Problems installing FC4 on Dell Optiplex GX620

[Craig White]

Les is certainly capable of engaging a debate with anyone on an
incredibly diverse set of subjects and I suspect you just entered one,
but I will say this.

The two posts that you have made on the subject suggest that you have an
incredibly narrow focus in your expectations. Whether Linux presently
supports some/all SATA drives and controllers and to which degree it
presently supports it is of interest to all Linux users but whether
Windows does the same better/worse is hardly the issue for Linux users.

Windows is entirely proprietary source and thus you use by your
acceptance of a EULA that conveys to you an incredibly limited set of
rights and imbues Microsoft with your consent to their rights on your
system, data files that you store or access with your system for which
you pay a privilege fee which is neither transferable nor durable.

A Linux system on the other hand has an end user license which empowers
you and gives you all rights and really only restricts what you must do
if you decide to redistribute Linux or it's various parts/pieces. 

If you look at things from the perspective of end user licenses...you
should be asking Windows users why they bother endlessly purchasing and
repurchasing the same software to which they obtain no ownership
whatsoever and could conceivably be denied access to the documents
(their own work product). That to me is far more encompassing of an
issue than whether XYZ brand SATA RAID controller works with Fedora.

Some hardware manufacturers hurry to put their 'drivers' out for the
Windows platform because it represents a larger pool of potential sales
for them while Linux gradually accumulates the details to create the
device drivers, with or without manufacturers assistance with varying
levels of success.

SATA drives are supported to some extent by FC-4 - there are controllers
- such as the fake RAID controllers that are suggested to be hardware
RAID controllers but really are software RAID controllers with drivers
installed into Windows and yes, some have Linux drivers too, but in
reality, those fake RAID devices and drivers don't perform better and
would leave you hanging if the motherboard or expansion card died since
you would have to locate identical hardware to make them functional
again whereas if you used software RAID, you wouldn't have a problem
moving the drive array to another SATA motherboard/controller.

The issue of SATA on Fedora really isn't about SATA as it is about the
controllers that people are trying to use and the RAID implementations
that they are trying to use.

If you purchase some of the quality brand SATA controllers, you are
likely to find that they work perfectly well with Fedora and other Linux
distributions. If you are talking about budget minded, often motherboard
embedded cheap SATA implementations, Windows is the right place to
start.

Things are not always as they appear.

Craig

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 20:30 -0500, Myth User wrote:
> So you're saying that Linux does support SATA as good or better than other
> platforms.  And you're saying that because of one anicdotle expirence
> envolving your putting a CDRom on a RAID controller that somehow the two
> platforms are equal?
> 
> Just because you don't know how to set SCSI Select to boot from a CD doesn't
> mean anything.
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Les Mikesell" <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
> To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 8:19 PM
> Subject: Re: Problems installing FC4 on Dell Optiplex GX620
> 
> 
> > On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 18:11, Myth User wrote:
> >
> > > The fix for your problem is wait until Linux catches up to the Windows
> > > world in terms of, among other things, emerging disk technologies.
> >
> > Oh, that's funny...  Did you ever try to install Windows 2000 or XP
> > on a server with the Adaptec Ultra320 controller and no floppy drive?
> > It wouldn't even load the driver from a USB floppy or the CD
> > drive.
> >
> > -- 
> >   Les Mikesell
> >    lesmikesell at gmail.com
> >
> >
> > -- 
> > fedora-list mailing list
> > fedora-list at redhat.com
> > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>