[TriLUG] An Xmas Story

[Matt Matthews]

At first, this sounds like a Windows story, but there is a Linux part and I
thought y'all might find it interesting, so bear with me.

For part of Xmas week, we visited my in-laws. My father-in-law enjoys playing
with computers, although he's mostly used to the Windows world. For the past
three years, since I've taken to putting my own systems together from parts,
he's been interested in doing the same. The week before Xmas, he called us up
and asked me questions about a motherboard, etc. to purchase so we could
assemble a system while I was visiting. He ended up with:

- Soyo K7V Dragon+ with bulit-in sound (very nice), 10/100 ethernet, and
  additional USB headers (with drive bay panel for front-of-case USB access)
- Athlon 1600+ XP CPU
- 256Mb DDR RAM
- 40Gb ATA100 WDC HDD
- inexpensive WinFast GeForce 2 MX
- hardware modem that I brought with me (bought at Intrex)
- CD-RW from his old machine
- used floppy drive
- some $50 case from Best Buy(?)

He also had purchased an upgrade version of Windows XP Home Edition, which he
planned to install on this new box, once assembled.

After a few hitches, the box was finally assembled and ready to have an OS
installed on it. He has an original version of Windows 98 and used that to
"verify" to the Windows XP installer that he had a legitimate Windows license.
The installer is all text-mode for the initial section. After copying some
files to his hard drive, it rebooted and apparently tries to boot from those
newly installed files on the hard drive. (I'm guessing this is some sort of
stripped-down WinXP system, just like Linux installers use a stripped-down
Linux system.)

As a side note, my father-in-law had expressed an interest in having one
gigantic partition for everything. He's dealt with several partition installs
before, and didn't want to deal with that. Since his entire drive could be one
big NTFS partition, that's the road we tried to take.

However, after trying all the different options, the system would try to boot
from that new OS (on the hard drive) and give an error message. I found
various references to this issue on the 'net (using my laptop and his dialup
account) but never anything definitive that said "here's how to fix it". All
of the issues seemed to be related to large hard drives, and I even found a
reference to other WDC drive owners having this problem. The particular error
was simply a text message saying "error loading operating system".

Fun stuff, eh?

Anyway, after much fussing around trying to partition with WinXP or a
Windows/DOS floppy with fdisk/format on it or even a Linux rescue CD (Red Hat
7.2, disc 1) nothing worked. Even using a different filesystem (FAT32) didn't
make it happier (we'd used NTFS before), and later found out that FAT32
apparently only does 32Gb or smaller. We tried installing Win98 which tried to
format the entire drive FAT32 and then crapped out (probably because of the
32Gb limit). That was sort of unsettling: that it would format a drive that
was obviously too large. Shouldn't it check first?

The answer that my father-in-law initially hit upon was to make a single 20Gb
NTFS partition. After that, the install went fine, but he was disappointed
that it had taken so long and that it required making a smaller partition than
the instructions that came with WinXP had led him to believe was possible.
(Apparently NTFS has a partition size measured in Tb, not Gb.)

In the midst of all of this, when my father-in-law had to go out and cook some
chops on the grill, I took time to install Red Hat Linux 7.2 on the drive
(which at that time still didn't have a working MS OS on it). The install went
very smoothly, although I will admit I've done Red Hat installs several times
and knew exactly what to expect at various stages. The install used the entire
space on the hard drive, without complaint, and even configured to use his
GeForce 2 MX and his specific older model of Dell monitor that had come with a
previous computer. Furthermore, it detected and configured his on-board
ethernet and the sound. It also configured his burner correctly. It did not
detect and configure his PCI hardware modem, which is a shame. I'm not sure
how to make that work from an installer, to be honest.

After 20 minutes his system had come up using KDE for the desktop, playing the
usual KDE desktop sounds. The experience was very satisfying.

It was shortly after that install that my father-in-law got XP installed on a
20Gb partition (in the process deleting the Linux install, naturually). Once
XP was installed, it didn't recognize his sound hardware (whereas Red Hat 7.2
had!) and thus he had to install drivers for the sound from a CD that came
with the motherboard. 

