Reflections on a failed experiment

I have tried various distros over the last 9 years including Red Hat, Fedora, Suse (2 versions), Mandrake (now Mandriva), Gentoo, Debian, and most recently Ubuntu and Mepis. Of those I would say the one that came closest to a trouble free installation so far was the last version of Suse I used. Ubuntu was unable to partition my drive and left it useless so that I had to repartition and format it in Windows XP.

Mepis was the most impressive of all in terms of identifying my hardware, though I never got as far as trying to install my HP color laserjet printer. However, it proved to be the most frustrating experience of all for two reasons. First, the particular installation I wanted to do required a custom repartitioning of the hard drive and it took some time to figure out how the partitioning program worked. Second, the Grub installer program was incorrectly installed on my main hard drive, making the computer unbootable in anything except the Mepis live CD. Attempts at fixing it through the Mepis utilities program were a failure.

I admit I was attempting something somewhat risky. I tried to install it on an external, USB hard drive. My hope was thus to avoid messing with my primary drive at all. I really wanted to boot directly from there, but that proved to be practically undoable, even though it is theoretically possible (the bios boot options allow for this). After a great deal of problems and effort I was finally able to repartition and reformat my main drive and reinstall Windows XP. Obviously this what not what I intended to do when I went to install Mepis, but at least I didn't have to replace my hard drive!

This thing of trying Linux is kind of an annual self-flagellation for me, that has yet to work satisfactorily. I have concluded that I won't do it again until I have a computer to tinker with and can install only Linux and work on it at my leisure. There are 3 things that keep turning me away from Linux and which I, and others I have read (including Linux enthusiasts), feel are the Achilles heel of this OS.

First is the lack of standards. You don't just load Linux, you load this or that flavor of Linux. Even those in the same family of Linux (Debian vs. Red Hat) don't do things the same way. Mepis warns you in the installation process that much Linux information on the Web is out of date. They could add that it may not apply to the distro you are using in any event.

Second, is the lack of documentation. Now I know people are going to scream that's not true. There are loads of man pages, info files and what not. Some of them are even applicable to the distro we happen to be using! But the organization of this material in one place with index and search function does not seem to exist. When I was trying to figure out the partition program in Mepis the help file wanted to take me to a Web site. Of course I hadn't even figured out how to get my wireless network working in Mepis yet (I did figure it out). Where is the Windows-style help document when you need it? In fact, as an OpenOffice user (in Windows), I would say one of the greatest problems of Open Source software is that documentation is an afterthought in most cases.

Third, of course, is the well-known problem of hardware compatibility. Mepis certainly seems to have come a long ways in this area, as have other distros. For the tinkerers out there this is a lot of fun. For those of us who don't mind a few technical mind-benders sometimes, but who really want mostly to do work, this is a time drain.

I'm not an MS lover. I don't own and never have owned a copy of MS Office. I use Windows because it seems to be the only viable option for me at this time. And I'll probably flagellate myself with Linux once again next year, in spite of what I wrote above. It's good for a few chuckles by my adult kids who think their dad is a little nutty about computers anyway.
- Jon