Carl Tyler's Blog

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So I am still trying to uncompress that damned IBM WSE VMWare image. From other peoples comments I'll only be able to do it on a Linux box, and then move it the Windows box (would be a good thing to have in the Readme file). Easy I though, I'll just download the Knoppix CD ISO image and set it as the boot device within a VMWare session. No problem, Knoppix boots and looks great. Then the fun starts.

OK, I have the compressed file on the USB drive, no problem Knoppix can see and read the drive, excellent. Now I go to untar the file, hhhm , drive is read only, ok hit right mouse button on drive and there is an option change the drive to read write. Wait, it says that it won't do that as it's NTFS and I'll likely screw the files on drive. A quick google for some answers and it looks like I can use FAT32 to be readwrite in Linux. OK Shutdown knoppix, go back into windows, format the partition with fat32 (FYI if you want to format with fat32, to get the option the partition has to be less than 32gb in size), format drive and move across compressed tar file.

All looking good. Reboot Knoppix and mount USB drive. Great I can see the file, and I can make the drive read/write all looking good. Bring up a Terminal window and issue the tar command, woo hoo, the file is decompressing. Shit, it's almost half way through and it stops with an out of disk space error. bugger, Fat32 max file size is 4Gb arrgghhh. Easy I thought, I'll delete the partition and then make it a Linux format partition and then move the uncompressed file to a network share. This is where my belief that Linux is not ready for the typical end user comes into play.

1. Where the hell is a simple right mouse button format option?
2. Why should I have to search Google for a simple task like formatting a drive?
3. For techies that love to be a terminal window, I can see why they like Linux, seems like a lot of stuff has to be done through a terminal window
5. Ok this didn't relate to my issue at hand, but whenever you read something like, "to enable this driver, build a new kernel with blah blah" you know this is for gear heads.

Now I admit I know nothing about Linux, I also admit I probably missed something totally obvious, and really have had no need to learn it, but at times like this when I do go in to look at it then I think the people that are saying Linux is ready for prime time for end users are kidding themselves. The people that are saying this must be geeks and IT people, if I was to give a Linux box to my Dad and he had to add a drive to it, I'm sure he'd be there for a couple of weeks trying to figure it out. In controlled environments with an IT department, maybe Linux on desktops is fine, for everyone else??

Oh and the number one reason why Linux is going to struggle? The same reason UNIX struggled, too many flavours and distros. Sometimes, choice is bad. What could make Linux more popular on the desktop? An Apple version, it's pretty much there already, from what I hear they hide you from most of the inner workings of a UNIX platform already and that's what Linux needs.

And if you're wondering I'm still trying to format the drive