Flutterby™! : 2000-03-25 23:38:26+00

2000-03-25 23:38:26+00 by Dan Lyke 9 comments

As I've been coding today I've been sitting next to Steve who's trying to install NT4.0 on a system that formerly had Windows 98 on it, a procedure which, after enough crashes of NT's fdisk, included a partial install of Linux to get a partition table that wouldn't crash the NT installer, seems to finally be working, albeit with regular walks over to another machine because various dialogs that prompt for install files won't let him browse. Once again, I wonder what sort of funky hallucinogens anyone who says that Linux is hard to install is on.

Personally, I've wondered why Microsoft didn't release an NT 4.1. The NT 4.0 disks you buy today are identical to the ones Microsoft was hocking in 1996. I remember in 1998 game developers were begging for a version of DirectX 5.0 that would work on NT. It really sucks to be doing high-end game development and be forced to use Win98 which can't tolerate even the slighest bugs... What also sucks is that you don't have any browser on a raw install which means you need to install a browser before you can download the service packs if you're behind a proxied firewall... I've never had too much trouble installing NT (at least, not more trouble than Mandrake). It doesn't deal with unusual installs nearly as well as Red Hat or even Win98. I've taken the approach nowadays of either dedicating a machine completely to one OS or swapping hard drives when I want to use more than one OS on one machine.

Now Dan, you have to realize these are the same people that like Windows are the same ones that think powerpoint sparkels are cool... Eric? Dan speaks very highly of you but what are you smoking? Sure installing NT is pretty brain dead but "not much trouble"?? Any significant change and your re-applying service packs!!! all over again & again OH Gawd! THE FLASH BACKS! <shudder>

Yes, NT is 'not much trouble'. I've had more trouble getting PHP+MySQL+Apache Secure Server working on Red Hat 6.1. But the trick with Microsoft products is to try to do things the way Microsoft expects and to not get frustrated when you have to reboot every time you change your IP settings. On the order of things, installing NT is an absolute breeze compared to installing Netware 2.15c from floppies (ask Dan about that one!). Or better yet, ever install Irix? Just feel glad that Irix only runs on hardware made by SGI!

Welp I do think it's a pain to reboot for every little thing and the chinese fire drill of applying service packs to get MSSQL 7 to run with an "acceptable" amount of memory leaks makes my head hurt. My suggestion for your Linux solution is to dump PHP and play with Perl although I don't know why PHP would be a pain to install. Fortunately I never had to install Irix during my Pixar daze but I have heard stories. Netware is hideous (the reason why I made big bucks as a CNE aeons ago). I think we are in some agreement cept you find windows easier in the install. Is this comment system the "Cat's Pajamas" or what? It reminds me of the old BBS daze.

I recently rebooted my SQL7 server at work after 130 days of uptime - and then it was because I was installing the service pack on the SQL server. Of course, that's on an IBM Netfinity 7000 with 512MB of RAM - a system designed to provide maximum uptime. The fact that my old generic clone 486/100 with 32MB provided comparable uptimes running Apache, Postgres, Sendmail, etc. on Red Hat says something. But the folks I work for are in bed with Microsoft and don't mind spending 10x $$ on hardware to keep it running reliably. As far as Perl vs. PHP, I have some apps I wanted to get running that use PHP and MySQL. There are some funky conflicts in Red Hat with the Secure Apache, PHP and MySQL that really stink. I tend to be more of a systems integrator nowadays than a low-level tweaker (I've got too many platforms to support to get too nitty-gritty with any one) so I tend to look for a different solution than try to force things to co-operate. I'm actually considering a move to Zope + MySQL for my personal server. Don't get me wrong, I like Perl and I use it for all kinds of system admin stuff. I just think there might be a better solution for web application development. Dan's definitely moving in a good direction with Flutterby. Dan always has some very specific ideas of how he wants things to work. Agree or disagree, they always provide some siginificant value. I run into trouble at work (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee) because I keep wanting the members of the web team to look at Dan's stuff for ideas. Unfortunately some of his content keeps his site blocked. Fortunately the folks who do our filtering list are enlightened enough to only block the images on Photo.net... C'est la vie

I just upgraded to Win 2k. But first, I had to install NT. The NT install was much more of a pain in the butt. I will say that in the first three days, I have not crashed 2k.

Win2k = NT5 Microsoft really held out too ling on Win2K/NT5. They really tried to pack too much in at once. They tried to keep both the desktop version and server version in sync while adding significant (and frequently contradictory) features to each end. Like full DirectX/WDM support for the Desktop (not needed or really even wanted on the server) and support for > 4GB RAM and 4 CPUs and cluster for the server (again, not needed or wanted on the desktop). But that's probably all due to Dave Cutler flexing his muscles... For a good read on the history of NT, check out Showstopper. It's about the original development of NT. It's very enlightening about the real problems with NT and Microsoft in general. NT had a real go at becoming a great server platform under the direction of Cutler. He is probably the only single person capable of creating an OS that could compete with Unix - or rather - that would compete with Unix. Cutler is no fan of Unix, having created VMS and other competing OSes. At the same time, he fought much of the featuritis that resulted in NT as we know it.

It's one of those Your Mileage May Vary things, I think. I've had a lot more trouble with Linux installs than NT installs over the last year, but I chalk that up to having a lot more experience with NT. As for the original problem that generated this comment thread, there's a DOS utility called delpart that floats around the web. Boot DOS, run it, blow the entire partition table away, then load whatever. I've never run into a table that it couldn't wipe.

It may be just me, but I'm always using some non-standard config and linux typically is a whole lot easier to get up. NT has this weird idea of what hardware I want and don't even get me started on changing graphics cards on an already installed system. As far as W2K goes, I know of 5 people that have tried to upgrade from either nt4 or w98 and in each case, the upgrade managed to implode upon itself and destroy the partition table.