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Petreley on Win2k Installs and Softway Systems
Zach Frey writes "Nicholas Petreley [?] 's latest column has an interesting side-by-side comparison of Linux installs vs. Windows installs. It's a data point in the "Linux is too hard to install!" war. The upshot? Current Linux distros installed in around 15 minutes and had no trouble autodetecting his hardware, Win98 took 40 minutes and failed to recognize his network cards. W2K took ... much longer. " The more interesting comments, IMHO, were the comments on Softway Systems, but the Linux install article is timely, in light of the CNN install nightmare story.Update: 09/30 10:27 by H :Check out an update from Nick posted in the comments regarding the version of Win2k.
It doesn't make that much sense to consider this to be a "64-bit-related" deal; the issues of making NT (or W2K) code "64-bit-clean" are likely to have more to do with having considerable bits of test harness to validate that they work with big values than anything else, what with the major architectural differences.
As for competition immunity, we can go back to the days of the Roman Empire and see the ebb and flow of the growth and destruction of empires that people thought would stand. The more arrogant they get, the bigger the fall when they do fall.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I wonder why he never gave any numbers about the install time of Win2k?
Was he installing from the CD? Was he installing directly from his HD under windows? Was he installing from the CD in DOS? If he was installing from DOS, he probably didn't have the foresight to load smartdrv and sat there for 4 hours while it copied all 2,000 files from the i386 dir to the HD. Anyone who has any experience installing Win2k doesn't install this way as it is like chineese water torture. DOS copies files very very slow. The better method is to either boot from the Win2k CD directly, install from Windows (if you already have it installed), or if you MUST install from DOS - make SURE you run smartdrv to speed up the file copy process.
I can't speak for beta2 since it is almost 9 months old, but Release-Canidate 2 that was released a couple of weeks ago doesn't take more than an hour to install. I am speaking on behalf of 40 or so people in #Win2000 on efnet who all install Win2k at various times. As long as they arent installing from DOS without running smartdrv, and they don't have shitty hardware, they install within an hour consistantly.
Crowing about anecdotal evidence on Slashdot? I would've expected better.
Trying to convince the world that Linux is easy to install by throwing up meaningless stories like this is going to accomplish nothing. Making Linux truly easy to install with a wide variety of driver support will do a lot more.
Remember that Windows has sold literally 10s of millions of Win/95 and Win/98 upgrades. When upgrading, the O/S redetects all the hardware. Trying to argue that Windows doesn't work anything less than the vast majority of time is foolish.
It is my experience that they'd have more problems. Just an example...
Just about a week ago I installed a VooDoo II card. Should have been simple right? Well, I had to move the PCI network card to get the VooDoo II next to the video card. Insert the cards, closed it up, and booted Windows 98. WHHAAATT??? Windows 98 first decided to install *another* driver for my network card. So it did that, and I rebooted. Logged back in, and now I have *2* NIC drivers installed. Removed one, and then rebooted *again*. After logging in, I found out that I couldn't connect to the network. Windows 98 had decided to *reconfigure* my IP settings. So I fixed that up and, yep, you guessed it, rebooted again. So I rebooted 3 times and finally was back to the place I started at before installing the VooDoo II card. And I'm not the only one who has problems upgrading hardware under Windows. It's obvious that that is way beyond the grasp of the consumer.
How about the install? I shouldn't have to even mention that. Even with a smooth install, it's going to require the floppy shuffle to install all the newer drivers. And what chance to you think a consumer is going to associate what the Wizard is installing with the actual CD or disk the driver is one. Commonly my friends call me and ask, "It wants a disk for the PCI Network device, what's that. Uh, that's the disk with 'Netgear' on the label. Oh, okay it took that."...
And then after all that, do you have a complete setup? Oops, gotta install Office, and set up internet access and networking. With Linux, it's 20 minutes, and KDE is installed and configured, KOffice is installed and configured, networking is configured, and so on. Okay, maybe Linux *isn't* all the way there yet, but I'll bet it beats Microsoft to it.
-Brent--
Frankly, I was left a bit cold from the article. It didn't really say much of anything new or insightful other than one very critical point: Microsoft makes some huge assumptions about where one begins when using their OS (?!) products.
In all of the press and conversations I've read/heard discussing the installations of Linux vs. *using* Windows, the basic thing that seems to be missing is that very problem with Microsoft's assumption: that we only use their products and that we should be grateful for doing so. When folks complain about having to edit files to get their systems to work properly, so many seem to forget that it was only four years ago when the vast majority of PCs still ran Win 3.1 -- if that. Hello?! Win.ini? System.ini?
