimes, \catroot and it works as if by magic. It looks, sorts out the right driver from the disc, and all you have to do is hit 'Enter'.
Blimey! you've been *very* lucky then. It seems every time I end up having to "help" with a Windows machine it is because of driver wars, where the owner has tried and failed to get their hardware working. At the moment the Windows install on my laptop has killed itself *again* (I only have Windows on the laptop for a few games for testing stuff with Internet Explorer and also in case the laptop breaks I don't want to freak out the "engineer" who would be sent out to fix it) and needs to be fixed but I keep putting it off as I don't want to spend the time on it. (Another question I have is why are the Intel chipset drivers and the Wireless lan card drivers something like a 50 meg download *each* for Windows but only a few KB and already in the Ubuntu kernel? I think to get all the updates and drivers to install Windows XP on the laptop is currently running somewhere between 500 *MEGABYTES* & 1 *GIGABYTE*! of data and you don't get goodies like decent software with that.)
After the last time I had to install Windows on the laptop it took about 4 or 5 hours and lots of downloading of service packs and drivers (thank god I have ADSL!, even then the downloads themselves took another couple of hours on top if I had dialup then there would be no way I could have got the laptop working) compare and contrast to an Ubuntu install that takes, perhaps 20 minutes? and then some upgrades to packages which only take a few minutes of user interaction to deal with. I /think/ the only thing I need to do with Ubuntu and my laptop to make a bit of hardware work is that I have to copy the firmware for the Intel wireless card into the right place and this isn't really an Ubuntu "fault" as the problem is that Ubuntu can't redistribute the firmware because Intel says no.
After all that I'm still left with a *very* unfriendly environment that needs lots of tweaks+powertoys+useful software (like firefox, gimp, anti-virus, putty etc. etc.) to make the machine useful with Windows compared to a shiny Ubuntu that came with most of the useful software I need on the CD (which is quicker to download and simpler to get running than that Windows junk).
I'm wondering that as you are on dialup how you managed to keep up with the Windows updates and patches? Only the other day when installing a neighbours ADSL did he say "oh, I never bothered with those Windows updates before as they took too long with dialup". Even now I remember the horrors of downloading 100 meg service packs for Windows NT 4.0 on dialup and the Microsoft servers not supporting resume...
</windows rant>
Thanks Adam