First off: Star Wars: Episode II party, my place on Tuesday. If you're reading this, you're invited. It'll be low-key: just some cheesecake-eating and Attack Of The Clones watching to refresh everyone's memory before Revenge of the Sith opens.
Now, to vent: Linux sucks. Okay, it doesn't suck, but it can be darn frustrating sometimes. As Chu and I have been building the TiVo, we've run into a multitude of problems, some have been my fault, some have been Linux's fault. In general, I'm surprised at how much Linux still relies on the command prompt. Not that I'm uncomfortable with text commands (I've been on UNIX-like systems since high school), but I thought the Linux bazaar was trying to spread the OS to the masses. Until things "just work" and use a GUI, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Right now, neither of those is true.
To the specific gripes. My main complaint has to do with installation. We've had a lot of problems with other parts of TiVo, but in the end they mostly seem to be things I screwed up. But, on installation, we did things correctly and they just didn't work. First, I tried installing Fedora. I thought this would be easy, since I'd already installed machines with the Red Hat package they used to sell in stores. But a bit into the install process the screen went haywire. Complete fuzz. I went into options (ie, outside the gui and into the command prompt) and it told me to try using the "noprobe" option. I tried that to no avail.
So then I thought "there are several Linux distros, let's try SuSe." As I mentioned before, I had trouble finding a torrent for the DVD, so I downloaded the CD installation. This required an FTP install, and the GUI here was completely unhelpful. You had to find and type in the ftp servers yourself...how hard would it be for SuSe to maintain an active list which the install program could query? The first ftp site we tried, Oregon, was dead, but it took us a while to realize that. Next we tried Colorado, which bugged out 90% in (twice). Lastly, we connected to Tennessee, which downloaded the entire install, but then gave an error. Three times is enough for me: I'm done with SuSe.
Before I try to find a torrent for Debian, I try Fedora one more time. Digging through the myriad of options, I found "nofb" (whatever that means!) and the monitor problem disappeared. And this epitomizes why Linux is not populace-ready. Here's a known problem, with a documented solution, but no one has tried to autodetect and autofix the problem. How hard could it be to check the video out and make sure it doesn't go all fuzzy? (Well, to be honest it might be difficult, I truly have no idea.)
Second major gripe: Fedora has frozen four times since we started using it a week ago. They seem like hardware freezes, but I'm still not entirely clear why computers can't avoid, or skip over, such errors. Clearly the hardware still works, as when I reboot, everything operates normally. So why can't my OS detect which hardware is having trouble and reset it? (If my memory twitches, it'd have to try to copy the current memory contents onto the disk...but what's wrong with "mini-restarting" the processor or the hard drive if either of those is the problem.)
We've also had to install Fedora three times. We did the second fresh install because we partitioned poorly the first time (our mistake). But then Fedora froze when updating the RPMs, pretty much irrevocably corrupting the RPM database. A web search yielded a manual method of fixing the problem that would have taken about three hours; instead we decided to start over.
Problems on my side of the fence have been: mis-jumpering the DVD-drive (the manual might have been wrong, it's still unclear), buying the slightly wrong version of the TV Tuner (it still might work though), and not reading this wonderful step-through all the way through before we started playing and messing things up.
That said, our goal is to finish by May 25th and TiVo the Champions League final match (go AC Milan!) and I think that's still doable. We received a signal from the tuner card last night--whether it's the right signal has yet to be determined.
In good news: I'm up to 85 points on the Hitchhiker's Guide Adventure Game. (I'm at the part where I have to show a "sign of my intelligence.")
LOTD: How to piss off enjanerd.
haha Thanks for the link. Very punny. ;)
You're welcome. I thought your post was a dream sequence at first...I can't believe someone would do that!
Cool... I had a couple people say that they didn't think it was real at first. I guess my life is just funny like that.