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Wednesday,
November 24, 1999 I have probably taken my last trip to
Fry's. Not only are their prices not much better than you can find on the
web, but their basic policies seem to be customer hostile. A story goes
with it, but I'll probably put that in the column. Even if you know
exactly what you want, expect difficulties. This time they wanted --
demanded -- to open two sealed and taped motherboard boxes. I had
rooted through their stock pile to find two that had not previously been
opened, but I couldn't get out of the store with the seals intact. That
seems to be a new policy. They want the serial number off the mother board
itself, not the box, although they had themselves sealed the box with
nylon tape in a way that I certainly could not have duplicated while in
the store. Why they thought this a good idea, I do not know, nor could
anyone explain it other than that "the computer won't accept the
order unless we do it this way."
There was a time when that store had some sane people in it, and there
are still a couple of them in the CPU and Components departments, but this
has become senseless.
If you get a Quantum Fireball CX drive, the jumper settings are shown
on the drive as if the drive were held upside down with the power socket
to your left. If you go to the web site they'll show you a picture with it
right side up so that the settings look to be the exact opposite of what's
on the drive itself. The clue on the drive is the tiny little box marked
"key" which, if you stare at it long enough, you will discover
is a picture, not to scale, of the cable connector with the key marked by
a tiny bar; holding the drive with that "key" down makes it
upside down, power connector to the left, the way it is pictured on the
drive; on the web site they show it right side up, power connecter to the
right. Very confusing. In theory it comes with the jumper in
the right place for it to be the "master" setting, and in
fact it was, but the marking on the drive confused me. Oh. Well. It was 10
gigabytes for a hundred bucks at Fry's.
Fry's loses a lot to pilferage I am sure, and to employee theft as
well, but the answer to that isn't to treat customers as the enemy. As
Roland observes, the answer is surveillance cameras and store detectives.
Anyway I have the iWill Pentium II 400 going now, and Linux is being
installed. First pass was a problem because the mouse wasn't detected but
that message scrolls by so fast you don't notice it. But then it won't
open X windows and that drops you into a text mode that's pretty
hopeless. Fortunately I figured it out.
Once I got the mouse connected properly -- I used Stabilant 22 -- then
the installation went pretty well, except that I didn't properly configure
the screen resolution. I checked the "graphical login" box, and
when it finished all the compiles and rebooted, I got a big screen error
message "Out of Range". The STB 4400 AGP is capable of
more, but not with the drivers Red Hat assigned. I was locked out:
there seemed to be no recovery.
Reboot with the CDROM and do it all again only this time be sure I have
the screen resolutions set properly. This time I did NOT check the
"graphical login" box. Big mistake. Now it came up and let me
log in but I didn't have the foggiest notion of what to do, and the Red
Hat book assumed I HAD a graphical interface going.
At this point I made my 4th panic call to Mr. Dobbins, who told me to
use the highly intuitive command startx --bpp 32 with those
spaces and dashes; and typing that in got me a perfectly good graphical
interface that isn't windows but it's nice, and a Netscape that goes out
through the Rebel box to the internet. I can now browse the net with
Linette. Linette is an iWill AGP mother board, a 400 mHz Pentium II,
256 megs of memory, a Creative Sond Blaster card, and a Bay Networks
"tulip" 10/100 Ethernet card. I have had no problems with the
net with that card. A SOHO card did NOT work. There is an internal IDE Zip
drive which the system sees but which I haven't got working yet, but I am
sure that's a matter of time. The disk drive is a Quantum 10.2 which
formatted out to about 9.8 gigabytes. It's partitioned into a 300 megabyte
swap file, a 16 megabyte boot partition, and the rest one big root.
So far I like what I see. I don't seem to have the problems I was
having back with Red Hat 3.x when I began this experiment. Now I have two
Linux boxes, and the Rebel is doing very useful stuff. I expect to see
this one become useful shortly.
The boys are all here, and it's Thanksgiving weekend, followed by
LASCON the Los Angeles SF Club's Science Fiction Convention out at the
Burbank Airport Hilton. I'll be going over there Friday or so and
signing books Sunday afternoon. I have the maps for Burning City, I have
finished a major article on communications, I've been told that my drew
more people to a couple of big product web sites than they ever had
before, and both Linux machines are working. It's been a good week despite
some frustrations.
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