Anecdote re: NT vs. Linux installation

[jerryc at world.std.com (Jerry Clabaugh)]

One of my duties in my present job was to set up 2 NT machines in a
small
 heterogeneous cluster. It wasn't too hard, although in my experience it

 does take longer than installing Linux. Things got interesting when I
 tried to get the NT machines to print to our HP TCP ethernet printer.
 I looked through the documentation I had, found nothing. So I went
 to www.microsoft.com, did a search, and found 3 article titles which
 seemed to be just what I needed. I clicked on the top article, and got
 a message telling me that I had to turn on cookies, and I had to
register
 to access the 'premium content'. Now it seemed to me that paying $300
 for an operating system entitled me to information on how to use it,
 without having to give Microsoft any marketing data in return. But
after
 grumbling for a while, I started to fill out the on-line registration
forms.

 This is not a simple form. I entered 6 pages of information:

 Who are you? What's your address? Your phone number? Your e-mail?
 What other software do you run? What's your job title? Whom do you work
for?
 What's their address, fax, e-mail? What kind of business? What kind
 of software? How big? And on, and on and on. After 6 pages of this, the
thing
 crashed. And I couldn't access the premium content.

 I searched the Web at large and finally found some pages at U. Wisc.
 which offered the information without any nonsense.

 When doing the printer setup, I had to reboot THREE times. No, it
 wasn't crashing, NT just insisted that I reboot (1) after installing
 TCP/IP, (2) after installing the printer driver, and (3) after I set
 the printer to system default.

 Under Linux, I just made an entry in /etc/printcap, and printed a test
 page. The information on how to do it was in the Linux HOWTOs, easy to
find.


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