Tried to install Mandriva 2009.0 on Xeon server in lab. Installation went off smoothly enough, no major surprises. Minor things were that some packages were getting installed after I entered some user information.
Major stupidities
1. compulsory creation of some dumb user login. No doubt this is meant kindly for the benefit o dumb porn surfers and gamers with just enough intelligence to press the power button and slobber over keyboards while watching porn, this is massively irritating. Also, by default NIS is turned off, or maybe one has to wade back to package selection to install NIS tools. what angers me and frustrates me is that packagers put is solid 1GB of crapware bu have dysentry if they include these small but essential packages by default. Installing and configuring Linux in a lab environment is becoming messy because of the concentration of developers toward Joe User, who can just distinguish between porn and viagra ads.
2. Configuring network is another pain in the nether regions. All information was there yet I had to do ifup and ifdown a couple of times to get the network on the next reboot.
3. At this point of time, I have successfully mount NFS files. I learnt linux the "hard way" by trying to think what the programs do and how they do it, on a very superficial level. The magic of GNU/Linux is precisely this; it is designed toward a commonsense approach without needing to go into the details. If you want, you can but it is not needed. I believe in reading man pages and tweaking settings by hand, naturally I am old fashioned because I do not like exotic configuration tools which hide the original system files behind the distribution idiosyncracies. So, I edited /etc/fstab and mounted 4 NFS points using nfs as protocols. next reboot nothing happens, sigh.. i have to scour some stupid system file and see that it mounts only nfs4 file types in /etc/fstab and not nfs. sure i can tweak it etc. I do not see the problem of the script writer if he had kept nfs also. It saves considerable heartburn and time. Protocol versions may change and it is appreciated that distributors and maintainers strive to give the latest, but IMHO this is stupid.
4. Now come to the best(worst) part. I enable nis, of course, as mentione earlier, i have exotic fonts, 5 different programs for playing media all by default but including nis-utils is a problem! so another urpmi command later these are installed. I set the domainname etc and check by su - in a terminal and all seems to be Ok. Now, i go to console login and enter the NIS user, "wrong password". my eyes pop out. i login as root and do su - user_name, i am logged in! but console wont let me in, gdm/kdm wont let me in. The stupidity of the whole thing is paralysing and I shall now erase the accursed thing. How I wish Slackware had a proper 64bit version.
Major stupidities
1. compulsory creation of some dumb user login. No doubt this is meant kindly for the benefit o dumb porn surfers and gamers with just enough intelligence to press the power button and slobber over keyboards while watching porn, this is massively irritating. Also, by default NIS is turned off, or maybe one has to wade back to package selection to install NIS tools. what angers me and frustrates me is that packagers put is solid 1GB of crapware bu have dysentry if they include these small but essential packages by default. Installing and configuring Linux in a lab environment is becoming messy because of the concentration of developers toward Joe User, who can just distinguish between porn and viagra ads.
2. Configuring network is another pain in the nether regions. All information was there yet I had to do ifup and ifdown a couple of times to get the network on the next reboot.
3. At this point of time, I have successfully mount NFS files. I learnt linux the "hard way" by trying to think what the programs do and how they do it, on a very superficial level. The magic of GNU/Linux is precisely this; it is designed toward a commonsense approach without needing to go into the details. If you want, you can but it is not needed. I believe in reading man pages and tweaking settings by hand, naturally I am old fashioned because I do not like exotic configuration tools which hide the original system files behind the distribution idiosyncracies. So, I edited /etc/fstab and mounted 4 NFS points using nfs as protocols. next reboot nothing happens, sigh.. i have to scour some stupid system file and see that it mounts only nfs4 file types in /etc/fstab and not nfs. sure i can tweak it etc. I do not see the problem of the script writer if he had kept nfs also. It saves considerable heartburn and time. Protocol versions may change and it is appreciated that distributors and maintainers strive to give the latest, but IMHO this is stupid.
4. Now come to the best(worst) part. I enable nis, of course, as mentione earlier, i have exotic fonts, 5 different programs for playing media all by default but including nis-utils is a problem! so another urpmi command later these are installed. I set the domainname etc and check by su - in a terminal and all seems to be Ok. Now, i go to console login and enter the NIS user, "wrong password". my eyes pop out. i login as root and do su - user_name, i am logged in! but console wont let me in, gdm/kdm wont let me in. The stupidity of the whole thing is paralysing and I shall now erase the accursed thing. How I wish Slackware had a proper 64bit version.
1 comment:
I dont want to start a distro, slackware is great. i do have plans for creating my own 64 bit slackware ISO.
mandriva has some funny installation schemes "gnome destop", "kde desktop" and "custom desktop". i admit that i am not of your calibre in brains, but i do wish that you give me some credit. i chose the "custom install" and selected the packages for half an hour...
another funny thing is that the MBR or the kernel, i dont recall which, is installed AFTER a user has been created.
anyway, i hate this server mode etc. slackware does not have such stupid modes and it can be used by anyone. This is an artificial hype created by Ubuntu and Fedora to peddle their products.
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