I spent last Saturday fixing up an old computer. For the last 7 years or so, I’ve donated equipment to needy kids and families.
This computer was a generic 1GHz Pentium-III: a local computer shop house brand. Apparently the previous owner tried to do a bit of fixing-up himself and got in over his head, because it arrived with the CD burner unsecured, internal cables unplugged, and devices incorrectly cabled and jumpered for Master/Slave designations. Perhaps he just raided all the good parts and shoved in some replacements. Who knows? I’m not complaining because he did give me a lovely gift that I hope to give to someone else very soon.
He must have also been a smoker, because the fans and heatsink were literally saturated with smoker’s dust. Smoker’s dust is an evil, particulate matter born of an unholy union between carcinogenic fog, common household fluff, and the heat inside your case. It looks quite like that fluorescent-coloured powdered cheese that you get with a box of Kraft Dinner, though a few shades darker. Scary to behold — though not as disturbing as those pictures the Canadian Lung Association like you shock you with.
After much disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly, I had a functioning computer. The included hard drive was dead, so I swapped in another that I’d pre-installed Ubuntu to. That worked fine, but I thought that so long as I had a “test computer” at my disposal I’d use the opportunity to try out a few untried distros I had sitting around: OpenSUSE 10.3, Mepis 7.0 and Mandriva 2008.
Mandriva installed wonderfully and was fun to play with, so I popped in OpenSUSE. It started fine, then reported read errors for half a dozen packages before freezing completely 3 minutes into the copying phase. I booted Ubuntu 7.10, which aborted to BusyBox shortly after the splash screen. PCLinuxOS 2007 would neither copy to RAM nor boot to a graphical desktop… just a login prompt. Odd. Just out of curiousity, I returned to Mandriva, which not only booted up correctly, but allowed me to re-install successfully. I haven’t used Mandriva since Mandrake Linux 10.1, but I found myself now doubly-impressed, not with just the professional-looking install procedure and the beautiful desktop, but with its error-handling.
This is not the first time I’ve had this experience. Always it is due to some kind of hardware problem — bad RAM, a dying hard drive, something failing or misconfigured. In this instance, using the clues I saw from OpenSUSE and the verbose mode of the other distros led me to conclude there was a problem with ‘hdc’ — the DVD-ROM drive. No doubt it is full of the same fluorescent cheese dust that plagued the rest of the system, but my disc cleaning kit is some 1300 km away at the moment.
I can see problems such as these for what they are, and am thankful that Linux’s sensitivity to hardware actually points out problems that a user should be aware of. However, I can also completely imagine how this ordeal would be an awful, FUD-confirming, curiousity-spanking experience for the Linux-curious…
…Especially seeing as it’s also been my experience that many of these failing or misconfigured computers will install Windows just fine.
So was Mandriva 2008 really an exceptional product with error handling capabilities (like Windows?) or was it just blind or insensitive to disc read/write errors, and soldiered on through the installation anyway (like Windows?).
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Failure to install as expected will always be interpreted by the end-user as the sign of an inferior product. Joe or Jane Public would much rather have a working computer with a persnickety DVD-ROM drive than be faced with an empty computer whose OS refuses to install until the drive is cleaned or replaced — especially when they weren’t especially keen on having to learn an entirely new operating system to begin with.
It’s funny, but until relatively recently one of the most-cited barriers to Linux adoption was the difficulty in installing it.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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