Service Pack Hokey Cokey
Service Pack Hokey CokeyThis page originally described the problems when trying to install VisualBasic, which required applying and reapplying lots of ServicePacks?. However, it is a bit dishonest to diss one particular product, as if it were the only one displaying these problems. Do we have any similar war-stories from other platforms to compare with this, thus making concrete the discussion in EveryoneButMicrosoftConsortium?
About installing Windows NT:
See http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/deployment/planguide/Install.asp for the official word (March 4, 2000) on installing various Microsoft products under Windows NT 4.0. Here is a sample:
Internet Information Server 4.0 (IIS)
1. Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 operating system.
2. Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.
Would it be worth my time to try to get MS to admit that NT4 + SP3 made my Digital PC 5100 Workstation extremely unstable, and suffer BSODs at boot time? Probably not. -- PhlIp
3. Install Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 Service Pack 2 (without the Active DesktopTM interface item).
5. Install Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 5 or later.
Upgrading is not as bad as some horror stories, but it isn't a completely simple process either.
The specifics may change, but the dance is the same. One doesn't keep up to date on service packs automatically, because they tend not to play well with each other, and some may make things worse. Therefore you add service packs only when some pressing bug or software install mandates it.
Just to install NT from the base disks and then get everything up-to-date can involve quite a dance if you don't have all of the pieces on CD. My NT CD is an original, pre-service-pack. It comes with IE2. So my dance goes something like this. I forget the details, but the rhythm is correct:
Why install IE4 first?
I don't know, but if you don't do IE4 before IE5 you don't get the illegal desktop enhancements that make IE part of the shell. (KDE and others have similar enhancements but you don't hear anyone whining at them.) But Line 9 looks interesting. Why doesn't SP5 next take care of it? -- PhlIp
I don't do Windows, but isn't this an exaggeration? Would simply installing the latest version of all products listed above not be sufficient? Also, how do you get all those older versions? And, what if you don't even have SP, Visual Studio, IE and all those other non-VB-related tools? Finally, why is the large amount of memory needed? If you have less, performance will go down because of paging, but this cannot actually crash a user-space application, right? -- StephanHouben
Good for you, no. No - you gotta install them in the order they were invented. The older versions are all free for the download (if you live long enough to get your modem working out of a bare-bones NT4 SP0 box and can then locate them on MS's Web site, which no longer works with the IE2 that comes bundled with NT4). Visual Studio _is_ VB. Lots of memory is needed because MS engineers (like others) develop on only the most expensive possible workstations, so they never eat their own dog food. No, paging can't crash by itself, but it can slow down timing to the point where assumptions about which asynchronous process will end first fail, leading to contention of shared variables without semaphore defenses. -- PhlIp
One of the problems I have is with the base NT4 installer. It quite happily lets you set up a partition bigger than 2Gb to install into - then mysteriously won't install. Turns out that even though you've specified NTFS for the partition, it's initially formatted with FAT - and FAT doesn't support bigger than 2Gb partitions.
Then you find out that NT before SP4 doesn't support IDE disks bigger than 8.1Gb...
Usually I get around this by installing NT in a 2Gb partition at the start of the disk, and then using this copy to bootstrap the installation of a copy in a bigger NTFS partition. It turns out that the installer can install to NTFS, it just can't format NTFS.
Then, when I'm done, I usually swap the copy of NT in the first partition for a copy of Windows 98 - I've got to run my games on something, after all. :-) -- RogerLipscombe
About installing LinuxOperatingSystem:
Install Unix (or Linux) with XWindows. Try getting your sound card to function. Or even your PS/2 mouse. At least with Windows the minimum requirements are just memory, disk space and speed. With Unix (or Linux) you have to go out of your way to find compatible hardware components that don't suck.
And all this is needed for a secure VisualBasic install on Linux? ;-)
I've had similar dances upgrading programs under Linux. Some of the package managers can make this easier for you, but sometimes you're dealing with software that didn't come in whatever format of package your distribution eats. To install program A, you need a new version of some library, but that library needs one new library and updates to one other. And that one other needs a later kernel than you're running, so it's time to upgrade the kernel, which just so happens to need later versions of a compiler, two scripting languages, and 4 libraries. Recurse for a day or two until you no longer know what version is running what, just to fire up program A and discover that it kinda sucked anyhow. Back to freshmeat.net to look for the next candidate.
Whereas if you are running FreeBSD, and the package you want is in the ports tree, cd /usr/ports/<category>/<package>; make install, and it downloads the sources, upgrades any packages it depends on, builds everything automatically, and you're done. Most of the time, anyway.
Whoever is arguing here, when I installed Linux, there was no problem getting X, my sound card or anything else to work, and I'm a total Unix newbie. The way I have installed NT, OTOH, I am having massive problems with my ISDN card. For somebody else, it's probably the other way around. So what??? It's just software, after all, and today's version will be forgotten two years from now. -- FalkBruegmann
Linux's distribution model encourages vendors to compete against each other over features. Monopolysoft's distribution model encourages new OSs every 3 years, and new service packs every 8 months. They have no incentive to even release an NT4 with SP6 pre-installed. (Maybe they do release this. But I mean they have no economic incentive to make life easier for their MSCE troops.)
If you install Linux on the absolute latest hardware you will suffer. The Plug-n-Pray Falk enjoyed works best on a SuperVGA-class video card (not a 3d graphics card) and a Sound~Blaster-class sound card (not a 3d sound card). If you get anything wrong, even if you have a smarmy install program, you will endure config file hell. Monopolysoft makes hardware vendors pay for certification as "Windows 98 Ready", and hardware does not sell without this label, so such hardware usually works with older MS drivers. But not older Linux drivers.
However, the Linux distribution model encourages driver authors to compete in the area of stability. Most drivers can pop in and out of most distributions (bar matching library version numbers). So while you may get drivers refusing to do anything on principle because of a typo in their manually-written config files, you still don't get so many dumb bugs crashing the kernel half way thru your initialization routines and forcing a re-install. -- PhlIp
Other platforms: which computer system doesn't s*ck in this regard?
I vote... iMac. Or, you're going to argue, my Vic20 wins (even Nintendos crash occasionally). Sam, you just can't win. Not only will other people tirelessly argue that some other loser OS like Linux is superior, but you have jerks like me who think that (almost *) all software sucks equally. -- SunirShah (*) Obviously, I write perfect code. ;) Maybe I should write my own OS and call it Sunix.
I just plugged my Asteroids cartridge into the back of my Vic20 and turned it on. Plug and Play. I didn't know what the hell a kernel was. I was only four.
I think the subtle difference here was that the OS was on the Asteroids cartridge itself.
Do you think I cared? It worked, I blew up rocks, I had fun. When I got sick of it, I powered off, pulled the cartridge, powered on and loaded a game off cassette. Never crashed the kernel. By the way, the machine booted in less than a tenth of a second. Beat that, swap file jockey!
KDE on my new S.u.S.e Linux 6.1 comes with a neat Asteroids game. Fully rendered rocks, too. And it does not need to swap out the OS just to run.
Yes, but can it do that with only the 5k of RAM the Vic-20 had? Besides Vic-20 is easier to pronounce than "KDE on S.u.S.e Linux 6.1." Watch that PropellerBeanie twirl! Whee...
None of the above is necessary for VB to work stably and reliably for the uses it was intended for. It was provided really for a whole complete stable NT platform for site server. VB 6 and VS SP 3 is all you need.
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