Lost in Flash Drive PCI USB SCSI hotplug, etc.

[Marcelo Giles]

Dear Walt,

I'm sorry to learn that you didn't feel good about your accomplishment.
Reading further, I realized why and I have to agree with you. 
Unfortunately, Linux for PPC is at a rather early level of maturity, 
i.e., compared to that of Linux for x86, the platform for and on which 
it was originally developed.

Linux for PPC is a porting of Linux for x86. (IMO) One of the major 
obstacles to the improvement of Linux on the PPC platform is the ad-hoc 
closed, proprietary nature of the Macintosh hardware. Developers of 
Linux distributions (YDL, Debian, Gentoo, etc), have to put up with the 
sudden changes of specifications that so often come from Apple. These 
developers have to work really hard to "figure out" how the new 
hardware works, sometimes without a single clue. I guess that many 
times they have to resort to reverse-engineer Mac OS code to be able to 
learn how to interface with a particular piece of hardware (graphics, 
sound, modem, network, etc).

Whereas on a PC box (branded or not) Linux (particularly with kernels 
2.4 and 2.6), has truly became "plug'n play". It REALLY works. You just 
insert CD 1, select a few options and you're done. The only thing you 
have to do after that is insert the rest of the CDs. Some distributions 
even come on a DVD, so you insert it, click, click and that's all.

Linux on x86 is much more advanced just because the companies that make 
the hardware (HP, IBM, Dell, etc) have partnered with Linux 
distributions and really cooperate to make Linux work on their 
hardware. The only exceptions being from time to time some graphics 
cards from ATI and Envidia or some of the more bleeding-edge hardware.

As for documentation, this is one of the factors that contributes 
heavily to the price of software. It demands too many man-hours and it 
is obsoleted very quickly.

The problem with the smaller Linux distributions (insert YDL here) is 
their limited resources and reduced staffs, most of them part-time 
volunteers working ad-honorem, just for the thrill of it.

But Linux has its wealth of free and well-written documentation. 
Check-out, for instance, the set of Red Hat manuals at 
www.redhat.com/docs. There are 6 of them: 1-Installation, 2-Step by 
Step, 3-Administration, 4-Reference, 5-Introduction to System 
Administration, 6-Security. Each of them from 100 to more than 300 
pages long. I don't know about SuSe, but I'm sure they have their fair 
share of quality documentation, too.

On the Unix side, you should take a look at the huge amount of quality 
documentation available for IBM's AIX or Sun's Solaris.

All this was not meant to apologize anybody, it's just the part of the 
picture that I'm able to see. I'm sure that there are many more factors 
contributing to the overall perception that you have of Linux and Unix 
in general, but I'm afraid they're beyond my limited visual field.

Regarding the HFS+ issue, I understand that support for this file 
system comes in the latest 2.4 kernels and, of course, in 2.6. 
Probably, you're using an earlier version.

Finally, I'll look for some documentation that explains the issue of 
usb-to-scsi mapping and (if I find something decent), I'll forward it 
to you (in case you're still interested, of course).

And Walt, please, don't be discouraged. You know that you can count on 
the fine people that makes this mailing list what it is, a friendly and 
cooperative place in which you'll always find good advise.

Best regards.
--
Marcelo


On Aug 7, 2004, at 2:19 AM, Walt Pawley wrote:

> On 8/6/04 9:32 PM -0300, Marcelo Giles wrote ...
>
>> Congrats Walt! Good job.
>
> Thank you but I don't feel good about it.
>
> On 8/6/04 10:32 PM -0400, Andrew wrote ...
>
>>> # mount -t msdos /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash
>>
>> You may put this in a bash script for quicker mount/umount:
>
> True enough, but for now, I don't really need to be mucking with that.
>
> Here's why, to both notions.
>
> I started into this simply to test whether or not a combo FW/USB 2.0 
> card
> would work with YDL. I'd previously mucked about with 3.0 so decided 
> to try
> my luck with 3.0.1 because the machine I was working with could handle 
> it
> ... in theory. I wanted to do this because the card worked in Mac OS X
> 10.2.(3-6) with the vendor's software as a USB 2.0 speed device. 
> Without
> their driver, it only worked at 1.1 speeds. In 10.2.8, which is 
> supposed to
> handle such things without requiring an add-on driver, I could not get 
> the
> card to USB at all.
>
> First, I don't feel good about how difficult it was to get a successful
> install of YDL 3.0.1 even though the CDs fully check out as OK. 
> Anaconda
> kept coming up with unhandled exceptions until I chose to install a 
> server
> setup with add-ons. Apple's installer is far from perfect but things 
> seem
> to go smoother with installations of OS X. This is not all that 
> surprising
> as it's Unix masquerading as a nice, fuzzy, warm kitten of some 
> species or
> other so it doesn't need to satisfy the Unix maven with a plethora of
> options beyond the ken of mere mortals.
>
>> From my admittedly naive position, I can't help but believe that the 
>> Linux
> installation process is just too fraught with difficulties to be 
> handled by
> almost anyone who sits a computer routinely. Getting a working 
> foundation
> installed should be a trivial pursuit, IMHO. Likewise, IMHO, the rest 
> of
> installation activities should work from that installed foundation. 
> When
> the process fails, it should not leave you starting from ground zero 
> but
> rather with the installed foundation and whatever got successfully
> attached. I suppose this could be accomplished by a user by simply 
> turning
> off almost everything to be installed that they really want and then 
> adding
> them later.
>
> Second, I've truly come to abhor computer documentation. I'm rather an 
> old
> fart who started working with computers when they were graduate 
> academic
> curiosities rather than default toys of the underprivileged. The 
> people who
> wrote documentation in those days were well lettered for the most part.
> And, things were simpler. That has a huge affect on the nature of
> documentation. People had time to create meaningful, complete, even
> accurate descriptions of their work. Today, if you don't puzzle over 
> the
> uncommented C code ad nauseum, the English documentation often might as
> well be Chinese for all the help it provides. Life's too short for 
> that, so
> software had better just plain work up front. Unfortunately, in the 
> Unix
> domain, it doesn't. I think it's part of the geek credo, or something.
>
> Take, for example, the whole business of mapping Flash Drives to SCSI
> logic. After stepping back a bit from intensely peering directly into
> things, I found a bit of HTML in the docs that pointed this fact out 
> ... in
> passing. These same docs went on and on to tell about how I could do
> specific things ... none of which I wanted to do. What I would have
> preferred is some explanation of the logic of this arrangement. I 
> suppose I
> could blow a couple of grand and buy one of everything O'Reilly 
> publishes -
> but when would I have the time to read all that?
>
> Third, I suppose I should be happy that "-t msdos" works. Despite my
> elation at finally getting the Flash Drive mounted in some manner, I'm 
> both
> puzzled and disturbed by why the "-t hfs" nor "-t hfsplus" filesystem 
> type
> specifications don't work as at least one of them should. Or, at least,
> that's what the docs seem to be saying.
>
> I do believe the soap box I'm hopping about on is cracking, so I'll 
> step
> down now. Thanks for all the help!
>
> -- 
> Walter M. Pawley <walt@wump.org>