Paul Calvi [pcalvi@esne.com]

I spent my Saturday being completely defeated by Linux. As I wrote to you not long ago I installed RH5.1 and all was well including my Internet connection. Well I did a terrible thing. I moved. I had to swap ethernet cards in the machine because I have a cable modem and it is tied to the MAC address and I was leaving that in another computer at my old address. I put in the same make/model card (3Com Ethernet Express Pro XL 10/100 PCI). I also got the same cable Internet provider but with a different login name and now on a different subnet.

Win95 had no trouble with the switch at all. Linux was a different story. When I booted into Linux I got most of the way through and then it hung with an ever scrolling error message about eth0. After hitting random keys for about 15 minutes I managed to get to a prompt. I assumed I had to change some configuration files somewhere to tell it about the new card (does it track MAC addresses?) and my new TCP/IP setup (but its DHCP so what is there to change?). After about four hours of delving into the guts of netcfg, kernald, and RH’s setup, nothing worked any better. I finally posted a detailed question on a couple of the Linux newsgroups for help but have not heard anything yet (so much for the "got an answer in two hours" responses to quips about no formal tech support most Linux diehards give you). I did finally manage to find a FAQ about cable modems and DHCP under Linux that had a great description of how to get such access working but it said I had to download some files for it to work. This would be fine if it was not for the fact that with just a plain old 5.1 install my Internet access worked fine before.

I thought I would cut my losses and just reinstall. I did so three times (in various ways including both killing partitions and leaving them alone) to no avail. Why Linux will not pick up the same Internet configuration it did before has me baffled.

On another note. In my previous email to you I mentioned I had trouble setting up multiple partitions on my 2GB SCSI drive. A few folks responded with one fellow saying he thought that Linux was confusing my /usr partition with /user. Anyway, I still cannot get Linux to create a second "standard" partition no matter what I do. I wonder if it is SCSI related? I remember reading somewhere about BIOS translation for larger drives....

Calvi again:

I was catching up on your letters today when I came to your experiences with USB mice. Just as I was reading your posts my new USB Zip Drive got plunked on my desk. My Win98 setup has been mostly stable with only a couple odd crashes. I hope I am not asking for trouble with this USB Zip. I knew I should have gone with the parallel...

Another Win98 oddity: I recently did a fresh install of Win98 where I chose to install "Netwatcher", something I do not think I have ever done before for no particular reason. Anyway, today I noticed in Explorer that the computer seemed to be refreshing the file list every five seconds. The machine is on a network with a lot of files so this was quite annoying. Un-installing Netwatcher stopped this nasty habit.

Subject: On Linux 11f

From: Jim Griebel (jgri@earthlink.net)

I stumbled over your Web site a week or two ago and was delighted to find it -- I always enjoyed your columns and somewhere I actually have a copy of _Adventures in Microland_. I just bought a copy of _Starswarm_, too, but not via Amazon, sorry, for reasons I won't go into.

I enjoyed reading about your adventures with Linux and what others have to say about it, so I decided to give it a shot myself. At $39.95 for a full-up OS -- Red Hat 5.2, this is -- what have I got to lose? Maybe it really is the Milennium. This was before I started thinking of it as the Operating System that Ate My Life.

The installation went smoothly and easily, and surprisingly quickly too -- but then I wasn't trying to dual boot and didn't set up networking or a printer. And then there I was, in naked Linux. I knew my video card wasn't supported going in, but figured that I could just set it for a nice standard 16-color VGA mode and still use X-windows and all those nifty graphical configuration tools that Red Hat throws in to make Linux easier to use.

Wrong. I managed to accomplish this, but then it turned out that most of those nifty configuration tools, which only run under X, won't work in a 16-color mode, they want a 256-color mode or higher. If XFree86 doesn't recognize your video card, it declares it a jan-u-wine IBM VGA of 198? vintage and drops you into a 320x200 window. The config tools will run there, all right, but this is where you discover that (a) you can't scroll that window and (b) the config tools have evidently been built at a fixed size, taking no account of the size of the desktop in which they will be displayed and (c) the default window manager has a propensity to display windows that are too big for it so that you can't move, close or resize them or, perhaps, reach the buttons you need to click to get any use out of them.

