Well not so much woes as frustrating setbacks. One of the things people are always boasting about Linux is how you can run it on pretty much any old machine. I run a small web site from the Linux box under my desk and it runs pretty well. Up until yesterday the machine only had 256 Meg of RAM and still ran OK although using the graphical desktop was a bit frustrating but it was usable.
Now I’m no Linux guru and the Linux box is not my main machine so I, and probably a lot of the world, spend most of my time on Windoze. Hey it works OK most of the time and in general most things are pretty simple, at least when they work!
My policy with the Linux box is, if it ‘ain’t broken, don’t touch it! Well I decided I wanted to try Joomla. Turns out I need to install some mods to Apache but they are not in my current and somewhat old Linux install, so rather than try to figure out how install them and probably break all sort of things in the process I decided to upgrade to a newer Linux.
Now my Linux of choice is SUSE and I’m running 10.1 right now. Seems that since Novell bought SUSE the home version of Linux has been spun off into openSUSE. No problem, just down load it, burn a CD and off we go, right?
Well, not quite. First the download is 4.5 Gig! Took a while. Then I needed to burn it to a DVD (too big for a CD) but my current burning software couldn’t cope with a file that big so I installed the trial version of Nero. That then took an hour or so to install, I couldn’t believe how slow the install was.
So finally I end up with a DVD with the image on it. Great. Go to boot my Linux box from it today and it does not boot. Turns out my old crusty Linux box has a CD drive in it, not a DVD drive so it cannot read the DVD.
Great, so now I have to swap out the CD drive for a DVD drive before I can continue. I just hope it’s that simple but these things rarely are.
So, OK, I know it’s not really the fault of Linux that I’m having such fun but if it was easier to install those mods I need into my current system I wouldn’t be going through all of this anyway.
And even when I’m done, I don’t know if the new level of SUSE will have the modules I need on it or not so at the end of all this I may be no better off than I am now.
And that my friends is why most people in the world use Windows over Linux.
[Edit]
Mmmm. Just had a thought. I’ve got VmWare Player on my windows box. Maybe I should set up a virtual Linux machine and install the openSUSE on that, just to see if this is all going to be worthwhile or not. I could even do a dummy upgrade from 10.1 to the 11.1 of the openSUSE to see it it will work first before I touch my real machine.
