My day, observations (long)

[Robert Sinland <rsinland@means.net>]

    Hi all, well today the mailman brought me Using Linux fourth edition.
This one comes with RedHat 5.1, Caldara OpenLinux Lite 1.2 and StarOffice on
cd's.
I figured Redhat might be the way to go due to all the RPM's out there etc,
so I cleaned out
a HD and gave it a go.  Note:  In all fairness the HD I cleared was a
semi-crappy 545 meg
hd on the end of the IDE chain, or /dev/hdd wich is installed as a slave
behind a 36x cdrom.
  Install was far from smooth, part my fault I admit.  Disk Druid or the
redhat fdisk would not
even consider putting it on that  drive.  I had to boot up  slackware and
use that fdisk to prep
(partition and make ext2 and swap) the drive then go back into RedHat's boot
and install thing.
    It eventually worked and RedHat installed, loaded up everything I asked
for, rebooted and
even ran.  Alas, no sound support.  I figured I would just recompile the
kernal with sound
added in.   Did the rpm thing from the second CD and got the kernal sources
on the HD.
  Did make xconfig, all went well, make dep, no problem, make clean, no
sweat...
Then did a make.....  Got  a broken pipe error every min or so,  so I just
re-entered make.
Eventually it hit the end, with a TON of compile errors.  (Yes I had
installed EVERYTHING)
  Well I blew it off, and figured the drive might be to blame.  Still dont
know for sure...

    Next thing I did was reboot to my old Slakware install and downloaded
the newest kernal
sources. 2.2.5.  Compiled that with no problems at all.  Compared to my
older 2.0.29 kernal it's
faster then hell!  Only problem so far is I have to reword a script or two
to connect to the net.
  So what's my point?  Not sure I have one at this time, though I wonder if
Redhat is indeed
all it's cracked up to be...   Spent most of the day here in front of this
box, either installing, or
compiling stuff, and at this point RedHat hasn't won me over....yet anyway.
  On the other hand, under slakware I have so many Lib-this-and that's
installed I don't
know for sure what I can get rid of anymore :)
  BTW not at all trying to bash any Linux release at all, just sharing my
day...
Hope someone can empathise :)
RS