I managed to upgrade XFree86 and get over that, and am now running X on my Creative Labs Video Blaster Riva TNT, with the KDE desktop. I can connect to the Internet and have hopes of winding up with a little network of my own here at home. (Hopes frustrated, for the moment, by the new motherboard I bought to build my Linux system on having a BIOS that is apparently so clever that it can't be fooled into just grabbing a boot loader off a hard disk, but must find an MSDOS/Windows active partition there.) I can type this on Corel WordPerfect 8 (with Grammatik, incidentally, which claims I'm too prolix) while looking at your Web site on Netscape in another window with a couple of other windows open doing other things.

And, well, so what? I can do all those things in Win 95, and I could do them a couple of hours after I started upgrading to it for the first time, not after a week and a half of bafflement and frustration. And, oddly enough, I seem to have more weird little problems here than I do in the notoriously buggy and unstable Windoze. WordPerfect tends to leave part of a word hanging at the end of a line after it wraps it. Netscape Communicator works intermittently when I try to do FTP -- sometimes it downloads to a file the way it's supposed to, sometimes it dumps the file into the window that usually displays the FTP site directory, with some odd results. And niggles: The keys on the numeric pad don't work. I learned to type on a PC keyboard that didn't have the "new" keys between the main set and the numeric pad, and this is driving me bonzo.

Worst of all, for somebody coming from Windows, there is evidently no consistency in how X applications behave. Take the mouse -- sometimes clicking as many times as you want just highlights or unhighlights the item, and then you must make a choice from a set of buttons. Sometimes single-clicking does something, and double-clicking does it twice. Sometimes you have to double-click. Sometimes clicking on a menu item produces a submenu which behaves in "Windows-like" fashion. Sometimes you must hold the button down to keep the submenu open, and whatever's highlighted when you release it is your choice. God knows what three-button mice do. When a window loses the focus, the focus doesn't always seem to go back to where it was, and telling exactly what has the focus can be a challenge.

Some people evidently feel this is a Good Thing and the conventions of Windows are a straitjacket on their creativity, or something, but -- Wasn't a major part of the reason for introducing a GUI, and all the enormous complication and resource drain it brings with it, to eliminate the problem of having to learn a bunch of different user interfaces and trying to keep them all straight? Doesn't consistent behavior promote this? Doesn't this occur to the people who design X applications? Hello?

Somebody wrote about Linux that "It's 1978 over again!" or words to that effect, and I'm inclined to have the same feeling, if not the same thought as the other fellow had. This is just what it was like back then when documentation was spotty, vague and example-free, products were released before they were quite finished (and often when they were quite broken), there were few to no standards other than those imposed by the hardware you were running on, and Chaos Manor was christened. I suppose if I were twenty, or even thirty, I might look on all the pitfalls and traps for the unwary I've stumbled into in the time between shoving in the Red Hat install floppy as challenges to be overcome, instead of as a series of bloody nuisances. I suppose that there must be some vestiges of that feeling of challenge left, or I wouldn't still be bothering with this, and I suppose that if Corel and Netscape and others are going to throw free software at me, I might just keep fooling with Linux. But . . .

Nobody knows better than you the long, rocky, pothole-ridden road between the way things were twenty years ago and the way things are today; your columns, I think, had some influence on changing things from the way they were then to the way they are now, from a time when hobbyists largely built their own computers to a time when you pick one up, set up and ready to rock when you switch it on, at Best Buy. If you stick with Linux, be prepared to repeat yourself, at length, because it is now where everything was then.

This whole package, from Linux itself to the KDE desktop, reminds me forcefully of a lot of Shareware I wouldn't have paid the authors for if it had dispensed free beer. This is a consequence of its being Open Source, it seems to me, and it seems to me further that if it's actually going to eat Microsoft's lunch, or even give it a run for its money, then history is about to repeat itself, and we'll wind up with something very like another Microsoft, only this one will have started with Linux.

Jerry,

First just wanted to say that your site is growing like a hydra, its becoming increasingly hard to keep track of where I am and what I’m doing here! Oh well, exponential growth will do that to you.

I received my postcard from the "new" BYTE today, unfortunately the only option it gives subscribers is fulfillment of the balance of your BYTE subscription with WINDOWS Magazine. Yee ha, whoopee! Not only that but they expect us to use our own stamp if we choose this option. Also if you go to the BYTE website to get the customer service phone number you will notice two things; there is no 800 number anymore and they no longer offer an email contact (do we see a trend here?) I guess there’s really not a whole lot left to say.

I have run into this same problem with Win98-- files that are required, but not in any of the Cabinet Files. I hear that some files in Win98 are compressed into the setup program or a related file. To get these files back, you must reinstall Win98.

Detjen, Mike [mike.detjen@intel.com]

Jerry,

I found the following exchange regarding an error similar to yours by searching the web using HOTBOT. This might be what you need.

