Why Linux Is Better (was Re: OT: Solaris question)

[Brian Kelsay]

Big post to deal with, but here goes, comments in-line to save sanity.

>My wife wants a hard drive upgrade.  I have a spare 20GB drive to put in
>there, but she has so many things which are installed on D: that
>installing it will be a royal pain.  This is because the first Windows
>partition on the second hard drive is *always* given drive letter D:.  No
>exceptions!  

Ghost could solve this problem.  Costs money, but I could loan you a floppy that would do it.  
Ghost D: directly to the new drive, replace D w/ new drive, on reboot the newdrive becomes D:.  
Ghost also resizes partitions, which is what makes it great, but it's usually too expensive for the 
home user.  So why is Windows on D:?  Usually it's C, unless you have a 2GB limit on the primary 
(boot) partition.  My piece o'crap work box has Winders NT 4 and it is limited to 2GB on the boot 
drive, sort of.  I believe that once you get an image created you can ghost it to a larger drive as 
above, but I haven't monkeyed around w/ NT in a while.  Here I have a 4 GB C and a 4GB D now that I 
actually check.  So apparently the limit can be raised and they have monkeyed w/ it some.

>So in order to add the second hard drive, I would have to create a 10GB
>partition on the 20GB hard drive (half its size) to match the current
>10GB hard drive partition on the current hard drive which is drive D:. 
>Then I would need to copy over the 9GB of files on the current drive D:
>partition.  I would need to reboot her computer into KNOPPIX because M$
>has decreed that some of the files on D: are system files which cannot be
>moved in Windows.
Again, Ghost is the answer, or dd under Linux.

>I'm avoiding this for a little while because I have another Windows
>computer with a 5GB share on the network, and I have some of her files
>stored there to cover some of her needs.

You may be better off putting the extra storage to a file server in the long run, but programs 
can't typically be installed to network drives.  I'm sure if I say you can't then someone will 
prove me wrong.

>What is worse is that once I install this second drive, all of the drive
>letters move around.  Suddenly, her DVDROM/CDROM drive is no longer drive
>I:.  Suddenly, all her applications can't find the CDROM drive for the
>program CD.  Suddenly, many things don't work anymore.  Two solutions: if
>the application has a user-accessible config file, change the position of
>the CDROM drive in the config file; if the application does not have a
>user-accessible config file, *reinstall the application*.

I used to make the CDROM the Z drive under Dos and Windows.  You could do this in the config.sys 
file.  Newer Winders programs and Winders itself don't limit you to the CDROM being at the same 
drive letter if you have to update the program or whatever.  You may be able to edit a config 
(.ini) file in the applications folder to change where it thinks the CD drive is.

>If she had been running Linux, I would have installed the new hard drive,
>partitioned and formatted it, and added an entry into /etc/fstab.  THE
>END.  No applications would have suddenly found their important files
>missing.  No system files mysteriously located on drive H: when they used
>to be on drive D:, because there are no drive letters.  Her CDROM drive
>would *still* be located at /mnt/cdrom, not suddenly moving from I: to M:.

True.

>Hours of work in Windows, versus less than an hour including the physical
>hard drive install in Linux.

>Secondly, ln -s.  In M$ Windows, you can create "shortcuts".  These allow
>you to open a file in an application, such as double-clicking on a
>shortcut to a M$ Word document.  But they are very limited.  Another
>application I have in Windows refuses to use the C:WINDOWSFONTS
>directory, so I have to have two copies of every font on my system to use
>that desktop publishing program.  Windows shortcuts don't let you use the
>actual file the shortcut links to, so I can't create shortcuts in the DTP
>app directory linking to Fonts in the C:WINDOWSFONTS, because those are
>the shortcuts to the files and not treated the same as the files
>themselves.

I have found that within Winders 2000 and XP you can make a link to another drive or folder.  It's 
not a shortcut.  Example of what I did.  On the C drive I created a directory that refers to 
another partition.  C:images points to partition 2 or the E drive, and c:extra points to partition 
3, F drive.  I had to create the empty directory on C and then in disk management, select the 
drive, right click and choose "change drive letter and paths", add button, and then mountin the 
following empty NTFS folder.  So you would have to have an NTFS file system.  I assume this is to 
allow you to install programs to the other drive and still access them as if on C, not much use to 
me, but I was just messing w/ it.

> Linux, symbolic links are essentially the same as M$ Windows
>shortcuts, but they are also treated the same as the files themselves.  I
>can select a symbolic link to a file to open it in OpenOffice.  I can't
>do the same thing with a shortcut in Windows, I have to know the actual
>location of the file rather than the location of the shortcut.  And Linux
>can create symbolic links to directories as well, meaning that I can move
>/opt anywhere on the system.  Or take an existing install which has /usr
>as its own partition, and use a symbolic link to move /usr/local onto its
>own partition.  With Windows, the drive is the drive.  You can't tell
>Drive D: to also be Drive H:.

True.  Good Luck.

Brian Kelsay