Linux woes July 2nd, 2005
I've been fighting my Linux box for a couple days now. My problem is that I'm used to the professional distributions, like SuSE and RedHat, but I'm trying to use some of the free distributions instead. The problem is that they take tweaking and tweaking if you're doing anything weird — and that's the status of my Promise Ultra100 add-on hard drive controller card.<br />
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Mostly it runs, but I finally realized that my add-on hard drive controller card was not being recognized by the Linux distribution I've been using recently — SimplyMepis.<br />
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My old Linux OS was SuSE Linux 9.0 Professional, and it had no trouble whatsoever with that card.<br />
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OK, I thought maybe the two old drives were bad. I plugged in a new 160GB Western Digital hard drive. Still not recognized. A little Google research and I found that I could get it recognized if I put some particular parameters in the boot instructions.<br />
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Not quite — it booted ok, then I formatted it as ext3. Wrote some stuff on there. Thank goodness I didn't delete the original files, though. When I rebooted, the system could not fsck (file system check) the new drive partition. Round the horn some more. <br />
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Finally, I decided to install CentOS 4.0, a free clone of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Nope, wouldn't install. Both graphical install and text install failed. I'll check it out further. Probably there's a new version now, anyway.<br />
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But, I'm tempted to go right back to my SuSE 9.0 — or upgrade to SuSE 9.3. <br />
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I keep talking about how easy Xandros Desktop is to use, but it is designed for easy use by Windows users. It doesn't include all the server programs that I want to run for web development.<br />
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I think SuSE 9.0 will go back on tomorrow.