Oh im so sad :(

[lazygamer]

So I was installing XFS Redhat Linux, and I thought everything was gonna be fine. The first time, there was an unexplainable crash in the installer. That shook me up. But I went on, and saw the package selection screen. It was horrible! By default, Redhat had stuffed their distro full of shit that is redunant, useless, and I will never use! That's not even including the "default un-selected options" that were available. There was actually some good ones that I selected though. The problem is mainly that the tremendous quanity of stuff you had to sift through! Redhat should be given a good smack for making one of the most horrible package choosing experinces I've ever seen! Why not have a "dumbass home user n00b option"? After the whole ordeal was over(and even then, I had chosen a whole lot of stuff that I would probably never use, or was redundant, or I had no idea whether it's abscene would harm my system functionality) everything would of been ok.

Then shit hits the fan. The XFS disk installs, now let's put in the Redhat Disk. Huh? This is not the right disk? Try it again and the same message appears. Nooooooo, all my package selection time lost, all my burn time lost. It was no good, I rebooted in sadness and am now off to bed, to cure my tiredness and sadness. Sleep is a drug, and it is the perfect solution for sadness. Take 10hrs and see me in the morning.

What went wrong? Is there much chance of a corrupt .iso? Is it the fault of the CD burning process? I did do alot of multi-tasking and system usage while I was burning the disks, is that a no-no? I get this feeling it is... but im not sure. Problem is, when stuff like this happens, I get a hopeless paranoia feeling. I feel like the disks are fine, and they will do the exact same thing over again when re-burnt "properly". And then when the .isos are downloaded again from another source, one of them will be corrupt again(if corrupt downloads are the issue). If not that, then I feel that XFS/Redhat installer simply won't like my system and refuse to install even after all I've been through.

Then the package selection angers me. Im so upset with it that I'll just say fuck it and go with their choices, even though a huge amount of space will be wasted with useless garbage.

Is Redhat(once installed) something to be scared of? The package selection has made me paranoid with what if's.

I mean god, Windows has hundreds of megs of wasted space from sloppy programing, and Redhat(I used to think of them as 1337hat or pimphat, well that package system fiasco has made them lose their cool alternate name for quite some time) has hundreds of megs of wasted space from sloppy package selections.

[voidmain]

If you don't want to have to do a detailed install where you select individual packages then don't do it. But it's certainly not bad to do an "install everything" option so you can at least look through and play with those items that you think are "redundant, useless, and you will never use" (which they are not, and you surely will never use them if you don't install them or read about them).  

RedHat has "dumbed down" install options for people such as yourself, but for people like me I prefer the granularity of a custom install because I know exactly what I want and what I don't want.  Can't tell you about XFS as I have never used it, nor really have a need to. But for someone like you who is new to Linux you might want to stick to a predefined install method until you get more familiar with Linux.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/install-guide/s1-steps-type.html

[ September 17, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Master of Reality]

being pissed off because of too many choices is a good thing. I sifted through every time i installed then the last time i said fuck it and install all 3GB of extra software. I uninstalled a lot of it over time and now it is mostly what i want.

[lazygamer]

Yah, well might as well do as Void main said. I got 8gigs of space for Linux. My question is, do I have corrupt burn sessions? Luckily I use CD-RW's for linux disks so I can erase them if I want to try a different distro. CD-RW's work perfectly fine for booting and installing off of if you use your rewriter drive to boot with. I've been able to install Mandrake and Libranet with no issues this way...

The reason why I used the XFS Redhat was because it's susposed to have a big performance increase due to the XFS.

So is Redhat similar to Linux for configuring, once it's installed?

[Master of Reality]

quote:Originally posted by lazygamer:
So is Redhat similar to Linux for configuring, once it's installed?

huh? is redhat similar to linux? Red Hat is Linux.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by lazygamer:
The reason why I used the XFS Redhat was because it's susposed to have a big performance increase due to the XFS.

If you think this will speed up your games it will not. The increased performance gained by XFS will only be noticable if you do massive file I/O (much copying/deleting/etc of many small files). So even though XFS may outperform ext3 you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

     

quote:So is Redhat similar to Linux for configuring, once it's installed?

And as m0r stated, RedHat Linux is as much a Linux OS as any other distro (even though "Linux" itself is actually just the kernel). In fact probably more so than most other distros because it is currently one of the oldest. But I guess age would not make a distro any more "Linux", but it does mean they are more experienced. What really makes a distro "Linux" is if it uses the Linux kernel.  I believe the only distro that is older than RedHat that is currently still used is Slackware.

I don't recall Debian GNU/Linux being started until after many of the others. SLS being the first that I remember, then Slackware (derived from SLS), then RedHat, Mandrake (derived from RedHat quite some time later).  Most of the rest of them are fairly recent additions.  But all of the big players are made up of the same basic software.  They each do have some minor distro specific differences and a few system utilities but once you know what they are you will have no troubles.  

