!Re: Nuke Redmond!

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Apr 6 12:55:12 2000

On Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 01:00:56PM -0400, Bill Pechter wrote:
> I do none of the above but my Win95 desktop intermittantly blows
> chunks and drops ethernet IP connectivity. I've seen this less often
> with Win98...

I wish I'd gotten that far, but W98 doesn't even like my SVGA enough to
give me a really usable display, I loaded all the drivers (and it's a
generic Trident PCI VGA, not some oddball thing) but no matter what I set
it to it always snaps back into 16-color mode at the lowest resolution.
Works OK under NT but the system keeps locking up, and half the time the
mouse doesn't get detected so it takes a few reboots to get it going.

> > I've never wanted to become an expert on *NIX and its kin, but IIRC, if you
> > make any changes to the system you not only have to restart the system, you
> > have to recompile several modules, including, in some cases, the kernel.
>
> If you're adding new device driver -- maybe. Not if the one was
> alread compiled for that kernel.

I don't know about other Unices but loadable drivers on Linux work *very*
well these days. I wrote a couple recently and I just love how you can type
"make" and by the time you're done, the new driver has replaced the old one
and it's all initialized and ready to go. Took me a couple of days before
I even managed to crash the system the first time (through pointer bugs
in ring 0 code), definitely a very nice environment, if you're willing to
swallow the idea of writing device drivers in an HLL in the first place.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Apr 06 2000 - 12:55:12 BST