Why I don't use Linux! 4287

Nico Kadel-Garcia I wonder. In about 1997 a couple I knew bought a Dell Dimension 200 (or something like that) and ran Windows 95 on it for a year or so until Windows would not longer stay up long enough to even attempt a backup. After testing one thing and another (especially memtest-86), it seemed as though the hardware was OK. I tried re-installing Windows 95, but that did not help.

As a wild guess, I stuck in Red Hat Linux 7.3 that I had on hand, and it worked just fine for them for another couple of years until the IDE controller quit and would not run the hard drive anymore. Fortunately, when they ordered the box, I urged them to get one with a real modem in it, and they did.

When I built my latest box, I could not be sure everything would work, but I got a real modem (hard to find when the MB was all PCI-X slots, so I needed a real PCI modem), but did nothing else special. Everything works fine. I guess I am not a "most home user", but for all my so-called expertise, I could not find the information I needed to be really sure the system would run RHEL 3, which is what I do use. I have been pretty lucky that way. I have owned three machines, and all of them ran Linux (various versions) just fine, starting with Red Hat Linux 5.0. I did not like the desktop that came with RHL5.0, but anything worked better than Windows 95.

The only version of Linux that did not work for me was Fedora Core 2. It would not work my ISA Soundblaster card, and would not work as a print server with my RHEL3 system as a client. It worked OK stand-alone, though, and sound is not important to me. So I run RHL 9 on there (protected by a firewall). I have not tried any of the newer versions of Fedora on that machine.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 09:15:00 up 54 days, 3:09, 3 users, load average: 5.32, 5.25, 4.87