And RedHat is currently the most popular distro and is being embraced by many major commercial players like IBM, Sun, HP, etc (not that either of those factors should be a deciding factor but something to consider).  I personally think the two best distros are RedHat and Debian. But for commercial support RedHat is the front runner. And I suspect that within the next week or two (maybe even earlier) you will see the release of RedHat 8.0 which is supposed to refine the desktop even more with the goal of becoming a better desktop system.

I believe SuSe is actually older than RedHat but hasn't become really popular until recently. I have some minor philosophy issues with it which has caused me not to actually try it to this point. I believe I am am accurate on the age order of the popular distros but wouldn't bet on it.

[ September 17, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[lazygamer]

/smacks forehead!

DUH! Of course it's similiar to Linux! I meant to say "MANDRAKE"! I tend to do these noun mistakes see.    

Now what about that CD issue. Should I reburn those CD's? Or is windows "reliable" with multi-tasking while burning?

Oh and even if I won't gain a whole lot of performance boost from XFS, it doesn't have any downsides(assuming the XFS partitioning is not my install problem), so might as well have every little bit of speed eh? Besides, it says it's great at recovering from crashes.

[ September 18, 2002: Message edited by: lazygamer ]

[Stryker]

you did a perfect burn, congradulations on that. As for your CD issue i'd suggest going here as it helped me. The page does bring some bad news for you though, lets hope you have dsl or something.

edit: my mistake, there is an easier fix now. before when i was there they didn't have that.

[ September 18, 2002: Message edited by: Stryker ]

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by lazygamer:
Oh and even if I won't gain a whole lot of performance boost from XFS, it doesn't have any downsides(assuming the XFS partitioning is not my install problem), so might as well have every little bit of speed eh? Besides, it says it's great at recovering from crashes.

The reason it is good at recovering from crashes is due to the fact that it's a journaling file system. ext3 is also a journaling file system so it too is very good at recovering from crashes (I mean power outages).

[RudeCat7]

NO! I know this for a fact! Windows cannot handle the tiniest background application while burning! No screensavers, no virus scanners, nuthin!

In fact, having researched it a lot while I was learning to burn cds, you shouldn't even touch the mouse while windows is doing a burn!

Things may have changed a bit now, with XP being such a "stable" OS and all.

[Calum]

i know a guy in melbourne who actually uses msn messenger while burning, however he tells me he has to switch off the sound in msn mess. or else it corrupts the burn.

personally i find that just opening 'My Computer' off the desktop fucks up a CD burn in windows, let alone attempting to start some app.

[choasforages]

ummm, loading times anyone?, thats the advantage of xfs. my 400mhz system was pretty better with xfs, poor with ext2, and acceptlble with reiserfs. things loadfaster, and the smaller files, think about libary files, most are small, and need to be loaded at the start time of an application. so it does make things a bit quicker./*void main, be sure to correct this if im wrong*/

[voidmain]

Well since you have xfs support and I assume you also have ext3 support do you have enough disk space to do two side-by-side installs and do some performance comparisons?  I would be interested in a semi-scientific study that would test normal user operations and compare results.  I'm willing to bet you will find there is not much of a difference but I would certianly humbly accept it if I were wrong.

Then also perform some tests where large numbers of small files are copied, and smaller numbers of large files.  And of course we could think up a much larger list of things to perform.  I don't believe the shared library load times should have much of an effect as once they are loaded, any other programs that need them use them from memory and do not have to load them again from disk..

Hey, we got the FAQ section going, maybe we need to start an MES Benchmarking site.    

In the mean time I am searching for such benchmark comparisons on the google as we speak..

[edit]
Here looks like the kind of comparison I'm looking for:
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue68/dellomodarme.html

But this comparison appears to be quite old. Looks like they were using kernel version 2.2.x and ext3 was still in alpha (which is why they didn't recommend it).  But the performance I thought looked pretty good for ext3. I also saw that disk benchmark checks are pretty much meaningless for several reasons. e.g. a cleanly formated file system of a specific type might perform very well but it also may be more prone to fragmentation where it would perform very bad, among many other reasons.
[/edit]

[ September 18, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[choasforages]

i can almost do a near scientific statment on reiserfs if you would except a default redhat kernel, versus the one i made from the a vanilla 2.4.18 and the gentoo patchs, but i just don't have the resourses to benchmark xfs, but i did use it, and it was pretty quick for running wine. but that was the redhat 7.2 version of the installer and a few things were broken. though i do have to say that reiserfs is quite impressive also. and it probably would be a very small different if any on xfs, but i do mes with 3-5 meg mp3's, which in my book, are small files/*compared to the divx files i have that don't even fit on cdr*/. now the sweet thing, is that xfs is included in 2.5.36 or so i have heard

[lazygamer]

So in other words, fuck XFS, just put some resierFS on and use my RH disks.  

I just hope the system configuration utilities aren't like their packages list. One thing I can't figure out, how is it that both Mandrake and RH have 3 CD's, yet RH has a vastly greater amount of stuff to choose from?