Also, his modem was somewhat painful to install since the instructions were in
a PDF on a CD. There is no Acrobat Reader on the modem's CD but the
motherboard came with Acrobat Reader 3.0 (along with several other Windows
utilities). However, the pages for the Windows installation weren't readable
with that version of Reader, because it seems some foreign, but invisible,
characters were embedded in it somewhere. (I'm not making that up. Only those
pages for Windows installation, and part of the Linux instructions, were
blank!) I think that acroread on Linux also has a similar issue, but xpdf
displayed those pages just fine, so my Linux laptop came to the rescue so he
could install his modem on WinXP.

The final problem was that he'd installed Easy CD Creator 4 on WinXP before
finding out that it didn't work with WinXP (as some of you may be aware).
Roxio isn't going to fix it, but is offering a less expensive upgrade to ECDC5
which apparently does work with WinXP. And even though WinXP knew that ECDC4
didn't work when he tried to actually run it, he was frustrated that it had
actually let him install it before telling him about any problems with it.
(That is, it recognized the product executable as one that was known to be
problematic, but hadn't bothered to tell him when it saw him installing it.)
This later seemed to be the cause for some problems with the burner itself
being disabled because ECDC4 had left behind some DLLs. We have read on
Roxio's site that they licensed technology to MS for bundling burning tech
with WinXP and my guess (uneducated, though it is) is that ECDC4 overwrote the
WinXP DLLs with its own DLLs and then didn't remove them it uninstalled, since
it didn't keep copies. After a quick reinstall of WinXP, the DLLs were still
there, but we think that the versions (and file sizes) were different. I can't
be sure of all of the details there, however. My father-in-law is still a bit
burned at Roxio and MS for not working out a way to make ECDC4 work on WinXP.

The 20Gb space left on his hard drive now includes a copy of Red Hat 7.2,
which we did after he got XP running. With my help, he got the modem working,
and was browsing his online portfolio at some Quicken site within minutes. As
a reference, he had not been able to pull up the same site in Windows XP using
IE6; I'm guessing that some privacy setting was turned on that prevented IE
from working correctly, but I didn't look into it. Furthermore, he took about
5 minutes, with my help, to set up his email accounts in KMail. He also looked
at the KOffice stuff and was impressed enough to spend the entire evening
playing around with the KDE desktop.

The biggest frustration was that that $30 Xerox printer he had wouldn't work
with Linux. It seems like it should, but it just doesn't. He gave away to my
bothering law, apparently, an Epson that would have worked pefectly. (Epson
printers are the recommendations for low-cost inkjets on linuxprinting.org.)
He's going to get that Epson back and let his son have the Xerox printer,
since the Xerox works great in Windows.

So not a roaring success for Linux, but there are a few Windows annoyances
that are helping Linux look better.

 - The original install issue with the 40Gb drive
 - The sound drivers not being stock on WinXP
 - The issue with the Easy CD Creator 4 software, and subsequent disabling of
   the CDRW drive
 - The nagging message about getting a .NET Passport account
 - The nagging message about such-and-such days left to activate your copy of
   WinXP
 - The Quicken portfolio site not working with IE6 under the settings my
   father-in-law chose (I'm not clear on details)

Red Hat didn't have a problem with the drive. Red Hat recognized and
configured the sound. Red Hat configured his burner correctly and includes
burning software. Red Hat does include enticements to sign up for the Red Hat
Network for updates and so forth, but they aren't on the desktop every time
you log in. The versions of Mozilla and Konq that came default on Red
Hat loaded up his finance site with no issues.

We gave him a Linux book for his birthday (Dec 27th) in the hopes that he'll
try booting into Linux more often. I'm at least pleased that he is giving it
some time, even if it's small time, because it means more people using it and
more people knowing about it and more websites seeing Mozilla and Konq in
their logs.

Ok, I'll stop rambling now, but I felt the need to share. I suppose
long-winded missives like this will get me kill-filed. :^)

Regards,
matt

-- 
Matt Matthews     \ ph: 919.660.2811        \ Use GNU/Linux  _o) w00t
Duke Univ., Postdoc\ jvmatthe at math.duke.edu  \____________   /\\
Dept. of Mathematics\ http://www.math.duke.edu/~jvmatthe/ \ _\_V