by Bright and early I rise from my bed to pursue the American Way (spend
money.) I arrived at Micro Center to purchase some Thin-net supplies and
perhaps a Linux CDROM (my current CDROM is a bit old and I am about to
network my two computers and so want the latest Linux kernel.)
($300.00 later - man this store is neat)
What have we here! A Yggdrasil CDROM. The spine is marked Summer 1994 but
no matter, the kernel should be relatively new. The price, $19.95. I would
later find that the spine was incorrect and the CD was actually the Fall
1994. Great... I throw the CD in the basket and roll as quickly as possible
to the very long checkout line.
(back home)
The wife is upset.... I was only supposed to spend $60.00. Of well, she will
get over it (she always does ;) ) I rip open the Yggd package and thumb
through the manual (not really... just thought I would impress you guys..) I
fdisk a few new partitions from OS/2 and then reboot with the Yggd floppy.
It hangs attempting to mount root... several times.... I know I have no
conflicts... I *was* successfully running Slackware 2.x (1.59), OS/2, DOS,
Windows whenever beta, etc. Hmm.... thi IS odd. I throw the new ether16
card to another IRQ.. works... weird.. No biggie, I will deal with that
later. Now, I login as INSTALL. The install begins. I choose my
partitions, do some formatting and after the root partition is formatted I
find... it will not mount...
(Second try....)
it mounts. Do I want LILO to rewrite the MBR: NO! Boot Manager is so much
prettier. OK. All installed. Reboot. No bootable OS in this partition.
Wow... how neat.
I have been using Slackware successfully for almost a year... never had a
problem and yet Yggdrasil's CDROM will not install. My equipment is pretty
standard: IDE - 2 drives, s3, 16 mb, pretty plain. All my devices are
supported. Now, I think I will just give Yggd a call... Hah! Not for $2.95 a
minute. Maybe if I needed config help... but I can hardly justify spending
that kind of cash for their broken install. So I think: I will drop them
some email... How odd.... they mention that they will accept email but fail
to provide an email address.
Bad business, yes. I understand support costs are high... Hell, these guys
have *any* support costs, it is all profit at $2.95/min. How do they support
bugs in their install.... they don't.
I pull out the Slackware dist. Install (same config, partitions etc.) It
works, flawlessly... Imagine that. A free install distribution and it
works. If I pay, it doesn't.
Judge for yourself....
B Griggs