Mike

------------------------------

Thanks Tony , William, Don and the others who have graciously offered timely advice on this topic. Well, I’m just now taking a brief respite from "Upgrade Hell" now that I got my modem (and every other little thingy in this new system re-installed/configured) working again. One thing that is preventing me from continuing though is the fact that I can’t finish installing my new mobo because when I try to access the Mobo setup CD I get this error message: " CDSTART.EXE...linked to missing oleaut32.dll:420..." However, I’ve looked and the dll is there in windows\system. Any ideas??? Also, get protection fault on shut-down but am "assuming" that that is because the mobo isn’t installed right yet.

But hey, I aint complainin’! <G> Just slightly frustrated.

Thanks again for all the help... now where did I put that chainsaw....

JA

Tony Su wrote:

- --

"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer."

• Anonymous

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

• Arthur C. Clark, The Lost Worlds of 2001

------------------------------

James:

If you got Win98 installed, there is an abundance of built-in utilities for fixing things . . . (or messing them up further).

First try Start; Run and type"vcmui.exe". This is the Win98 Version Conflict Manager. It will tell you which system files the Win98 install program replaced and allow you to restore the originals.

Second thing to try would be the System File Checker. Easiest access is Start; Run and type "sfc.exe". This one scans for altered or corrupt system files and allows replacing them with good copies from the CD.

If you elected to install the system info module during the original install, you can find access to most of the settings and utilities under Start; Programs; Accessories;SystemTools; System Information and then select the Tools menu.

Good Luck

James C. Lasater [jamesclasater@mediaone.net]

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

I am thinking about installing windows 98. I have read everything I can get my hands on about it but no one seems to write anything about 16 bit programs and fat32. I have a load of 16 bit programs (mostly games) and am wondering if they will run ok under fat32.

Do you know anything about it?

I am hooked on solitaire and mahjongg. I have some 32 bit programs but most are 16 bit, holdovers from windows 3.1.

I have read about the small cluster sizes in fat 32 and am quite excited

about it, but if there is a problem with running 15 bit programs I will

struggle along with windows 95 (version a). Please tell me if you know about

Will Broe [wbroe@usa.net]

I have enjoyed your column since the first copy of BYTE I received. I especially enjoy the sections on your home network. I recently enrolled in college, and added a Compaq Presario to our previously single-computer home. I have read of the benefits of a home network, and am taking computer and network related classes in school, so I dove right in. First I bought two network cards very inexpensively off of an auction site. Both work perfectly for transferring files and simple scenarios like that. I also wanted to use the network for internet sharing, since our house only has one phone line. I was wondering what software you use to connect your networked computers to the internet, or if you have any suggestions for me. I’ve tried a simple proxy server called Spoonproxy, but I don’t want to have to keep reconfiguring my laptop to the proxy server at home, dial-up from away, and the colleges NetWare network at school. Our computer at home runs Win98, the laptop Win95, so it was relatively simple until this point.

One more problem I had with SpoonProxy is that I use ICQ to keep in touch with friends and family, and it is extremely difficult to configure to use with the setup I am testing now. It works fine on the College’s network, though.

If you have any input or suggestions, I would be very appreciative. Thank you very much. Also, where would I find the answer, on your website? Or would someone reply to this e-mail address? Thank you very much.

Sherburne, Richard [SherburneR@ag.state.la.us]

A caution, a note and a query.

When, where, and how did you end up teaching con law? A strange career move for some of your published skills, I might think. I don’t mean to quibble, and I certainly do not wish to believe in the "The Constitution means what we think it means today" theory but see the Pennsylvania Gas/Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Nat’l League of Cities/San Antonio Transit cases flip/flops. Both instances a decision on a central issue of constitutional structure, both instances a 180 degree flip within a few years of the decision. Perhaps, to borrow a phrase, our constitution does only mean what 5 old people say it means on any given day ( a very loose paraphrase of both Justice Brennan and Gerald Ford). My work life involves con law and I cannot explain the process when it comes to those two flips, other than by "The first version didn’t work, so we are now trying option 2". Not a very reassuring view of a stable republic.

The caution is watch out for the new NT virus that appears to be going around which hit MCI last weekend. Network Associates has a fix on their site, get it. It comes in and appears to be a normal NT process, as it goes about compressing and encrypting executable files on your drives. I got virused by it on my NT machine at home this weekend and the only thing that cured it was a low level format and start from scratch.

Merry Xmas, and get the Amex subscription mechanism up soon plz.

