(The Franco-German divide rears up again, this time in cyber-land. Ida Chobwhoncz compares the French version of Linux, Mandrake, with the German offering, Knoppix (or Gnoppix) ... )

I've finished with Mandrake linux; tossed the books into an archive box, and strung the CD's up from the ceiling on cords to let them spin and twirl in the updrafts from the fire. Free-flying Tux.

I'm not annoyed with them because for the past two years they've been trumpeting their imminent launch into the corporate world; I don't regard that as a sell-out. I'm absolutely fed up with release after release failing to solve fundamental problems; like automounting floppy discs and cd-roms; USB devices such as my CD-writer hanging the system when trying to see them in usbview; support for older graphics cards and monitors quietly being dropped (you should be buying new hardware); Video files being recognised in 7.0, then unsupported in 7.2 and 8.0; and a refusal to install on older motherboards.

I'm not a Francophobe either, but they did sink the Rainbow Warrior and blast their bombs in Mura Atoll, and some of us have long memories...

Guy Fawkes (1) suggested I should try Knoppix. Well, not suggested, more like insisted. And demanded I trust him too: This is the person who sent me Mandrake 8 on three Cd-roms. At the time I thought he was recommending them to me, now I know he was just dumping them.

But, as he pointed out, I did now have Broadband, and downloading complete ISO images (2) was a possibility. Four hours later I was scratching at the mousepad trying to find the settings to burn an ISO image on a CD so that it was bootable. Then, I stuck it in the old P1 (3) with the strange graphics card that no Mandrake distro has ever installed on, rebooted, and watched with fascination as KDE 3 (4) unfolded on the screen in full glory and brilliant blue colours. All done with 64M of system memory and what little there was on the graphics card, 4M at the most, I suspect.

I was able to look through the linux partitions left by my crashed Red Hat 6.0 installation, and rescue the shell scripts that I wrote to take a collection of digital photos and convert them into thumbnails set 6 to an HTML page, copying the files by FTP to an HP workstation on the network. It was really a staged triumph, because I had already salvaged the lost files using the excellent explore2fs utility (5)from Windows on the same machine, but I proved a point; Knoppix was an excellent rescue utility, and capable of dealing with obscure hardware to the same degree that Windows could. I could play AVI and MPEG files with no problems on a piece of software that gave an excellent simulation of a video player.

Now came the interesting bit. The machine on which I wanted to test Knoppix has a faulty CD drive, (the third in 3 years, and I blame all the repeated installations of Mandrake for most of the breakdowns). The Knoppix site suggested that there were several alternatives, involving network booting, or just plonking the whole lot on a hard disk and persuading the box to treat it as a Cd-rom. I had a network, I could try either. I went for the second option, because when I started to read all the long words in the technical description of the first item my eyes watered and I knew it was not my path. Also, and probably more significant, the how-to guide for the second option contained the following sentence (reproduced exactly, the spelling is not mine)

"WARNING, YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOUR ARE DOING!"

Like Dougal in the plane, I knew a big red button when I saw one, and I knew it was my duty to push it, so I did; creating a boot disk from a DOS window, and toggling the reset button. Up came the system without a hitch, same bright blue and white screen, and KDE 3 running smooth as silk, this time with 256M on a P2 (3), and three disks to play with.

Time for test 3, a strange P1 with 64M of ram and a faster clock speed (199MHz) than the Gateway in test 1, with a motherboard that Mandrake had disdainfully advised me was too primitive for the expensive distros I had bought (7.0, 7.2), suggesting I could find lower specification CD's on the front covers of magazines to try. Yes, that is almost word for word what was displayed on the screen, and that is after I had paid good money for the distros. I wish them every success in their venture into the corporate world; they seem to be adopting as their company style the arrogance that Parisian Waiters are legendary for.

I have a simple criteria by which I now judge Linux distros: it should be able to do everything that Windows can; except for crashing, and sulking instead of shutting down. That means installing onto the hardware without insisting you start scrabbling through pages of manuals and searching the net to find the dot-clock settings for your monitor; detecting all the devices that are present in the ISA slots; asking for drivers if it cannot deal with them from the built-in databases, and knowing what devices are on the end of USB leads when they are plugged into the system. It struggled for a while, detecting a serial mouse, an S3 graphics card, and finally emerging into the now familiar blue screen.

Back at the P2, I had plugged my Kodak onto the USB lead, and confirmed that usbview could see it. But now I stumbled, I couldn't find a photo application in any of the menus. A shell command couldn't find gphoto, xscanimage wouldn't find the camera as an acquisition device, Kooka wouldn't find it, and neither would the Gimp. Finally I spotted gqcam in the menus, but that didn't work. It looked like it would be gphoto or nothing, and I wasn't yet ready to do a full installation and start adding rpm's.

I went looking through the old Mandrake partitions, and found all the home directories locked. This is a Knoppix feature, it knows when there is a Dougal in the cockpit and changes the colour of the big red button to match the desktop. I had seen all I needed to , and powered the system down so that I could concentrate on the other box.

Back at the second P1, I had stopped the boot process because the Cd-rom seemed to be struggling to get the filing system process to run. I've had problems with that Cd-rom before, so I rebooted and copied the Knoppix directory onto the hard disk and rebooted again with the floppy. KDE came up much faster this time, and I could see two Cd-roms on the desktop. Excellent, one would be the USB writer. So, for the acid test, I stuck a disc in the USB CD-writer and clicked on the desktop item for the second Cd-rom, and there was Konqueror with all the files available. So that settled it, Knoppix had equalled Windows 98 for functionality and hardware detection. As an added bonus, when right-clicking on the USB-CD-rom to eject the disk, I saw there was a create-CD option available. The only thing missing from the desktop was an icon for the USB Zip disk, but the device was present in the output from usbview. I right-clicked the desktop and created a new floppy device, finding /dev/sda was already present in the drop-down list, but didn't get all the mount settings right. Still, that's just a matter of RTFM, isn't it?

I'm happy now to have found something that is as easy to use as Windows, that doesn't ask cryptic questions at install time or boot time, recognises most types of graphics cards and monitors, and handles the common range of pluggable usb devices. I might be treating Mandrake 9 unfairly here; it possibly handles the usb devices too, but it treated my hardware with great disrespect and refused to show itself to the light of day.

Germany 1, France 0

Footnotes
1. Guy Fawkes is never (knowingly) wrong.
2. ISO images are byte-stream files containing the data which, when fixed on a CD, becomes folders and files
3. A P1 is a Pentium processor, a P2 is a Pentium 2 processor, for those of you who have never used such primitive machinery
4. KDE is the Linux approximation to the Windows desktop. It is far more versatile.
5. Explore2fs is a utility for Windows, written in Delphi, which can access Linux filesystems. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

(PS: I'm looking for information on a Gucci Boar's Head. Any offers?