I'm still not sure where I stand on the Linux-for-the-masses issue, but I'm sure that I don't want people to assume that they have to settle for an inferior product when, with a bit of tweaking and polish, a better solution (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) is readily available. That said, I'm encouraged by where Caldera is taking the install process; I only wish that the 'Advanced' user bypass option will always remain.
BeOS install crushes them all
Im constantly amazed by how good BeOS is at what it does. Of course what it does is still quite limited compared to other OSes that have been out longer. In my experience the RH and windows installs are pretty much equal these days. Alot depends on your hardware.
I prefer the RH because the windows way of doing just about anything really frustrates me. Windows is an example of how NOT to do a GUI interface. BeOS is an example of just how good a GUI can be.
BeOS has the easiest, quickest install of them all if (and its still a fairly big if) your hardware is supported.
BeOS is fun & easy to use and doesn't sacrifice power in doing so. And its fast, really really fast. Right now its weakest point as an OS is the lack of multiuser support and the attendant network security problems.
Well here are a few of mine.
;)
;)
My system is:
Celeron 300
Abit bh6 board
128MB ram
Mylex UW Scsi adapter
plextor 32X scsi cdrom, plextor 4x12 scsi cd-r
IBM 8 GB ide hard drive
awe 64 soundcard
Riva TNT video card
Linksys 10/100 Network card (the one the guy used)
SGI 20.something inch monitor
Windows 98
The install is fairly simple, it des not recognize the video card (As TNT cards weren't around when 98 was made..duh) The NIC is either detected as a NE 2000 card, or nothing at all. Everything else works fine. After the install I pop in the driver cd for the video card and floppies for the network card. After a reboot everything works fine. I don't see what this guy's problem was for the Linksys card... go figure.
Windows NT (Workstation)
I installed NT a long time ago so I don't remember all the details. Video card worked fine after applying service pack 3 with AGP support. The sound card was a nightmare to install though, ISA PNP support in NT definately needs work. But after I finally managed to get it working everything was fine. I would like to mention that I used NT for a few months and not once did the system crash. Apps crash of course but that is present in every O/S. Never did I have to reboot a system due to a lockup. So when I hear these stories of systems locking up it makes me wonder if the user was playing Quake or something on the NT server
Mandrake 6.0
The TNT card does not get detected, this is okay as I can pick it from the list of cards supported. The SGI monitor does not get recognized _ this is a major pain in the ass as I don't have the manual for it. After playing "Guess the horizontal and vertical frequency" for 5 minutes I manage to get it right. Not a good way to pass time. Network card is detected fine. Mandrake 6.0 also does not have sound detection as part of the install, bummer. After running sndconfig everything works fine. All in all an okay install... the monitor bit is what annoys me the most.
Caldera 2.3
Wow..not bad, I'd say the best Linux installer I've tried so far. Detects everything sans... The monitor is not detected but they have an entry for it! Amazing. So I pick it and everything works fine, why doesn't Mandrake have the entry for my SGI monitor but Caldera does? Weird. After pondering that I also notice that Caldera detected my Awe 64 as a Soundblaster 16... makes me raise an eyebrow, but it works. My opinion? Not bad.
BeOS 4.5
Finally BeOS. I am lucky enough to have supported hardware, a lot of my friends have been unable to install it due to lack of drivers. I pop the cd in, run partition magic to make a BeOS partition. After a reboot the install kicks in, asks me if I want some 3rd party demos and japanese support. After that the install begins, after returning from a 5 minute trip to the kitchen I see that the install is done! BeOS boots in some 10 seconds and presto.. I blink in amazement as the install didn't ask me any hardware questions. But lo and behold everything was detected except for my network card (networking isn't part of the hardware detection I guess) I go into prefrences and put in my card type (no irqs or io settings to mess with) and my ip adress info. All done.
Moral of the story? Windows 98 install is easy, Windows NT is fine unless you have ISA PNP cards, Mandrake 6.0 install is livable, Caldera 2.3 install is about on par with Windows 98. BeOS install crushes them all. Not bad for an operating system made by a little company heavily in debt and smirked at by open source advocates screaming "Since you won't open source you will die! Mwahahaha!" Anyway that's my two cents. The biggest thing to watch out for is to make sure you have compatible hardware. Check first, install second. Not the other way around. Pardon any spelling errors
Zagato-sama
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I for one advocate iMacs to all those who don't know anything about computers, and don't *want* to know about computers. For everyone else, Linux is the way to go. Sure, there's BeOS and FreeBSD and others, but if they know that much they'll know whether it's the OS for them.
Linux is also the way to go in environments like corporations where the users don't know anything, and don't *need* to know anything because there are real computer people to support them. Of course, having a thin-client solution is an even better solution in such environments.
