smoothwall installation issue

[William Muriithi]

Sorensen,

> As far as I know, Dell is perfectly willing to keep a model but change
> some hardware inside.  After all dlink and linksys and such do it all
> the time.  smoothwall certainly lists the vostro 200, but when did they
> test it?  Which version of 200 was it?
Good questions. I don't have a good answers for them though. I assume
those details were released immediately after the current smoothwall
version.

>
> If it doesn't detect any disks, then either you are using a much too old
> version of smoothwall with an old kernel, or the chipset was changed to
> a new version that needs an even newer kernel (if one exists for it yet)
> or possible a bios setting has to be changed (although Dell rarely
> provides those needed settings on their systems).
I am using the current and latest release. It has to be the later,
some chipset changed. I played with the BIOS extensively actually and
nothing helped.

> After looking over the smoothwall website, I think I very much dislike
> them.  I don't like artificial limits added to existing linux code just
> so someone can charge more money to remove those limits.  Besides
> couldn't you change the code and recompile to elliminate a lot of those
> limits?  It doesn't make sense to me.
Totally agree. I do not also like it because of its limitation. See, I
could easily install  CentOS 5 on vostro 200 and everything worked
well without any input from me. That mean all the necessary drivers
and such are on 2.6.18  So why make it this limiting? who knows. They
claim its for security.

I am doing it for someone, so I had to work with it. I highlighted the
other alternatives to him, but he preferred smoothwall due to ease of
management, you use browser only. Doing otherwise is like a Window
user asking for help and I start suggesting Linux. Not going to have
good relationship after that.

> Len Sorensen
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William
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