The Inverse Law of Googlespace "Noise"

Yesterday I made a reference to the fact that we were not "hearing" alot of Google chatter about the hangs were were seeing with the 2.6 kernel and NFS.

This brings up something I have noticed before. It is starting to become a first principal with me: The Googlespace inverse law of chatter if you will: If I am not seeing alot of people posting about a problem, I must be missing something obvious.

Here is an example from a few weeks ago. Over the weekend (managers in the middle of budget cycles have to do this kind of stuff off hours. It helps to have no life though) I was all set to install and play with a bunch of different Linux Distros. There are hundreds of course, but I was just after a few. I had:

• Knoppix 4.02
• Kubuntu 5.10
• Fedora Core 5 test 2
• Fedora Core 4 (fully patched to KDE 3.5)
• Mandriva 2006
• Xandros 3.0 
• OpenSUSE 10

Mostly I was just curious how they all ran on old hardware (500 Mhz / 192 MB RAM laptops assembled out of junk laptops), but I was also interested in observing how each distro chooses to simplify or standardize some things, but leaves other things the way it comes from the base project.

I mentioned in a post before the NAS server testing series that I did not get why Kubuntu was so hard to configure on wireless cards. That was at the back of my mind when I set up my tableau of ancient computers. I finally decided I just did not have the right tool installed somehow, and spent some quality time in Google hunting. Nothing. No noise. No one out there but me was having problems with this! I could get it running, but only by manually invoking iwconfig, iwlist, ifconfig, and dhclient. Fine: but isn't Kubuntu supposed to be really easy? Xandros over there made it painless, as did most of the others on my desk. What was I missing?

I did find the online web doc to Kubuntu, and RTFM. And then I pounded my head on the desk, near the Knoppix computer. I had been making an assumption: the Kubuntu folks had fixed something and made it *so* obvious that a new Linux person with Kubuntu as their first Distro would never have done what I did.

When you configure networking on Fedora, you use "neat" or "system-config-network". On SUSE you use YAST. On Knoppix there is a place on the KDE menu you navigate to to "Configure Knoppix". On Mandriva, there is the "Mandriva control center": The tools vary but the paradigm is the same: Each distro provides the system config tool.

Kubuntu did it right: They put the system config tool *inside* the KDE control tool (kcontrol, labeled as "System Settings" on the KDE menu, with the familiar KDE control center icon).  I never thought to look there, but it is exactly where I looked the *first* time I fired up Linux, and then had to learn all the funny places the various distros hid these things. My apologies to the good folks who have developed Kubuntu: There was a problem: it was a loose nut at the keyboard.

So, there it is: If you search and search in Google and you can not find it... re-examine your basic assumptions. Like me, you might be missing the thing right in front of you.

Lack of information is information too.

And it is still weird how well some Distros support newer wireless cards, and others support older ones, and others seemingly all of them, and probably others none at all.

I am off to SHARE next week, and vacation the week after that. I'll try to get something up next week from the show, but there will be nothing in the week after that: I am headed off to where there is no Internet. The week after that I have another post or two on NAS server testing in mind.