why normal people don't use linux

[jaeclectic]

I started attempting to re-install Red Hat 7.1 in a nice empty partition on my PC sometime early this afternoon, maybe 1-ish. Just finished at 9:15 or so.

OK, so maybe normal people can use Linux, but not in a dual-boot configuration. And especially not if they already have a working operating system installed (not to mention lots o' data) that they don't want to overwrite.

The scenario:

I initially installed RH 6.something on this machine not long after I got it, so sometime in 2000. Back then, I figured out how to partition the disk using the standard (albeit unsupported) freeware utility FIPS -- as I recall, the main difficulty was figuring out that I needed FIPS and then finding a download site, not using it or even figuring out what I needed to do. At some point later on, I upgraded to RH 7.1, which was also pretty painless as far as I can now recall -- much less painful than the upgrade from W98 to W2K that I did around the same time.

Last year, my hard disk crashed. Having Linux installed actually saved my sanity, since Linux was still usable when W2K was hopelessly corrupted. Therefore I was able to get to some crucial files (at the time, I was in the throes of preparing for the DUX conference, and had things like lists of people I needed to contact etc.). However, in order to recover all the data from the disk, I ended up hiring some guys who were very Windows knowledgable, but knew nothing from nothing about Linux. So basically, I just told them not to worry about the Linux partition, just leave it blank and I would reload it myself.

So here it is, not quite a year later, and I'm unemployed, so it's about time I did this. And why does it prove so difficult? Oh, combination of stuff:

- When my friendly neighborhood PC repair guy (hereinafter FNPCRG) reformatted the disk, it didn't occur to him that the Linux partition needed to be a primary rather than a logical partition. And since that particular distinction is kind of a Windows-PC thing rather than a Unix thing, I didn't know to tell him. Or to check.

- Turns out the install program for RH 7.1 doesn't have an option like "take this Windows partition and use it, honest there's nothing on it that I need". You have to have set up all the partitions you need (at least root, boot, and swap) before you get there. And they can't be formatted as FAT32, or the RH installer assumes you want a "partitionless install" with accompanying warning messages about how your performance will suck etc.

- Turns out that FIPS doesn't know a thing about logical partitions, so it can't even see the nice partition that FNPCRG set up.

- After a certain amount of googling, I ascertain that the recommended option is to buy a windows-friendly partitioning program. Oh well, what's another 70$.

- Windows partitioning program works fine, but has this tendency to limit things in ways that may make sense to it, but are not particularly helpful. For instance, the Linux boot partition needs to be no more than 32M. The program keeps saying the minimum size of a partition is 47M. It takes a certain amount of beating my head against the bricks to determine that you can work around this by deleting the partition and re-creating it, instead of just resizing. And so on, this is just an example.

- Every time the partitions are changed, the PC needs to be rebooted, and takes a very very very long time to come back because data has to be moved around on the disk. Just to add a little extra agravation, every time it's rebooted it needs to be rebooted a second time because the operating system "detects that a device has changed".

- My previous configuration had been with the Linux disk as the second out of three, which was because of a limitation that the boot sector had to be fairly early on the physical disk. This worked fine, but looked kind of odd since I had a C drive and E drive that worked under Windows, and a mysteriously unusable D drive in between (since this is already a very long and undoubtedly tedious story, I am simplifying by leaving out the way drive letters changed during the upgrade from W98 to W2K, and again when the machine was reloaded). For some reason, I thought that this was a limitation of RH 6, and that I didn't need to keep it that way. This proved untrue -- therefore extra rounds of changing partitions as I changed it to have the two Windows disks together, and then changed it again to put it back to the original sequence.

- Even after many go-rounds, I was still getting a message from the Linux install saying that my boot partition was "above 1024 cylinders". Eventually, I realize that FNPCRG did not keep the original partition sizes -- whereas my C drive used to be 7G (under the approx 8G limit to be below 1024 cylinders), he made it more like 10G. And since I am not quite geeky enough to instantly grok that 1024 cylinders is less than 10G, and did not remember the exact number from 4 years ago when I set this up initially, and had not bothered to dig out my paper notes, more googling is required to figure this out.

- Oh, and at the very last minute, I figure out that the only way to set things up for dual-boot is to select "Custom install", although the RH documentation only indicates this by a coy note in the section on LILO that says "skip this section if you have chosen Workstation, Server, or Laptop installation". But correcting this doesn't take long, it's counted in the 45 minutes -- even though when I change from Server to Custom, the RH install program randomly remembered only about half of my previous selections.

But hey, the good news is that the default configuration in RH 7.1 works correctly with my cable modem. So not only do I have a dual-boot machine again, but even internet access under Linux. Woo hoo, she says wearily.