Re: OT: hardware problems

John, 

Please remember that discussion via this list is text-only. However,
text and its content are only a very small portion of what communication
is as a whole. As such, a text-based medium such as email can be
difficult at times to interpret when there is a lot of emotion involved,
especially anger and/or frustration, as it lacks the body language,
vocal intonation, and other cues that one would normally use to fully
understand a message being told to them. Therefore, one's word choice is
all that he or she has available to them in this medium to properly
express their opinion or issues as wanted. It is from this word choice
that we, the readers, must guess your cues to fully understand and
appropriately interpret your text. 

We are a community - we want the community spirit to grow and spread. We
want people to learn the benefits of Free software. Rest assured that,
though it may be troublesome at first, we will do our best to guide you
through those troubles as we are able. This great community is one of
the most powerful aspects of the information freedoms we've been given
with GNU/Linux, and it can aide you significantly...if you let it.
  

Now on to the content of your message:

On Sat, 2007-05-12 at 22:26 -0500, John wrote:
  

I'd rather go back to Windows 100% and deal with its security problems
than have to *waste *my time troubleshooting my FC builds.
    

If you'd prefer tried and proven solutions, I recommend Red Hat's
Enterprise Linux ("RHEL") or one of its no-cost clones such as the
Community Enterprise OS ("CentOS"). This will give you the benefit of
known-stable and -tested software, and (with Red Hat's paid support)
guaranteed support via Service Level Agreements ("SLAs") and whatnot. 
  

 Two outta three FC boxes (here) have 
'misplaced' the floppy and cd drives. I know the cd drive was working 
when I switched over to KDE from Gnome; now its MIA with KDE too.
    

When you say "misplaced," what, specifically, are you referring to? Are
the icons just not showing up? Are they the wrong icons? Are they not
responding to any option when you click them? 

We can only know as much about your problem as you are willing to tell
us. Generally speaking, more verbose information that you can give the
community about your issue will help us help you solve or workaround it.
(We're not telepathic, no matter how awesome that would be. :P)


  

This box, can't even find my scanner-- jeez, I can go to the HP site
and get the scanner software for Win95 to Vista.
    

In the vast majority of cases, GNU/Linux drivers for hardware are
maintained by distribution vendors and/or as part of the standard
upstream packages that these distribution vendors use for their basis.
More often than not, as Windows' drivers will show,
manufacturer-produced drivers can be quite buggy, unstable, and/or
insecure.
  

What make/model scanner do you have? Which scanning software have you
used? Have you tried HP's tools from the hplip/hpijs packages? Does it
show any specific error message?
  

  How screwed up is Fedora 7 going to be??
    

The merger has brought some hardships along with Development's usual
slight-breakage, but those should be quickly resolved. Instead of
blaming Linux or Fedora for malfunctioning and simply giving up, we ask
that you please rephrase your issues in a more polite tone. If we can
help you solve these problems, then that means that we've potentially
helped a great deal many people around the world who may have similar
troubles. Perhaps these issues could also be fixed in their respective
packages, which would make them work much nicer by default with the next
update or for new users who install them.

As someone who's been running the Development tree since about the
F7-Test2 timeframe, I can vouch that it will be quite impressive.
Indeed, it will have its bugs, though, as any piece of software does;
but we as a community will continue to improve upon the software and
squash those bugs as we find them. 

Thanks for your time and patience.