Re: I don't want more choice... I just want nicer things

Howard J. Rogers wrote:
> I mean... here I am, two weeks into a 'I am a Red Hat 9 boy' conversion.
> Religious conviction is high. Fervour is ardourous.
>
> And then Mandrake 9.1 pops up. It detects wireless cards that RH9 just spits
> at. It looks good. It doesn't complain about my French classical CD
> collection (mmmm... maybe it should've). It works... OK, I'm converted.
> Call me a Mandrake-boy!!

Mandrake IS nice, I use it at home, along with RH9 on my kids pc's, but I've found RH a little more difficult to get talking to the PC's when they are in windows mode (they all dual boot)

> But bugger me if Oracle 9.2 won't install on it at all, as I've finally
> persuaded it to do on RH9. So I scour the web, and seek guidance from the
> Linux untouchables... but sod-all is there to be seen.

I'm currently in a hair pulling battle with SuSE 7.3 and 9ir2, on friday I said $#@! it and blew the whole install away on my new playground (PIII dual processor with 3 SCSI and one IDI drive) and reinstalled from scratch. (I wanted to redo partitions with LVM anyway) I was going to go minimal as possible and load only X and windowmaker or blackbox, but loaded the default KDE install and saved the minimal install for a later date. I was going to go 100% LVM but the install didnt like that so I did the partitioning on one disk only for the OS and oracle_home, then went and did the LVM on the remaining disks and VOILA! excpet that now when I boot it kicks me straight to a login prompt and I cant get X going for love nor money.... arrrggggggg! (on my way over to the SuSE ng as I wrote this)

> I mean: what is it with this operating system? Flavour after flavour, and
> never a straight plumb-line to be relied upon in existence!
>
> Then I have to seek psychiatric counselling, because I like gnome, and
> Mandrake prefers KDE. If I go KDE, am I missing out on something? If I go
> gnome, I *know* I'm missing out on something. Call me paranoid, but I know
> whatever side I'm on, the other side are watching. Do I go mozilla,
> konqueror, opera, galeon, or what? Stuff me if I can't actually install
> Crossover Office and have, cough, Internet Explorer! But that's clearly a
> sin, and I seek forgiveness, Father. Oh for the days of 'thou shalt have IE
> and have done with it, or we'll break your operating system!'. At least you
> knew where you came in relation to God and Bill. Thou shalt have no other
> choices but Me. OK... slightly Leninistic, but at least one knew where you
> stood, even if it was only at the foot of Mount Sinaii.
>
> Do I use pan, knode, mozilla news, or what?

I use all three on different machines, but I find pan buggy sometimes, knode ok, and mozilla news sometimes doesnt pick up messages that I can see plain as day on outlook express or knode.
>
> I don't want choices!!!!!!!!! I just want an application that will do what I
> want when I want it, and looking pretty sexy whilst it's doing it. And
> running Oracle would be nice, too. And I don't want to have to choose! I
> just want nice things. (And a workable replacement for Frontpage would be
> nice: I have a new website to construct, after all!).
>
> Look at me, Linux. Look at moi: Give Me An Operating System with
> Applications that Work, and looks noice (that's 'nice' for the non-Kath &
> Kim fans out there or for those that haven't a clue). It's no good claiming
> "if an app crashes the O/S will survive" if your apps crash every 3
> seconds. I'd rather go for the apps which work for hours on end and trash
> everything in site when they finally decide to make a dramatic exit. And
> I'd *really* like not to have to worry about which version of glibc is
> installed before I fall in love with the interface.
>

My biggest peeve now is WHY the hell can't Oracle install without loading this lib, going in to *this* script and adding a "'" here and this line there, yada yada yada... While I appreciate the skills I gain doing this, sometimes I'd like to just get the damm software installed in an hour and get a bloody database up & running by noon! I admit it is *fun* boggling the windows boys with greps, awks, vi's and pico's, but there are definatly times I miss the push-button windows installs. One would think that Oracle/Linux would have it by now so that the first thing the install did was check for neccesary glibc lib's, gcc's and all the rest, point to the neccesary stuff if you didnt have it, install it and get on with things like creating databases rather that slogging thru 30 page howto's. Include something like SuSE's orarun.rpm's that take care of a lot of the PITA stuff. Is *that* too much to ask? I'm surprised with oracles push for linux that they dont have this in place. <end of rant>

> Can someone please advise me: what distro, and what apps? Because I'm fed up
> making the choices for myself.
>
> Regards
> HJR
>

For browser I really like mozilla about the best,(especially the tabs) check out their firebird (browser only) I havent had a chance to yet. Opera is ok, but I dont like how they arrange the real-estate. Nautilis is nice as well. Even on my windows machines I use mostly mozilla 1.4 now...

Openoffice is nice, but sloooow on my old PIII's.

I think there is need for a comp.databases.oracle.linux group here IMO where all can discuss issues & workarounds etc.

I have the BSD's on cd's as well as some of the debian distros to play with, someone have some extra time they can lend me?

cheers! Received on Sat Sep 20 2003 - 11:18:53 CDT