-Brent--
Much more likely is the theory that Microsoft bought Softway simply to bury the technology. Microsoft has a vested intrest in making sure that cross-platform development remains very difficult (to keep all the software, and thus all the users, on Windows). And certainly promoting the Unix API as _the_ cross-platform API is Microsoft's worst nightmare.
As to hiring talent for 64-bit Windows, why did Microsoft throw a hissy fit over Compaq's dropping NT-on-Alpha, and not simply hire the entire Compaq/Dec group to continue doing what they were already doing? Here you have a group of people already familiar with a 64-bit architecture _and_ the internals of NT, and in sudden need of a new job. It's possible that Microsoft was just being childish, but more likely they aren't looking for outside help.
As for Microsoft being immune from competition, I think the book "Megatrends" said it best- "There is no divine right of inherited markets any more than there is the divine right of kings". The book was talking about Railroads, but the lessons apply.
When a Windows system gets hosed for unspecified reasons, many customers call in to the company they purchased their computer from for support with reinstalling it. A customer rarely has to go through the reinstall without someone to hold their hand over the phone. The Windows reinstall (by the time you've installed whatever drivers, service packs, applications, etc) can take more than two hours. RedHat will install in 20 minutes max with all apps already installed. You just can't beat that!
The major downside, though, was that it was sooooo slow. Linux on the same box whizzed through the install, and was ready to use in no time at all (apart from having to fix some of the broken Red Hat defaults, like ignoring the users' .inputrc).
FWIW, I also installed Linux and Solaris 7 on my Sparc this week, too. Linux took it's usual 20 minutes. Slowaris took over 4 hours...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Articles about how someone had an easier time installing one OS versus another are pretty pointless. Unless they're doing some massive multi-model, multi-OS, multi add-on test, it's just anecdotal evidence. And as with any anecdotal evidence, people will use it to support their favorite side of the arguement.
I've had really bad installs with many OSes. Windows has the real-world advantage that Windows is the first OS vendors write drivers for. It's also the one they maintain best. Often, you'll find your hardware driver on the Windows CD.
This does not make Windows a better OS, it means that vendors favor it because of marketshare, therefore feeding the marketshare.
Windows also does a decent job of maintaining backwards compatibility.
However, if your hardware isn't supported by Windows, chances are good your recourse is NIL. You could write your own drivers, but you won't find source as a starting point, or a community of Windows device driver developers waiting to give you help.
My opinion is that one would have a much better time trying to write for obscure hardware under Linux than Windows.
It also means, if my observation is correct, that Linux will catch up to Windows for device support, and will take that advantage away.
Most of the non-technically literate will be installing from EIDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drives, which are much easier than SCSI to auto-detect.
Your milage may vary if you have some kind of wonky SCSI card, but if you have a normal type of Adaptec card you shouldn't have the kind of problems you describe.
The only normal Adaptec model I've heard of problems with is the 294x, due to the incredibly large number of firmware changes that Adaptec made during the lifespan of that card.
I've heard a few complaints about some of the cheapo Adaptec models that don't have a BIOS on them, but from your description, that doesn't sound like your situation.
There are also a number of off-brand SCSI controllers or sound cards that use Adaptec chipsets, and I've heard of a few problems with some of those. In general, most people say to avoid such things.
Personally, I have several machines with SCSI CD-ROM drives on several different types of SCSI controllers, Future Domain 950 (8-bit ISA), Adaptec 154x (ISA), Future Domain 1860 (ISA), Adaptec 284x (VLB) and NCR/Symbios Logic 538xx (PCI). I've never had trouble with Red Hat's installer (5.0, 5.1 or 5.2) not correctly identifying and supporting any of my SCSI CD-ROM drives (Sony, Panasonic or Toshiba).
For that matter, I've never had trouble installing Red Hat with the two wonky proprietary interface CD-ROM drives I've got (Aztech and Phillips/LMS-CM205).
Another suggestion if you have sufficient hard drive space is to copy the Red Hat distribution under MS-DOS to your hard drive and then do the install from there. Or if you have a network card and another machine with a CD-ROM drive that is running something that can export it under NFS you can do a network install, I do that with my laptops that don't have a CD-ROM on them and it works great.
There are ways to get around your problem without having to resort to a floppy install.
Having recently installed W2k, I can tell you that he does not exaggerate. I could have installed SuSe, every package, nine or ten times over in the span I waited for Win2k to tell me it couldn't complete the install. Instead, I drank two pots of coffee, recompiled my Linux kernel five times, wrote 1,000 lines of code, read the first four chapters of 'Linux Device Drivers', built a new box from spare parts, installed RH 5.2 on it, configured it, re-timed my Camaro, drove to the store for smokes, bled the brakes on said Camaro, washed my hands of the grease, checked my phone lines for noise, played a few games of Quake, ate lunch, ate dinner, watched Alien 3 on video, did some light housekeeping, and refreshed /. two hundred times. The sick part? I was installing it on a PIII from a local drive!
