Monday, October 04, 2004

windows install

I wanted to try out some windows open source software so I decided to install windows on one of my spare pcs yesterday. The install went along ok, but there sure are a lot of re-boots. I wonder why one needs to reboot so often when installing windows software or the windows o/s. My guess is that components like network, internet explorer, communications, gui services, etc. are so intertwined that you have to reboot the whole operating system so that configuration settings and so forth can take effect. In contrast with linux/unix, if you change a component like network interface or xwindow you just need to reload the changed component but not the kernel.

Once I got the operating system and security patches installed, I set up the network. That was really easy: I right clicked on network neighborhood, took properties and set up my computer's name, work group, ip address and file sharing options. Then I selected each shared resource in the my computer icon. It all went really fast and easy (but with a re-boot or two).

In contrast setting up my network in linux is a lot more work. For fedora core 2, I used system-configure-network to set up the basic network (I could have used ifconfig and edited /etc/hosts instead but this is more work). Then I had to edit /etc/samba/smb.config (or use SWATT) to get the windows connectivity and finally set up the connection to the remote printer with CUPS (a real work-out).

There are a lot of things to complain about in the windows world, but setting up a network is not one of them. Microsoft makes this a lot easier than it is under Linux or Unix.

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