Clark E. Myers [ClarkEMyers@email.msn.com]

Quoting PC Week:The virus installs itself on an NT system by creating a copy of itself in the NT Driver directory, calling itself IE403R.SYS. It also installs itself as a service under the Remote Explorer name, and carries a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) that supports it in the infecting and encryption process. Remote Explorer encrypts executable, text and HTML files on an NT system.

So far as I know the only connection with the browsers is the naming convention. Perhaps a reference to IE's habits, IE is a virus jokes, or just as likely the author's hope that systems people are accustomed to seeing IE popup unannounced. Currently there is nothing like it reported in Novel. Richard Sherburne's letter has a report in the wild with dramatic speed. Obviously the unaltered form can be noticed quickly, and another reason to backup the network often.

Dec. 21 —  Here is a bad combination, according to Microsoft: a Windows 98 computer with Advanced Configurations and Power Interface (ACPI), an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) video adapter and a program that uses some of the DirectX 6.0 features.

IF YOU RUN ONE of those programs after resuming your computer from Suspend or Standby mode, your computer may hang. A fix will be in the next service pack, but if you want it earlier you should contact Microsoft Technical Support and ask for Pci.vxd 4.10.2017 11/6/98 6:28pm 65,919 bytes Pcimp.pci 4.10.2017 11/6/98 6:33pm 16,240 bytes. Be careful, however. If you ask for more technical support than just asking for these files, you may be charged for the call.

Null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane and empty of meaning for all time.

Jerry:

Just a short correction (my apologies if somebody’s already reported this): The 76MB download of the NT SP4 is no longer at the ftp site you give in the "Upgrading NT" piece—it’s at the other www site now (<http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/NT4SvcPk4/defa ult.asp>); you have to select "Full download" from the list box.

From: Don Wilkes [don.wilkes@gems9.gov.bc.ca]

Dear Jerry,

Maybe it's just early-morning lack of caffeine, but you have me completely baffled here. What does Mr. Nader have to do with it, and why invoke the Inquisition? Have I wandered into a bit of Monty Python here?

I'm sure there's a point, or at least a pun, to all this, but I'm not yet sure what.

Cheers,

Roger G. Smith [rgsmith@c-gate.net]

Jerry,

Studio B put up this article today about free and low cost off-site search engines for web sites.

Darnell will have something eventually, but it might be something to look at for now.....

Roger

Donald W. McArthur [don@mcarthurweb.com]

Dr. Pournelle,

Most new large hard drives are manufactured under a standard known as Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA) to increase speed. Normally Windows 98 does not set this as default. To set it go to:

My Computer, Properties, Device Manger, Disk Drives, GENERIC IDE DISK TYPE 46, Properties. Settings. There you will find a check box for DMA that needs to be set. Reboot. That may help.

Fair warning (and interesting in its own right); when LanBridge is on-line it checks with "home" to insure that it has not been loaded on two networks! I had a customer call me complaining that the software wouldn’t work and was throwing error messages. It turns out he took his version home from work to install there (on the sly). Boy was he red-faced admitting that! <g>

I’ve also used Red Hat 5.1 Linux to do this. Setting up IP Masquerading is not too difficult and it performs flawlessly. I use the same box as a firewall and as a sendmail server with no problems. All of which come with the software at no extra cost.

I only regret my economies.

Numerous updates were released TODAY (December 23, 1998) for the Win98 OS. They just never stop updating Win98. I understand that the "OLE Automation Update" that fixes some crashes is ALSO out there for Windows 95. If you open IE4 in Win95 or Win98 and go to Help on the menubar, there will be an option for "Product Updates." This option will take you directly to Windows Update. Windows Update is more sophisticated if you have Windows 98. Last, I got a copy of the new "Office 97 SR-2a Patch" in the mail (snail mail) from Microsoft. I was one of the unfortunate people who downloaded it when it first came out, and I can tell you that they have successfully repaired this patch. Microsoft has published a list of the bug fixes enclosed in SR-2a on its website, if you don't need these fixes then you probably shouldn't get it.

Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]

First of all, I highly recommend installing the Win98 Resource Kit found on the CD. It has nearly all the material in the big, expensive book. Many third party books are little more than repackaged version of this same set of text files and utilities, making the price of the Win98 CD a bit more reasonable in retrospect. The updated TweakUI PowerToy alone is worth the effort but that is merely scratching the surface. There are a wealth of tools that can greatly simplify the life of any administrator or just single user.

