As I See It...

by James E. Felton

November 3, 1999

When I had my DSL service installed last Tuesday, my favorite version of Linux, Caldera 1.3, refused to recognize my network card.  Well, I have a fairly new copy of Red Hat 5.2 in my software closet that I installed once and deleted when I first got it.  I've never really liked Red Hat much because it seems much more difficult to set up and use than Caldera, and the included tools (text editors and such) seem to be much lower quality.  But since this is the most recent version of Linux I have in the house, I decided to give it a try.

Well, I started the install, and right off the bat it asks if you have any SCSI devices.  I have a zip drive, but I forgot that you're supposed to say no to this question.  So I said yes, and it found the zip drive (this caused some minor problems later that I still haven't fixed - maybe someone can explain to me how to cure this problem after the install?).  Another confusing issue in installing Red Hat is that it asks you where you want to install it.  The first time I installed Red Hat, a year or so ago, it took me several days to figure out that it wants you to say / .  Heck, how is anyone supposed to know that?  Caldera just highlights a Linux partition and asks if you want to install it there.

Anyway, the rest of the Red Hat installation is pretty much a "no-brainer" (assuming that you have a video card it recognizes).   Red Hat also doesn't do a very good job of explaining little things like the fact that you can use the VGA server if others fail.  For that matter, they don't do a very good job of explaining how to change servers at all.   If you're new to Linux and Red Hat doesn't recognize your video card, you're pretty much screwed!  And when you write to their tech support to ask them about something like this, they usually respond with something brilliant like "have you read the errata files?"   Heck, a new user wouldn't know "errata files" if they bit him!   Caldera does all of this much better.

Anyway, finally, I got to the "network card" section of the install.  Sure enough, Red Hat recognized the network card, so I proceeded to finish the Red Hat installation.

Since my Caldera Linux didn't recognize the card, the Southwestern Bell guy didn't tell me anything about how to set up the DSL for Linux.  So I was on my own!  And honestly, I have never set up networking in Linux before.  Let alone DSL!

I hunted around Red Hat's crummy file manager for a few minutes, but couldn't find anything useful.  Finally, I decided to type netconfig in a terminal window.  Sure enough, it brought up a network configuration program.  I entered the information, as well as I could remember it from the Windows install, and opened a browser.  Nothing.  Then I rebooted the computer, and opened a browser window again.  SURPRISE!  It worked!  I couldn't believe it!

Since my biggest problem with Red Hat is navigation I immediately went to the KDE site and downloaded the KDE Window Manager for Red Hat 5.2.  Once I had that installed, finding my way around Red Hat was much easier!

Next came the biggest surprise!  I went to the site with the biggest Linux program I could think of - Sun Microsystems - StarOffice 5.1.  Star Office 5.1 for Linux is 68.7 megabytes which isn't huge, but is big enough to check my download speed.  I logged in to the site (a user name and password are required but the program is free), and clicked the link to download Star Office.  The counter in the download window started climbing - 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120...it climbed to over 130 kilobytes per second before finally settling down to 126 KBps.  That is almost twice as fast as my connection runs under Windows!

The image above documents the speed of that download.  Actually, the 22% shown in the indicator is not correct.  The file was downloading so fast that the indicator went wacky.  I haven't used a stopwatch yet to verify the accuracy, but I did use a regular watch and the file DID download in about 9 minutes which would calculate out to almost 8 megabytes per minute.

I've downloaded several other programs to be sure this wasn't just a fluke.  Nope!  Everything I've tried in Red Hat so far downloads at about 125 KBps as opposed to Windows which downloads at about 86 KBps.  But there is another difference.  In Windows, the counter slowly counts up to 86 KBps and stays there.  In Linux, it climbs to about 130 KBps.  But then it acts as if it has hit a ceiling and stalls for a second until it drops back below 125 KBps.  Then it climbs back up and does the same thing again.  But it always ends with an average around 125 KBps (unless I'm downloading from a very busy server).

Perhaps someone can explain to me why Linux downloads nearly twice as fast as Windows.  Perhaps someone could also explain to me why Linux is so much more stable than Windows.  But then again, it really doesn't matter to me - as long as it works!

Have an opinion you'd like to share? Send it to me!

Back to NC News