A friend of one of the folks here is finishing a Ph.D. in
mathematics. He uses an IBM laptop and he was running mandrake
7.1. Recently, he installed 8.0. It didn't like his mouse, so
he used an alternate image and installed kernel 2.2.19 and set
up that one in the bootloader. His total time to install was
1.5 hours.
Now to keep someone else happy, he had to install PowerPoint on
the same laptop.
He tried the Win98 restoration disk. It was missing so many
drivers that he despaired of ever finding them all.
He bought windows ME. The CD wasn't bootable. He restored 98
and tried to use it to start the ME disk. The program told him
that this was a CD for computers without windows and that he
needed to buy the upgrade edition.
He tried Windows NT. He had to seek professional advice (from
the staff of a linux company because Microsoft wasn't helping)
to get it installed. Then he discovered drivers simply were NOT
available for some of the features he needed to run power point.
He tried ME again, this time generating the famous 98 boot disk
that is the closest thing to a swiss army knife Microsoft ever
produced, Well, stage one--he couldn't format the partition.
He booted into linux and fired up disk drake and took care of
that ornery partition, even formatting it.
WindowsME install program upchucked saying some nonsense about
64K clusters which it did not support.
OK NOW the windows98 boot disk could format the partition. 4K
clusters were verified.
And ME still complained about 64K clusters and shut down.
So, with 4 days and the purchases of two systems wasted, he is
using Konqueror on the web to track down Microsoft Win98 drivers
for his notebook. Then he will finally be able to load
PowerPoint, we hope, unless it wants to see a different version
of Windows, like XP.
I am beginning to believe that if I took someone completely
ignorant of computers, then he could install linux and have a
fully functioning system a lot sooner than with windows.
