Re: OCI libraries for Linux

Bjorn Borud <borud_at_guardian.no> writes:

>you forgot to mention USENET and the various mailing-lists. with
>Linux you can get in touch with people who will solve your problem for
>free and much faster than the larger vendors can help you. with all
>the hype about the Internet and access to information I find it
>strange that the people who contribute the most to the hype aren't
>actually using the Internet's potential.

Here is a story for people who want good support:

I was helping a friend install Solaris X86 on their Toshiba Tecra 730XCDT, a couple of days ago. This machine is supported by Sun. I was having alot of trouble getting the video to work right. I asked Sun. They didn't have a clue (Great support?). I searched the net. AltaVista and other search engines wouldn't pull up anything meaningful. I did get pointers to lots of info from people who were running Linux on it and the very informative "Linux on Tecra" page. But unfortunately Oracle was needed on this laptop running under Unix. SO Solaris X86 was the only choice.

Eventually after posting like crazy to all the related newsgroups and mailing lists, one guy got back to me and told me to restart the machine in Windows 95 and reconfigure video to 8bpp instead of 16bpp and then reboot in Solaris. What was happening was that unlike Linux and Win 95 Solaris only support this laptop and all others in 256 color mode (8bpp). The driver was not successfully able to reset some registers after anything had been run on it in 16bpp mode. Even cold rebooting wasn't fixing it. This piece of advice did the trick for me. I got back to Sun and asked them to either fix the bug or at least document it on their support web page. Notice how I was supporting them instead of them supporting me.

Also, note that Linux supports tonnes more hardware much more reliably than does Solaris unreliably. My friend wanted an IBM 560. But Solaris just plain doesn't run on it. Linux runs on it like a champ.

Moral of the story : Dont believe everything you have heard about Linux from people who dont know Linux. I have seen an amazing number of people, specially in this newsgroup who claim to know Linux but really have no clue as to what it really is.

Atif Khan
aak2_at_ra.msstate.edu Received on Sat May 24 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT