Have spent many sleepless nights trying to get a linux gateway up and running. Have you ever started something and then wondered WHY? WHY have I spent SOOOo much time on this?
I do have a life, I'd like to think I'm not a geek but my behaviour of lately contradicts me. Getting a little USB NIC to work on a Linux box is a nightmare. I have my hands on a copy of SuSE. I will give this distribution a try soon. Might take a while cause I'm quite peeved off with the whole situation.
Hey J, are you out there? How are things? Sorry I haven't called to see how things are lately, will do so shortly.
I did see 'Something's gotta Give' with Jack Nicholson the other night. The man has still got it. He is such a great actor. Diane Keaton (fantastic), Keanu Reeves and Amanda Peet were all very good in it as well. It's a Romance Comedy that is worth watching.
Posted by [jc] at January 26, 2004 11:03 PMThis is what confuses me. USB support is really the function of the Kernel and/or modules. So the distribution should not matter that much... it should not matter if it's Red Hat or SUSE or Slackware or anything else... It's the version of the Linux Kernel that probably matters more. It must be new enough to offer good USB support.
Having said that, Slackware is the type of distro that installs a very clean setup without trying to guess too much. The installer just tries to get you up and running. After you have your command prompt, there are plenty of tools to configure stuff and it's time to read docs. So it doesn't do much guessing during installation, but instead tries to give you good configuration tools and a "back to the basics" approach to configuration (everything is text files and .tar.gz files for package management... it doesn't get simpler than that when you think about it).
HOWEVER, I have read discussions that USB NICs get configured out of the box. But I don't have a USB PC, so I can't say for sure.
Other decent distro is Debian. Both are good and "by the people, for the people". No big company behind either one.
You can download the latest Slackware .ISO image for free.
It is insane though, that in this day and age, USB anything does not work out of the box on any OS. Let me share a sroty with you now....
A few weeks ago, I ordered a 120Gig external Firewire hard drive for my iBook, so I could make movies and not run out of space. I purchased it on the Internet, from a shop in NSW, because they were cheap and nobody else had the drive I wanted. It arrived within two weeks. I took it out of the box, plugged it into the power, plugged it into the firewire port... and an "icecube" icon appeared on my desktop under OS X. Done. The bloody thing was ready to use. It took less time to get it working than it took to type in my credit card number....
By the way.... there was a Windows driver CD that came with the drive.... any idea where I should stick it? I don't understand why everything on the PC has to have a driver, when USB and Firewire are supposed to be standards.... no drivers were required for my iBook. No further questions, your Honour.
Bottom line: make sure your Kernel is new enough, no matter which distro you end up using. There should be USB modules pre-compiled in modern distros. Let me know what you end up doing....
Shem
Shem, does it have good USB-NIC hardware support?
Posted by: [jc] at January 28, 2004 11:04 PMhttp://www.slackware.org
There can be only one! (err... if you don't have OS X)
Shem
Posted by: Shem Mazur at January 28, 2004 10:20 PMyou're not a geek? since when?? ;)
Posted by: blue yes at January 27, 2004 12:52 PMJC, having sleepless nights will be good practice for you when JC Jnr comes.
Posted by: tdl at January 27, 2004 08:57 AM