Last updated: Monday, 28 March 2005 14:08 -0500
I like Linux quite a lot.
I've used Linux on a few different machines: a ThinkPad 770, a ThinkPad 600E, an IBM Aptiva, a Digital PC433, an AMD Athlon, and an IBM 300XL. All except the Digital PC433 are still in use.
Everything has pretty much worked a treat, at least as regards
the CPU. In actual point of fact, the embedded WinModem in the
ThinkPad 600E is a drag, since Linux can't deal with it. I also
had to swap out the 10GB disk that came with that system for a 6GB
one because I couldn't get the BIOS to work with the install
partitioning. Even now I need to have the disk parameters in my
/etc/lilo.conf file in order to boot.
I've used IBM token-ring, Ethernet 10base2, 10baseT, and 100baseT, and ppp dialin with my Linux laptops. I no longer use the token-ring stuff; my office has gone completely Ethernet now, and even before that I had a private Ethernet LAN in my office that I used in preference to the token-ring. The token-ring card occasionally got confused and required a reboot, either because it was utterly hosed softwarily or because the driver had oops!ed. No such problems with Ethernet.
I have a private Ethernet LAN at home, with a 10/100 switch. My home Linux machine does the ISP dial in and acts as a router and masquerades the other systems (one PC, one Macintosh, and two laptops). I recently decided to play around with DHCP, so it also acts as a DHCP server for the LAN.
My Linux and Windows desktop machines at home have 3Com 10/100 PCI cards in them, but I haven't been able to get my laptop's 3Com 3C574-TX 10/100 PCMCIA card to do more than about 1.06MB/s. I'm told this is because it's a 16-bit non-CardBus card, and in order to take advantage of the 100Mbps speed I'll need to replace it with a 32-bit CardBus card. I'm evaluating options on that right now.
I've just bought an Apple AirPort base station and a WaveLAN Orinoco Gold wireless PCMCIA card to play around with wireless access at home, but the parts haven't all come in yet and so this is still coming up to temperature.
My dialin experience using ppp has been very good, although I am consistently plagued by two problems:
pppd will start yakking like mad
with the far end, emitting matched ConfReq and
ConfRej messages to the syslog. The only way I've found
to stop this is to disconnect and reconnect.Script ?? exited [pid nnnn]'. When that
happens, the little bandwidth window stops tracking activity.
I have no idea what that's all about, but I wish it didn't
happen.I've only used Red Hat (5.2 through 6.1) and Mandrake (7.0) distributions to date. I only used Mandrake for a few days; when I got the Athlon (a gift from AMD), I said to myself, "Let's try another distribution; I've only used Red Hat." The Mandrake installation worked a treat, but I couldn't get it to dial in to my ISP, and I didn't like the way it had configured the Enlightenment window dressing under GNOME and didn't want to take the time to figure out how to fix it. So I threw it out and installed Red Hat 6.1, and have used Red Hat exclusively ever since. Not that this is necessarily the way it will stay, but I need to get some free time to experiment first.