Linux brings me to my knees

The last few weeks have been interesting and frustrating. Late last year I decided to delve a little deeper into Linux and kick out my favourite distribution in favour of a generic and customised system. After years of relying fairly heavily on the benefits of my preferred Mandrake distribution, I felt I was ready to install something a little more to my liking. At least that was the plan.

Next time I decide to get adventurous with Linux I hope some sane voice reminds me of the past weeks and brings me back to reality.

Alastair Otter, journalist, ITWeb

What I soon discovered was that my Linux skills were nowhere near as proficient as I had imagined. Too many years of Mandrake had clearly made me lazy. My first attempt was with a version of Debian, which is still very much the version of Linux most favoured by the hacker elite. Although I have long planned on installing Debian, I was always a little put off because it seemed to be a little hard core for my still developing skills. Armed, however, with my new-found confidence, I was convinced that I was ready for the challenge.

In truth Debian was a breeze to install. That is unless you want a graphical interface, your PCMCIA card working, as well as a host of other everyday tools installed. I had a command prompt blinking at me within just a few minutes and logged on with a satisfied smile. I had a quick look around the directories, which seemed in order, before starting X, the graphical interface. Nothing. Well, not actually nothing but a long blank-screen pause, a stream of error messages and then nothing.

Unfazed, I hunted around for a configuration file and typed "less XF86Config". Again an error message: "Command not found." I thought the next best bet was to open the file in Vi. Or at least in Vim which I had become accustomed to. Again, nothing. By this stage I was getting a little frustrated and it didn`t get any better from there. Some of the software I needed was on the disks I had lying around but much of it would have to be downloaded from the Internet. Problem was that I didn`t have access to the Internet because my PCMCIA card was not working, and I couldn`t get that working because I didn`t have access to the Internet.

The pattern continued for a few days and although I got connected to the Internet eventually, I could not get X to work no matter what I tried. It probably had more to do with the fact that the Mecer laptop on which I was trying to install Debian had the most obscure and Linux unfriendly graphics adapter ever invented.

Finally after days of slog I decided to rather install a minimal version of Mandrake and work from there. At least I knew that Mandrake would set up my graphics display, even if it was only using a framebuffer driver, the lowliest of display drivers. I had heard that recent versions of Mandrake supported the Trident Cyberblade graphics adapter in my machine but I only had Mandrake 7.1 on hand. And I needed to do some work in the near future so I forged on.

No problems with Mandrake except that it was an older version and had horribly out of date libraries, and updating libraries is not a task one would wish on your worst enemy. My favourite experience of all has been the very helpful configure script that comes with Galeon that tells me very helpfully that my version Glib is not recent enough, although it does also tell me that it knows I have a more recent version installed, which it refuses to use. I`ve read the Web sites. I`ve read the books and I still can`t get the thing to work.

A couple of weeks down the line, I have pretty much everything working, including a stripped down 2.4.9 kernel and while I`m feeling reasonably pleased with myself, I confess that it has been the most trying of times. Next time I decide to get adventurous with Linux I hope some sane voice reminds me of the past weeks and brings me back to reality. But as they say, if it doesn`t kill you it will make you stronger, so there is a good chance that I will regain my confidence and repeat the mistake in the near future.