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Try this: http://linux.org.mt/node/82#AEN153 for the fingerprint reader. The laptop I tested this on (Thinkpad T60) ran flawlessly.

"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "

NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?

If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.

"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."

Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.

But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.

http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linux InSpace.html

And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)

NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.

"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"

I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.

It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.

BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

This should help you out:

1. File associations

Edit your /etc/mailcap or /etc/mime.types file!


2. Multimedia

Xine is easy to compile and install: to get the extra codec support you need to install the mplayer libraries, instructions are here. Regarding audio I'm not sure what your problem is, I can play more than 1 movie in xine at a time reciving sound from all of them - getting a noise from IM shouldn't be a problem.


3. Corporate groupware

You could use Open Exchange as the server and Evolution 2 as the mail client - haven't treid them myself but ave heard good things.


4. Firefox

I haven't come across any major sites that only allow IE recently (excluding MS itself of course). I'm not going to get in to the discussion of web standards and FF vs IE here - that's been covered thousands of times before.


5. Wifi

Kismet will scan for AP's (and even try and get the wep codes if you're that way inclined). Unfortunately you will need to use ifconfig yourself to connect to the ap though. Also drivers for wireless are really easy in linux thanks to ndiswrapper.


6. Fonts (minor)

If you miss the windows Arial font why not install it in Linux??

Haydn.

An Exchange-killer.

Have you tried Open Exchange? Not that exchange is appropraite to a discussion on the Desktop market.


A definitely legal method of playing encrypted DVDs.

Try xine! (btw Xine is an awesome app!)


For 3rd-party companies (Intuit, Adobe, Autodesk, etc etc ad nauseum) to release either Linux or Wine-friendly versions of their apps.

If you can't find an alternative application in Linux you could always run Windows through VMWare - you can also disable network support for the VM so that you always have a nice clean copy of Windows instead of one riddled with ad/spyware! Further you'd be surprised how fast this can be, I run an AMD 1600+ with 1GB and Windows runs very fast in VMWare.


For companies like Cisco to make it easy to run the VPN Client.

Cisco VPN client for Linux!


A perfect VT220 emulator. There are many in the Windows world.

xterm & gnome-terminal can be used to emulate VT220, for the latter it's as simple as adding a line to your xresources file.


Better wireless support, both thru more drivers from "industry", and better "management" front-ends.

I think you'll find that Wireless support in terms of drivers is just as good in Linux as it is in Windows - just install ndiswrapper and use the windows drivers!


Better looking fonts. Sure, fonts are 100x better looking than they were in 1999, but they are still better looking in Windows.

If font's are so important to you, why not just use the Windows true type fonts in linux??


In my opinion the reason people don't migrate to Linux is because they either think it'll be too hard to use or, like the parent poster, they believe that Linux won't be able to do what Windows can - and don't bother to do any research as to whether they're correct or not.

Haydn.

1. Download the source. (rest as root)
2. untar the archive: # tar -xzf someapp.tar.gz
3. cd to the source directory
4. # ./configure
5. # make
6. # make install

----

How many times have you seen instructions like this?

The other comments on the steps mentioned say "Thanks, that works great!" and things like that, but my compile threw errors and didn't work for me.

The problem is, which I learned after 3 years of daily linux use and 5 distros (including FreeBSD), is that you often need to specify options for the "./configure" step, and those option are found by doing "./configure --help". NOBODY EVER MENTIONS THIS! (sorry for use of caps, but this is a pretty huge problem.)

Compounding the problem is that once you do do a "./configure --help", you are given a huge list of options, but have no clue which ones (and what parameters you need to specify) to get your software to compile. Please tell me where I can find this if there is documentation as to a general process for trouble-shooting compile-options, because I have yet to find it.

Instead of the above example, how about some instructions like the following:

---
All steps are done as root (administrator). # is the root prompt of a command-shell, more info.

1. Change to the source-download dirctory:
# cd /usr/local/src/

2. Download the source (someapp-1.x.x.tar.gz, where the x's are replaced by the latest version numbers, see http://www.mysite.org/releases/ for the latest version information.
# wget ftp://dist.mysite.org/releases/someapp-1.x.x.tar.g z

3. Untar the archive:
# tar -xzf someapp-1.x.x.tar.gz

4. Change to the uncompressed source directory:
# cd someapp-1.x.x/

5. Configure the installer.

Most systems will need to specify the location of your Perl executable:
# ./configure --perl=/usr/bin/perl
Use the following command to find your Perl executable:
# locate perl | grep bin

Other common options that may be needed

Linux is even used in space!!!

If you were talking about the desktop, then sure. Linux is still geared more for someone that is a little bit more technically savvy then your average MS Windows user. However, I think your age range is off as well. I am 31 and have been using Linux for everything at home for many years now, though I am a programmer and more experienced with a computer then Joe User. I think your statement would make a little bit more sense if you had said it about your average non-technical home user.

Anti Aliasing isn't the end-all be-all of fonts. What matters is to have good fonts to begin with. If you go get the Microsoft ttf fonts and install them, you'll be much better off in programs that don't support anti-aliasing (easily) like Mozilla. Moz. is infinitely usable and looks just like Moz. Win32 if you use the same fonts.

I mention that because he complains about anti-aliasing, especially in Mozilla, both on the 10 things needing fixing page, and on the Top N Things That Have Been Solved page.

Microsoft core TTFs are available here: MS TTFs

Install guides and scripts are available several places: http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~jw35/docs/ms-fonts .html, http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/mini/TT-Debian -7.html, http://linux.org.mt/article/ttfonts.

The best script to auto-install to RedHat that I've found is here, he has lots of other goodies to boot: http://www.linuxquebec.com/~nomis80/