Playing with Linux

I decided to install Linux on my computer earlier this week. Since all my hardware is listed as supported, I figured it would be easy.

For the record, I currently use:

• Aiptek HyperPen Tablet T-6000U (USB mouse compatible)
• Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (Crystal Sound System 46xx chipset)
• 104-key Memorex Keyboard
• WinTV PCI capture card
• AMDTek (forget number) network adapter
• ATI Radeon 9200 AGP

Can you guess which didn’t work? If you guessed everything, you’re almost correct–that’s what worked in FreeBSD

With Mandrake 10.0 Community, the only things found were the keyboard and video card. With 10.0 Official, it found the network adapter–then failed to assign DHCP properly.

With SuSE 9.1 personal, same story.

This was when I tried FreeBSD, just because I knew it would fail, and wanted to remind myself why I don’t use FreeBSD.

Then I remembered this great Linux distribution I used back in 2000 called TurboLinux–the only Linux to actually do Asian language correctly. They actually patch every piece of software in their distribution to work with Asian languages. It always seemed solid, so I figured, hey why not?!

Well, here’s why not, it’s no longer free. What? Yes, a Linux you cannot download at all for free. How do you do that? I crawled the English page and FTP for about 5 hours with zero luck. Only thing there is the update disc. Finally I tried the Chinese Web site.

After a serious workout for my Chinese, I managed to find the discs on there. Yes, the Chinese branch of TurboLinux gives out the disks but the Japanese and USA ones do not–even though they’re the same discs. Oh well, take note.

Wow. Now that’s a solid install. It found my tablet, sound card, video card, game pad, WinTV adapter and Ethernet adapter. Not only that, it supports the extra keys on my 104-key keyboard, supports using button 3 of my pen for scrolling, had full support for Japanese, Chinese Traditional and Simplified, and it did MIDI. I have never seen a Linux distribution manage to configure MIDI on one of my sound cards before.

So, my recommendation of the day is TurboLinux if you want a professional distribution built on people who actually want to make Linux work for you, instead of make you work for Linux. Only con–new versions come out maybe once per year. Though fixes are always provided on TurboUpdate. It works just like WindowsUpdate.