Migration: Not for the Faint of Heart is an edtorial response to yesterday's OSNews article on the failings of one person to successfully switch to Linux. As I said, I thought their expectations were too high, and that they failed to consider resources that could help. Posted at OSNews
8:21:12 PM comment []
Upgraded the intranet server from Red Hat 8.0 "Phoebe" to Red Hat 9.0 "Shrike" yesterday. The slow part was the downloads - each CD takes about an hour over broadband (okay, that's not much to complain about!), but disk 5 had to be downloaded 5 times before I got a clean copy. (Hint: use MD5Sums.exe to test the .iso without going to all the hassle of burning a copy that Linux tells you isn't valid. Hint2: then run "linux mediacheck" on startup to make sure you've got a good copy).
Installation was smooth as silk: boot from the CD, tell it to upgrade the install it finds, confirm you want to upgrade all packages, walk away. Drop by two more times to insert CD 2 and 3 and you are up and running. All settings transferred, all(most) all software running. I say almost, regretably, because it looks like changes to the threading model (a real performance improvement, I hear) break Wine. There's a workaround already, and the Wine folks are hard at work at a solid fix. Details and a good review of RH 9.0 are available here and here:
Here's a sad story, one sure to be used by Linux bashers for more material. The evil side will summarize this as "somewhat clued-in tech writer can't get Linux to work on her machine." The other side might view this as "somwhat clued-in tech writer tries
Out-of-date distributions,
On older hardware that was running 95
Without asking for help from more clued-in Linux help
Requiring a dual boot, difficult under most OSes.
There were a number of things she could have done differently, such as: search out a Linux User Group for some friendly free advice and perhaps an installfest, bought a new machine with Linux installed, or sought out a friend with more experience.
She probably would not have had a more pleasant experience trying to install Windows XP Home on the machine, either.