Most but not all of the ‘extras’ are well organized from the MS Management Console, an item borrowed from the NT Back Office package. (The Resource Kit is set up as a snap-in.) In this array are many of the utilities that longtime UNIX users would consider essential to basic usability of a system. I can only suppose that Microsoft keeps these items out of the basic installation to avoid confusing novices, but it also serves to prevent many from realizing just how much is delivered on that CD. For instance, the INF Installer allows the simple addition of updated drivers and drivers for new devices to the Win98 install process.

A note about the Windows Update function. This can be set to use any network location the admin desires. (The tools to control this are, tada, in the Resource Kit.) Rather than every user within a company going to Microsoft’s web site for updates, those files can be downloaded once and stored on a local server. Updates for third party software and drivers can be supported, too. Since the Update can be automated by the admin this greatly simplifies distribution chores.

I can appreciate Mr. Adler’s excitement but I think it highly unlikely that an updated Win98 will be relabeled as the low-end Windows 2000. The Win2K name is intended to convey the unification of the desktop codebase. A version of Win98 will almost certainly still be shipping when Win2K is finally out, but it will be clearly represented as the legacy product, as Win3.1 was after the advent of Win95. I don’t understand how this could be perceived as a marketing bind. The products will be separated by a minimum of two years, as was originally intended for Win98 nee Win 97. If anything, this continuity is simpler than the traditional need to explain the difference between Windows and Windows NT, especially when NT often couldn’t do much of what made regular Windows attractive. It is well overdue but the millennium makes an apt moment to finally dispense with 16-bit code.

Also, the Service Pack for Win98 should be out long before Win2K (nee NT 5) ships. What is expected to coincide with the Service Pack release is the third BETA of Win2K. Mr. Adler is correct in that 140 Mb is completely unmanageable, possibly impossible for most home users to download. I would hope the pack is broken up into many files, each no greater than 10 MB for the neediest users. It should be possible to leave out many files as purely optional, I.E. the USB driver updates.

The Service Pack should also mark the release of a new Win98 OSR for vendors to ship. Hopefully, Microsoft will learn from the past and provide existing Win98 users with an easy upgrade path. A $10 CD by mail offer for registered users would be reasonable. Microsoft’s reluctance to offer the Win95 OSRs to early adopters was a major mistake in my opinion.

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

"If you got a system that runs at 100/300 and you have any mysterious problems, change it to 66/300 and they will probably go away. It's flaky memory. Once again the "certified" memory I had doesn't work. Get genuine Kingston PC 100 memory or don't try the 100 experiment at all! That system was GOOFY."

If you get a motherboard with a VIA chipset you won’t even need PC 100 memory. You can set your RAM to run asynchronously, and use 10ns (66MHz) SDRAM, and still run at 100 x 3. It’s only marginally slower than using PC 100 SDRAM, and allows you to using any SIMMs you have now (even FPM or EDO).

The L2 cache still runs at 100 MHz, so you get some benefit.

BTW most of the so-called PC 100 SIMMs that I’ve seen fail have been 8ns. The 7ns SIMMs seem to work better.

Happy Holidays,

Roger G. Smith [rgsmith@c-gate.net]

According to Slashdot, a company called Castlewood Systems is introducing a new removable-media drive that uses MR (magnetoresistive) head technology with $29 3.5" 2.2 GB cartridges. At this price (est $200) for a internal or external parallel or SCSI with claimed 12.2 MB/sec sustained transfer rate (20 MB/s burst) and 10-12 ms seek rate, this drive rocks. See the Orb faq. for more information. Castlewood was founded in 1996 by Syed Iftikar, who also founded SyQuest Technology.

How about it, Jerry? Could this be the Syquest replacement?

I have been following them on and off for about the last 10 months. As far as I can tell they have slipped their promised ship dates at least 3 times. Since Shark looks like it has gone belly up, I may be in the market for the Orb, if it can only make it to the market.

BTW, I see that one can pay by credit card now and I will be getting that to you. I did have a question about the "patron" rate and could not find an explaination on the site.

Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Rick Cartwright

After taking it all apart and plugging it back together a component at a time, it works again but now it doesn’t like the RAM. Anything above 640K tests as unworthy. Switching around the SIMMs doesn’t seem to effect any change.

Since I’m getting DOS memory I suspect it could a bad SIMM or a bad bank, either case allowing only 16-bit memory. That shouldn’t preclude XMS so it is a weak theory. In hopes that the motherboard is functional I’m going to try using a DIMM instead. That at least gets me down to a single point of failure.