Fun with Open Source®™© Software ! (it’s just like Windows department)
As part of my project to get the evil taint of Bigotsoft out of my house, I'm going through all of the Windows machines and giving them a nice Linux enema. On my current laptop, I decided that I would try to install an evaluation copy of SuSE ES9, so I could not only have Linux on the box but so I could also have a current version of SuSE ES to evaluate as a baseline for our Linux distribution at work.
SuSE Linux has an, um, interesting feature that doesn't become apparent until you start trying to load it onto a machine (like the Toshiba Portege 7020CT, which doesn't come with a CD-Rom or a bios that can load from an pcmcia or USB cdrom) that doesn't support booting from a CD; You need four diskettes to install on this machine. three disks that are just the kernel and installer, plus a fourth disk to hold the pcmcia drivers. And, even though Mastodon still does floppy loading (which needs to be pretty massively overhauled when I go to a 2.6 kernel; I may also have to do 2 or 3 disks because many of the modern drivers are huge bloated waddling feedlot cows), it doesn't use very many floppies -- I spent about 25 minutes digging through the house trying to find 4 floppies that were actually formattable so I could put the SuSE ES9 boot images on.
And then I started to load it. It looks really slick. Sure, it spits out HPA's little "I AM SYSLINUX, AND I AM COPYRIGHTED" banner, but that flashes by quite quickly and then you're in the slick world of the new supermenu system that modern Syslinux supports. It looks better than Windows, which is good because it sits there saying "loading linux" for three whole floppy disks. Finally, it's all done, and it kicks off the kernel (hidden under a pretty little spashscreen, a'la windows or MacOS), waits for about 10 seconds, then blats up an alert screen saying "Hey! You don't have 256 megabytes of memory! Fuck you, loser! I'm going to reboot now!"
How, um, Windowsish. It reminds me of trying to load Windows XP on smallish Pentia, down to the same stupid "Your Machine Is Not Studly Enough To Run Windows, Geek! Thanks For The $140, And No We Won't Refund Your Money!" sort of alert box, except, of course, that SuSE didn't cost me anything and the Windows installer whines about the machine a lot earlier in the install (and, for what it's worth, the Windows installer lies. Windows XP runs just fine, if more than slightly glacially, on a Pentium 75 with 32 megabytes of memory. It does take about 25 minutes to load my desktop, but aside from that it runs.) I would expect that a Linux installer would cheerfully say "You need more memory, you really need more memory, you're not going to get any support if you say yes, but if you want to continue say [yes], otherwise say [I am a loser] and I'll reboot your machine." If this wasn't an evaluation copy and, instead, I was out $5000 for the full commercial version, I'd be moderately peeved around now, but instead I should probably just see if Mastodon will load and recognise the pcmcia controllers.