love ubuntu even more after reinstalling windows xp

[towsonu2003]

this hit me today when I reinstalled xp from scratch (registry screwed, critical program MS-only program not running, afraid of wine, waiting for wine 1.1)...

XP did NOT recognize almost NONE of my hardware (winmodem, wireless broadcom, sound, video ati). I had to pop in the driver recovery cd, provided by HP, in order to make it workable.

This is interesting because although HP does NOT supply ANY driver support for linux (that's what their costumer service says, although they SEEM to support linux promotion somehow), ubuntu magically sees almost all my hardware and sets them up (except the stupid winmodem). ubuntu is nice even with my winmodem because it is the ONLY and ONLY distro out there (out of about 10 well known distros) where my winmodem works with precompiled slmodemd from linmodems.org (don't know why, no clues, have some posts around here on that)!

Now next time someone says linux is WORSE than XP with hardware recognition, I will hit them hard with a (pressed and nice & colorful) ubuntu liveCD!

nice job ubuntu pple! (someone please slap around my winmodem (softlink), wireless (broadcom), and video (ati) hardware producers as they suck - I did but didn't work)

time for me to give out those pressed CDs to my library-see u.

PS. I was about to quit trying linux (after 3 months and too many hard reboots) when I just popped in the ubuntu live cd, totally by CHANCE.


[edit] i forgot to say: live cd with boot:rescue is extremely nice when you need to restore / recover / rescue your GRUB boot stuff on mbr after Windows XP install by doing a simple grub-install /dev/hda !

[aysiu]

A lot of ignorant (and I mean that in the strictly technical sense--not as an insult) new Linux users claim that Windows "just works," and it annoys the **** out of me for the reason you stated--it's simply not true.

Like you, I have installed Windows from scratch (two times--once for XP, once for 2000--on two different computers), and both times hardware recognition was a nightmare. It was not a simple matter of downloading and installing a driver.

I didn't know which drivers to download, and I didn't know reliable places to get them (the manufacturer sites did not always have them, and Google searches often popped up dodgy sites with many hyphens in their URLs).

Almost every single Linux distro has recognized every single piece of hardware on my computer out of the box. Ubuntu is the only one that did not (my screen resolution), but I added two lines to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf (no downloading drivers), and it was fixed.

I wish people would just stop spreading FUD about Linux.

[towsonu2003]

hmm, it seems I forgot one thing here: u pple are really helpful (and speedy too), like the slackware pple. + this forum is actually my home page, not bc of my problems (few) but I like the community here.

however when you say


Almost every single Linux distro has recognized every single piece of hardware on my computer out of the box.

that is either very lucky ofyou, or you are good w/ hardwre research :) every single piece? all distros?? just joking ;) though I'm jealous now!

[aysiu]

No, I realize I'm lucky.

I wouldn't say every single Linux distro will recognize every single piece of hardware--that would be as misleading as saying Windows "just works."

I'm lucky. I didn't even buy this machine with Linux in mind. It's a regular eMachines that was the cheapest my wife and I could find for a large hard drive capacity. It just so happened to work with Blag, SuSE, Mandriva, Mepis, Debian, Ubuntu, and a bunch of other distros.

As I said before, though, Ubuntu did not recognize my screen resolution.

If you did want to do hardware research, though: https://wiki.ubuntu.com//HardwareSupport

[towsonu2003]

from emachines?? wow! that IS nice... /me more jealous. Try buying a lottery ticket or something :)

oh, and, thanks for the codes for quoting (above post) :)

I'll save the link for further reference (and hopefully never need it).

[tseliot]

XP did NOT recognize almost NONE of my hardware (winmodem, wireless broadcom, sound, video ati). I had to pop in the driver recovery cd, provided by HP, in order to make it workable.

It was really a pain in the neck to get my Bluetooth dongle (D-Link) to work in WinXP (some times it worked some other it didn't)

In Ubuntu it's just a matter of mouse clicks. It couldn't be easier.

[Cyril]

For me, windows has recognised more hardware. Especially on laptops.

[tseliot]

For me, windows has recognised more hardware. Especially on laptops.

It depends on your hardware. The same happens when some distros don't detect some peripherals while other distros do it.

[majikstreet]

I've installed windows from scratch about five times... None were pleasant, to say the least.