OT: the USB and floppy hassles...

[Fairlight]

Couple things, not long...

Dell is notorious for having some of the worst and most unreliable,
unresponsive support in the industry.  Some will swear by them.  Others
swear at them.  I've worked on a lot of Dell machines, and the feel I
have for them is that they're fine to buy from if there are no defects and
you don't need their support.  If the hardware works at the start, it
generally seems to stay that way to MTBF/EOL.  I personally would never buy
into them.  I'd rather white-box the components I want than go with any
brand-name system, actually.  At least you're -positive- you know what
you're getting, with no surprises.

Trusting OEM'd onboard adapters...not a great idea.  I wish I had a dime
for every inline "Adaptec" controller (not just compatibles, actually
-called- Adaptec) that has a different BIOS, not-quite-fully-there
implementation, and -isn't- 100% compatible with the adapter it purports to
actually be.  Adaptec is the one that I've had the most trouble with, but
I'm not a huge fan of inline components anyway; that's what was wrong with
the "integrated everything" of Packaged Hell (Packard Bell) systems.  The
corporate mindset has worked its way up the food chain in the industry,
unfortunately.  Incidentally, the Perc controllers I've seen on Dell
systems have all worked fine under linux...for future possible
consideration.

USB on SCO...  I don't even pretend to know whether it should or shouldn't
be working.  I'd be surprised if it was 100% or even 99% though.  Microsoft
took a very skeletal patch for win95b, win95c with really flaky and
imcomplete support, win98 original, and finally got it "mostly" right in
win98se.  Some say that it wasn't -truly- working correctly until win2k.
Linux had really non-existant to lousy USB support originally, and although
that's improved over the last five years in a dramatic way, it's still not
as complete as one would hope.  A lot of problems stem from the way you're
dealing with both the HAL portion for the standard and then the actual
driver that runs the device itself.  It's a two-pronged formula for trial
and error.  Why SCO should be so far behind MS...well, originally most
of the USB devices were designed for desktop-based use.  SCO is really a
server OS.  That's largely why linux was later to the party as well, I
think.  Nowadays, USB devices are more ubiquitous, and server-based USB
solutions are more common.  Part of that whole adoption curve also had to
do with performance, though--pre-2.0 being less than stellarly fast, and
even now it takes -some- CPU to run the devices.  USB is good for some
things, but for others there are better choices.  Some solutions are a
trade-off between convenience and performance; how much of one are you
willing to sacrifice for the other?

At any rate, glad you got it all working eventually.  :)

mark->