Red Hat-Installation
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winmodems
What's the step-by-step procedure to get RH Linux to use various "win" or "soft" modems that don't have a (damn cheap!) UART? That's been a sticking point that forced me to keep a copy of windows running on every system I have. When I go to retailers, almost every modem is this type, presumably because it's cheaper to have the CPU do some of the work, rather than pay an additional $0.05 for a real UART.
The exact procedure to get Red Hat Linux, or any other Linux distribution, to use a winmodem or softmodem varies depending on which chipset the particular modem is using.
I would point users attempting to do this to the linmodems page.
This is also a major headache on most laptops see the LQwiki [1] for advice on this problem.
dependency hell
One of the serious problems with traditional rpm is called dependency hell. The new (great) rpm you'ld like to install requires the installation of a few tools that depend on some libraries that you didn't install yet. You were required to manually trace back this tree of dependencies until all were resolved. This issue seems solved with yum.
---Winmodems---> ADSL
There seems to be a move back to real modems at the moment (2006) so they tend to work better with modern Linux distros. ADSL (DSL in the US) has however given us a new raft of USB devices with poorly doccumented hardware. Do the right thing and buy an ethernet enabled ADSL modem with a web interface. PS the winmodem spec required M$ specs to design the hardware that were only available under an NDA (very open source unfriendly).
'broken' yum repositories
Unfortunately yum created new bugs. Network-based it doesn't handle networking problems gracefully. I've had my share of "broken repository" messages.
Sound cards
Sound cards always seem to be a problem. I've loaded Linux on about 8 systems, and I'm not sure the sound has ever worked correctly. It's a simple thing that rarely breaks on Windows. Without it, games, multimedia, Gnome, KDE, etc. won't work completely and won't give the user the full experience.
Getting into the details of ALSA configuration remains exasperating because of the lack of clear (hopefully step by step) instructions on how to edit .asoundrc configuration files, which are necessary to be able to use "advanced" options such as multi-channel output. Even experts seem confused by the complication, and not many beginners or intermediate users are up to facing the editing of raw text configuration files either.
We also need to convince more manufacturers of professional audio cards to permit access to APIs so these problems can be better solved.
Directory structure
They modify standards. i.e. for apache the http.conf is split and has many include's whereas on windows and elsewhere it is one file on install.
