autoconfigure is unfriendly

[deerwood]

Hi all,

just wasted a whole day, evening and night to figure out, that I need

knoppix noscsi nousb nodhcp

to boot Knoppix succesfully.

Please accept my complains: the method of hardware detection used in
Knoppix is VERY unfriendly, when problems arise!

What I expected (and would have saved me several hours of failed reboot attempts) is an option to show, what Knoppix is actually trying to do instead of that STUPID green progress bar, which carries no more information than (working|hanging|looping).

The problem was, that the Knoppix boot did hang (or loop) many times, most often while autodetecting, but also after the boot sequence and after the message: 'entering runlevel 5'. This last problem seems to be related to the attempt to get DHCP info from nowhere (eth0 found, but was disconnected).

The advice, to boot with:

knoppix lang=<whatever> vga=normal xmodule=vesa \
nosound \
noapic \
noscsi \
nodma \
noapm \
nousb \
nopcmcia \
nofirewire \
noagp \
nomce \
nodhcp

then step by step removing one or the other option and rebooting until
Knoppix successfully starts was the way to I had to choose.

Are you (Mr. Knopper) serious? Did you try this yourself on a system with problems? When you simply could have turned on USEFULL messages instead of a green bar?

And, the possible options to use ain't documented completely/consistent
either. I found e.g. these (in various docs):

nosmp
noswap
noddc
noaudio

Are they valid? What do they mean?

And: there is no doc whatsoever about their meaning! Ok, even a 'normal' user might know nowadays, what 'USB' is (in terms of what to buy in a store and how to plug in a cable). But you expect a typical Windoof user to know, what 'smp', 'swap', 'ddc', 'mce' or 'apic' is?

Isn't it, that Knoppix should blame M$ and be better in hardware detection then every other system?

Then, please, support willing people with more than a Windows-like green bar.

No questions to answer this time. Comments are welcome.

Yours

Georg Rehfeld

PS: My system in short, when neccessary I'll give details:

- Intel PIII
- Intel board
- standard SCSI PCI card
- USB on board
- standard Ethernet card, not connected

[Facteur]

This sounds like an "in-the-heat-of-the-moment" post.

I did have similar problems especially with scsi, and eventually I used the "expert" option, which asked me questions along the way. It is true that it also took me a while to work out how important these "options" were, and that I intially ignored them because they were called "cheatcodes", which I associated with games actually.

However, I do not think it is a user friendliness problem, simply a documentation problem. However, it is hard to write documentation for newbies when you are not a newbie anymore. You skip things involuntarily.

In the end, people will ask you to check your abilities with the "search function". Several searches are required, because many posts which deal with this problems are not always given the most appropriate title. For example, look at your own title for the post, do you think a person with a similar problem to yours would find it easily?

I am not reprimanding, simply reducing the size of this problem because it is easily corrected. Knoppix is an excellent concept and distro, but you have to expect a certain amount of "no pain, no gain".

[rickenbacherus]

And, the possible options to use ain't documented completely/consistent
either. I found e.g. these (in various docs):

nosmp
noswap
noddc
noaudio

Are they valid? What do they mean?

And: there is no doc whatsoever about their meaning! Ok, even a 'normal' user might know nowadays, what 'USB' is (in terms of what to buy in a store and how to plug in a cable). But you expect a typical Windoof user to know, what 'smp', 'swap', 'ddc', 'mce' or 'apic' is?

I found the explainations for cheat codes right here in the Docs section.

[deerwood]

This sounds like an "in-the-heat-of-the-moment" post.

Actually you are right. I know, I should have delayed my post until retired ...
then I would not have written it, but at the same time would have dropped my
current attempts to get Knoppix up and running with ease!

I remind readers: I tried hard, a whole sunday, just to see Knoppix,
having only keyboard support then, no (USB) mouse, no network, no
nothing.

And please know: I couldn't live without Linux and GNU and Open Source
since more than ten years now. My firewall is a (SuSE) Linux system, my
Oracle DB runs on another Linux (side note: I got Oracle on Linux up and
running many years, before Oracle supported Linux and I have published a
'cookbook' how to do it).

Still, I insist: that green bar is nice to look at, when Knoppix boots
successfully, but is of no use at all if things go wrong.

What is missing is a boot option to be verbose about the autoconfigure
process. This should be easily possible at a first glance: Knoppix
gives text messages about what tests it skips, so it easily could tell
me, what it just is attempting to autoconfigure. E.g.:

  trying to autoconfigure apm (Advanced Power Management) use 'noapm' to skip
  ......... OK, found <whatever>
  trying to autoconfigure sound (Sound/Audio hardware) use 'nosound' to skip
  ... OK, found <whatever>
  trying to autoconfigure usb (Universal Serial Bus) use 'nousb' to skip
  .........|

This way one can easily identify, which hardware detection fails. The
whole process of getting Knoppix up and running would be seriously
simplified: one only has to disable detections, that obviously fail. In
my case, instead of having to boot more than 30 times (some of them, to
boot into W2K again, to be able to look into the internet for help) I
could had Knoppix up after 3 reboots. And a tester/user would not feel
as lost as is the case now.

Yes, I know, matters are much more complicated, even when the
autodetection succeeds the boot procedure can fail later on (as seems to
be the case with a disconnected network card and 'dhcp' not disabled).

Usefull messages are ever better than some 'progress bar' giving only
boolean information (go|nogo).

I did have similar problems especially with scsi, and
eventually I used the "expert" option, ...

I'll try that and report the outcome later. In the meantime I got part
of my USB system (the mouse) to work ... ahh, good. See my other post.

However, I do not think it is a user friendliness
problem, simply a documentation problem.

I believe, it is both.

For user friendliness while detecting the hardware see above.

Yes, clearly there is a documentation problem. This is not easy to
solve. Experts are bored by reading how to click here and there without
beeing told what that click actually does. Newbies are overwhelmed by
all the information and all the special terms and all the keys they are
supposed to type on their keyboard.

I believe, sort of an 'abstract' about an issue with hyperlinks to 'how
to reach this feature' (the click/type procedure) and to 'explanation of
this feature' (the expert docs) would be a step into the right
direction. E.g. the OpenOffice help system seems to be a good example of
this concept.

And, naturally, it is very difficult to get persons to actually document
features. This might be the most difficult part of the story.

However, it is hard to write documentation for newbies
when you are not a newbie anymore. You skip things
involuntarily.

:-) This was one of the reasons to write down my complains immediately.

... look at your own title for the post ...

It is appropriate. I'm simply whining, not asking anybody for anything,
not to mention helping anybody in this thread.

Knoppix is an excellent concept and distro, but
you have to expect a certain amount of "no pain, no gain".

Yes, I fully agree. Let us make Knoppix even better!

Dear Factuer, thanks for your very qualified comments. Happy to got them.

Georg