.sig: Now legally binding!
More seriously, both of these articles should be classified under "FUD", or atleast severely-misguided, because they don't take into account the intelligence/knowledge of the user. Let me give you an example - "I don't know how to fly an airplane, it's too hard, therefore all airplanes suck. But because I know how to drive a car, all cars are better than all airplanes." Anybody else see the flaw in that statement?
--
HardWare: Abit bh6, Celeron 366 @ 550, 128 RAM, ISA sb16, Realtek 8139 nic
.... *CRUNCH*)
BeOS 4.0 (haven't upgraded yet)
Ok, I'll get it out of the way: BeOS is great! My machine instaled & rebooted in about 6 minutes. It didn't detect Sound, but I could set it up easily (I lost most of the time working out that I didn't need to worry about configuring i/o or irqs). There was, at the time, no NIC driver for my card....
Other points: Very few options to choose from: You either instaled it clean or full of demos and other extras. I *love* the very simple app they use to create partitions. And the BeOS GUI is very good, very *easy*.
win 98 SE:
It took me 50 minutes to install and reboot! It keeps on insisting that my 3.5 floppy drive is an old 5.125 floppy drive. I have to remove & reinstall it on the device manager various times before it finally got the ideia... Otherwise everything worked first time, even TNT card (remember this was the SE version of 98).
NT 4:
Ok, less time to reboot than 98 (about 20 minutes), but didn't video, sound or network cards. I installed the drivers from floppys and they worked first time (first time this was this easy for me).
2000:
It asks me the usual (windows) questions and then proceeds to do everything quietly. Takes about an hour on my system.
Now, Win 200 has a cute way of solving install problems: It logs every action it makes, before it makes it, so it knows it must bypass it if it crashes and restarts the install.
Well... It don't work too well. I watched open-mouthed as my pc instaled almost to the end, crashed, self rebooted, restarted the install, didn't ask any questions and re-installed everything... only to crash and repeat at the very same spot.
It did this 5 times before I took pity on it and stopped it.
Suse 6.1
Love the isntall. It's (IMHO!) the best isntall around for us middle-of-the-road folks, who know quite a bit about pc's, but can't (or can't be bothered to) begin to unravell the library dependencies in Linux. It's a text-mode app, so no fancy tetris game while-u-wait, but it does the job well. It boots into graphic mode into Suse's own X config app for Videocard & monitor defenition, which works very well. It didn't detect my sb16 or my nic, had to do it by hand.
Anyway, in the M$ world I *still* prefer NT4 (sp5). BeOS is (don't flame please, this *my* personal opinion only) the better OS of the lot. It was the fastest, easiest to setup, and rock-stable. It has litle or no software, but so did Linux 4 years ago (In fact that's what M$serfs criticised about Linux at the time, right....).
Suse is a very good instalation, prefered it to RH 5.2 which was the latest I have tried so far.
Maybe 6.0...
No, I can't spell!
-"Run to that wall until I tell you to stop"
(tagadum,tagadum,tagadum
-"stop...."
The other box is a 1-year old Dell that SHIPPED with Windows 98. I wiped the disk and tried reinstalling Windows 98, from the Dell-supplied CD. With 3 minutes left in the install (they have a little timer), I got an error message about a broken or missing vxd file. Reformatted the disk again -- same thing. I have a real problem. Dell support was useless. ("Try starting the installation from the floppy instead of booting from the Windows 98 CD". I tried, just to be safe, and of course that failed.) Searched the web and found a 19-step procedure for fixing this file. The procedure takes about an hour to go through. Made a slight error after that, and had to start from scratch (more reformatting). Got it right the next time. Installed a NIC which caused the machine to lock up solid when booting. Removing the NIC (in safe mode, from the control panel) and physically removing the card didn't fix the problem. Another reformat and reinstall (along with the 19-step 1-hour procedure to avoid the vxd problem). Finally get through it all, and the machine is flaky -- freezes within five minutes.
It's hard to imagine a simpler installation scenario -- standard Dell machine with no extra hardware; blank disk; standard Windows 98 installation. After banging my head against this wall for three days I still have a useless PC.
Meanwhile, I'm quite new to Linux, and got through the RH 6.0 install in about 15 minutes on another machine, on my first attempt.
Now I have to say that the Windows install had prettier graphics flashing while the installation "proceeded", but I don't see that as contributing to simplicity.