Linux death march (no one else was complaining!)

[edited comments about Kanotix and German]

Background: I've heard some linux developers gripe that PC manufacturers completely thumb their noses at any iso standards for hardware, they simply ship their product if it works with the current version of Windows. Oh boo hoo, how unfair life is, I say. I'm imagining some developers then taking one box which meets the standards. They make a distro that works fine on a few "perfect" boxes-- getting internet through an ethernet cable, of course-- and in effect thumb their nose at the rest of us with non-standard boxes.

That's one possible interpretation of my frustrations below. Another is that I do in fact have a hopelessly buggy box that is in need of repair, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with my burning process. I'm also a non-CS major, over 35, who's only been tinkering with linux for 18 months. You're free to take or leave this advice.

I call this round of testing for linux disros a "death march" because I am getting fed up with nonfunctionality. I am tempted to chalk this nonfunctionality up to indifferent incompetence. There's that Dilbert cartoon where an I-beam has fallen on one guy's head. That employee complains and Catbert informs him, "No one else is complaining." Well, I am.

Here's a description of the test.

THE DISTROS: A dozen live CD or DVD distros. I chose live distros because it's easy to compare and I've seen too many cases of nonfunctionality that I'm not committing a few hours to so many more distros. But as it is I have tested half the Distrowatch top twenty.

THE BOX: A NetVista with 512 MB memory and 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor. It's probably 2-3 years old.

THE TESTS:

USB: I booted up the box with a Lexmark SECURE II 1GB USB pen drive sitting in a USB port. I counted it a success if I were able to read one particular text file on the stick, even if I had to go to the trouble of typing a mount command to do it.

MPEG-I. I had an MPEG-1 animation stored on a hard drive on a pre-existing partition, in the /home/knoppix folder, as part of a Knoppix 5.01 HDD install. I attempted to access the file using icons for this hard drive partition that pop up on the desktop. I would then doubleclick on the icon for this animation and then see what happens. So playing the animation successfully is both a file-access test and a sound and video playing test.

WIFI: I don't do ndiswrapper. This box has an Atheros-based wifi card in it and I have been able to get it to connect to my home encrypted wifi network with many distros. Usually I use the "iwconfig" command.

The candidates:

Damn Small Linux 3.0 RC1

Failed to boot. "Unable to connect to X server."

Damn Small Linux- Not 0.1

Failed to boot. "Unable to connect to X server."

dyne:bolic 2.0

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Worked flawlessly, including sound.
USB PEN DRIVE: worked fine.
WIFI: Probably not working. I couldn't fogure it out. I'd love to be proven wrong here.

Gentoo RR4

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Saw the video and sound. (I had to change some settings in Kmix to get it to work).
USB PEN DRIVE: worked fine.
WIFI: KWifiManager worked for me.

Kanotix 2005-04

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Worked flawlessly, including sound.
USB PEN DRIVE: worked fine.
WIFI: Worked flawlessly with the "iwconfig" command
CAVEAT: I once became frustrated with the language interfaces on the kanotix web site, but they have made dramatic improvements in the past six months.

Knoppix 4.02-DVD

MPEG-1. Accessed the file, but playback sound was plagued by an odd echo.
USB PEN DRIVE: Couldn't see it, even in USB view.
WIFI: worked flawlessly with the "iwconfig" command.

Knoppix 5.01-DVD

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Worked flawlessly, including sound.
USB PEN DRIVE: worked flawlelessly.
WIFI: worked flawlessly with the "iwconfig" command.
CAVEAT: Sound and USB devices work flawlessly with a live boot, but gave me trouble with a HDD install. I published a bug fix I got from "AgenteFBI" at the knoppix.net fora.

Mediainlinux 4 RC5

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Worked flawlessly, including sound.
USB PEN DRIVE: Couldn't see it, even in USB view. The irony here is that for an old laptop, MiL was the only distro that let me see the data on the stick.
WIFI: Worked flawlessly with the "iwconfig" command.

Paipix 5.0

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. Attempts to play it with Kaffeine initiated a reboot of the system. (I tried it four times across two different reboots).
USB PEN DRIVE: worked with use of the mount /dev/sda1 command.
WIFI: worked flawlessly with the "iwconfig" command.

Quantian Scientific Computing Environment 0.7.92

MPEG-1: Not able to access the file. Problem with the desktop-- a bug upon loading.
USB PEN DRIVE: never got to the data, although I was able to see it on the list with "usbview".

Slax Kill Bill 5.03

MPEG-1: Couldn't see the file.
USB PEN DRIVE: icon shows up, inoperatble.
WIFI: might have had it, but I coulnd't get it to run.

Slax 5.05

MPEG-1: Accessed the file. No sound when playing it.
USB PEN DRIVE: Accessed the data.
WIFI: Use of the "iwconfig" command locked up the system, requiring a hard power off!

SUSE 10.0

MPEG-1: SUSE will not ship with software that enables the playing of MPEG-1 files.
USB PEN DRIVE: I quit this distro because it USB access was painfully slow and intermittent. My perception is that it got worse with time.

SUSE 10.1

WIFI: I quit this distro because the developers capriciously took out the wifi driver because it didn't meet OSS standards.

Ubuntu 6.06

MPEG-1: "unable to mount the selected volume" when trying to access the file.
USB PEN DRIVE: worked
WIFI: It's over my head, or it's non-functioning, or madwifi not present. It accepted my iwconfig command but didn't work over all.
CAVEAT: On this box, I frequenly found that when I had various flavors of ubuntu products installed, I had a slow-up problem. When I would leave the box alone for more than an hour, and come back to it, my system would act like it was running on a 2.8 MHz processor instead of a 2.8 GHz processor. Neither the ubuntu fora nor my local LUG email-list were able to help solve, let alone scarcely believe, my problem.

Conclusions

1. Gentoo RR4 is the surprise winner. Ironically I didn't figure out either the wireless or the sound until I went back to it a second time. I guess I'm afraid to go Gentoo, but if these Debian-based systems don't get their act together, I'm bailing. It also ships with povray (and completely incidentally, comes with scene files I wrote for povray!). I would note that if one were going to the trouble of a live CD, then the software on it is a serious consideration, and live DVD's may often win out over live CD's.
2. Knoppix is my old friend. The DVD has everything I could want, except povray. The HDD install is working okay on my box.
3. kanotix 2005-04 used to have several problems with how it handled languages in its web site, and I'm proud to say the worst ones are fixed. (I tried out the 2006 "Easter" version and found its hardware detection not as robust as the older one). It is lacking a bit in software for the graphics fanatic, but Kanotix 2005-04 is still the first distro I would reach for as a rescue CD.
4. dyne:bolic is another distro I'd like to get to know better. If it has wireless drivers, I might consider it based on its overall beauty