[aclug-L] Re: LInux sucks

["Jeffrey L. Hansen" <jlhansen@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll stick my nose into this now.  I've performed "fdisk /mbr" many times.
It removes anything in the master boot record but, I believe, leaves the
disk in general unchanged.  I'm not really familiar with the Linux flavor
of filesystem, but isn't the mbr reserved for lilo?  Anyway, my point is
that it might mess up lilo but should be safe for the rest of the disk.  I
think I saw that you were using ez drive.  My take is that the overlay
that ez drive uses was removed by the fdisk /mbr (ez drive lives in the
mbr, I believe) and that killed the translation table it uses which, if my
extrapolation is valid, but render any roadmap the disk is using invalid.
I'll bet that if you tossed ez drive and started again that it wouldn't
give you anymore headaches.  I've had many run-ins with those magic disk
configuration programs.  I've never seen a time when they were worth the
trouble.

I hope that helps.  It's one of those situations where you'll probably
have to just take the bruises and emerge older and wiser.  As far as Linux
sucking or not, I've had many frustrating late nights with Linux.  I'm
still not ready to throw out windows and migrate completely.  I find its
configuration hard to sort out, its documentation sparse and often
undecipherable, and its interfaces and design philosophy hard for windows
users to intuitively grasp (at least those in my circle of friends).  All
that said, I'll keep at it until either I get the devine insight I need or
until the package becomes more user-friendly.  I see the benefit to
competition to me a huge benefit, if nothing else.  Keep at it.  I'm sure
you'll get it.  I'm notoriously slow and I'm forced to keep current in the
Microsoft world in order to administer the boxes at work.  If I ever get
the time I hope to gain a working grasp on Linux, at least the Red Hat
distributions I've been working with.  I believe the benefits to outweigh
the effort.

jeff


On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, Greg House wrote:

> re: "Linux sucks"
> 
> I can't tell you then number of times that I've said "Windows sucks", or "NT
> sucks" or whatever... <grin>
> 
> However, Linux, as an OS, generally has pretty tight security features. That
> doesn't necessarily mean your distribution doesn't do stuff that breaks 'em, 
> or
> your mail application, or something odd about your configuration. It seems 
> like
> it'd be more fair to say "Mandrake sucks" or "kmail sucks" or "vericad sucks"
> or "crackers suck" then to say Linux sucks. That would be like me saying
> Windows sucks because I don't like something Outlook did for me. Yeah, there's
> some vague connection between Windows and Outlook, but it's not Windows that
> did the offending deed.
> 
> I don't understand the text you saw on your screen before the problem, but
> here's a possible theory. You said you saw that and immediately powered your
> machine down, right? If that was the case, perhaps the message was just that,
> nothing but text...it wasn't doing anything, but...when you power cycled it,
> that caused some disk corruption. I had a disk corrupted a couple of months 
> ago
> by power cycling the system. (it was a Windows system, it trashed the 
> registry 
> and it wouldn't boot, required me to reload Windows, the fact that I had a
> Linux partition on the system and was able to boot that was the only reason I
> didn't lose all my data off the Windows side...) I've also see a "fake trojan"
> mail message that would pop up a box that claimed it was deleting all your
> files (showed something that looked like a delete confirmation message for 
> each
> file on your hard drive), but it didn't really DO anything. That one ran on
> windows, and it was an actual application, but it seems within the realm of
> possibility that something like that could be done.
> 
> The other possibility is that someone actually cracked something and exploited
> a bug. A bug is a bug and there is no OS on earth that doesn't have some. 
> Linux
> isn't exept. Neither is Solaris, or Windows NT. If there was a security
> problem, I bet it'd get fixed a lot faster on Linux then on NT. And just
> because something has a bug (even a pretty bad one) doesn't mean that it 
> sucks.
> 
> Greg
> 
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