From: "Antti Kurenniemi" 

Soooo,


went and bought a RH package ('cause I wanted the manuals in print), and
started installing. We had an extra Dell box, so I used that one. In goes
the first cd, and installation starts. The installer recognized the monitor
(flat panel) perfectly, and display adapter (intel 854 something)... and
then said "no display mode available".

Okey-dokey, ditch the panel and start over again with another, more
"normal" monitor. Install went fine, again it recognized the
monitor (iiyama something) correctly, and installed everything.

But then the display was set so what looked like 640x480 resolution, which
was a bit difficult because the configuration window was higher than that,
so the buttons were below the bottom of the screen. Anyone seen that before
(hint: it has been bothering Windows for ages)? Well, no problem, right:
just make the window smaller by dragging the top border down, and then move
the whole window up to get the buttons on screen.

Bu wait! The window *cannot*be*resized*from*the*top*border! Unbelievable!
Who the fuck thought that I could not resize that windo, huh? What a
genious idea.

Well, anyways, I managed to move the window around to get the buttons. So,
change the resolution and restart the x-window thing (wow, ain't that a
modern approach, having to restart the stupid thing), and hey presto - the
same low resolution again.

So, changed it again, double-checking the settings, and restarted the whole
machine just to make sure. This time, the display comes up as text-only,
with an error message that is gibberish - none of the characters are right.
But there are two buttons, of which one has two and the other three
characters, so those must be yes and no. Hit enter, hoping the defaults are
okay, and bang! systems restarts and says it cannot start x-windows at all.

Okay, this clearly stinks way worse than Mandrake, so I'm just going to
call this a failure and not touch RedHat again in two or three years. A few
years ago I had similar problems with RedHat, but I thought it would have
gotten better in that respect - obviously I was wrong.

In general, the distros need to become more uniform in support of hardware,
because this kind of nonsense really does not make Linux look good in, at
least not in my books.


Antti Kurenniemi
(a bit tired, but still determined to get a working Linux installation soon)

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4