Slashdot Mirror

Have a look at antiX, choice of light desktops and definitely put in an SSD
http://antix.mepis.org/index.p...
even goes well on my old MSI Wind

I'd search 'repair apt database'. Here is one of the links I found: http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/i...

Otherwise, to build an already-existing package from source:
apt-get build-dep imagemagick

It's funny MS is the least invasive in this but not by their choice of course.

Anyone know a polished linux distribution that could hold the candle after Ubuntu croaks in a weird accident involving barbed sex toys (fingers crossed)?

Yes, I am bitter.

MS is the least invasive only if you restrict "Linux" to mean "Ubuntu" and not the rest of the great (imho better) distros. :-p

I recommend downloading liveCDs/DVDs getting to know what's out there -- that's what I did after ditching Ubuntu in very early 2010. I personally favor Mepis for its stability, polish, speed and use of Synaptic/apt for a package manager, but Fedora and OpenSUSE are also highly stable & polished (though they weren't as easy to find/install programs with last time I tried). Mageia and PCLinuxOS are also really nice, just not quite as stable in my experience.

BTW I understand the urge to be bitter, since I felt that way when people kept worshiping the Ubuntu team & leader despite obvious FUD-spreading to make other distros seem as hard as they were a decade ago (as if Ubuntu is the only "easy" distro) and their blunt statements that they don't care what users want or need.... But seriously, they're not worth feeling bitter/angry about -- don't waste your energy on that, use it to educate as many people as possible about other distros instead.

I also started out with Ubuntu (8.04), but thankfully the first distro I tried after I got fed up with its issues in early '10 was Simply Mepis, which has to be the easiest one ever. After I'd gotten used to it, I felt comfortable enough trying out OpenSuSE, Fedora, etc. to enjoy distro-hopping and start learning the commandline for fun since it wasn't as necessary as it had been for me in Ubuntu. If I'd gone straight for Debian either before or after Ubuntu, though, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on Linux for good.

I think we really need a page or site for users like us to offer our experiences with different distros in order to help one another discover which ones to try out. It's frustrating to see how many people try a distro that's too far beyond their skill level and react by deciding that either all of Linux is far too hard, or that Ubuntu & its derivatives are the only real options.

Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.

Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard drive unbootable... I tried Simply Mepis for a few months and was enchanted, then gave OpenSuSE & Fedora a few months each and tried lesser-known distros I heard about like Samity or Petite. The results: the ones I tried were uniformly more stable & easier than Ubuntu -- my mother, a barely computer-literate senior citizen, can use & even install/set up the mainstream ones without trouble -- and *all* of them had a much friendlier, more user-centric vibe at their forums. I only ran into a handful that weren't functional out of the proverbial box, and almost all of those stated openly that they're for advanced users.

I'd highly recommend that you give the other mainstream distros a try if you haven't done so at least within the past 4 years; you just might be very, very surprised... (FWIW I think the easiest/friendliest is Simply Mepis, which is my favorite, but I'm sure that fans of the others would argue!)

I was in the same position 2.5 years ago -- I don't know which distros you tried, but the one that has turned out to be the most user-friendly (and have the nicest community) is SimplyMepis. It's Debian-based, so it uses the easiest package manager I've found (Synaptic/.deb), and they set up the desktop environment (KDE4) to be easy enough for total newbies to use.

For what it's worth, I usually describe myself as a half-geek... I find technology fascinating & enjoy learning Linux -- but my brain doesn't work in the way needed to even combine terminal commands, as it's more geared for the humanities (writing fiction, sociology, psychology, etc.).

150Mhz Pentium? From the horse's mouth,

It should run on most computers, ranging from 64MB old PII 266 systems with pre-configured 128MB swap to the latest powerful boxes. 128MB RAM is recommended minimum for antiX. The installer needs minimum 2.2GB hard disk size. antiX can also be used as a fast-booting rescue cd.

For the curious, here's a recent review. And the FAQ.

Disclaimer: I don't know /why/ you'd want to run Linux on a P1, but whatever turns your crank I guess. The misery of dropped BIOS & ethernet card support finally did me in. Plus none of it ever works slighly as well as W98SE.

Flame me to a crisp if you like, but on that hardware it's the kickass Desktop. I still use it for vintage gaming. (YMMV: you have to know how to make 98 work well. Most don't, and suffer proportionately.)

Built specially for the transitioning Windows user. Built on Debian 5 stable core and KDE desktop and has all the basics in the live CD and an active support community. Most XP users I've exposed to it had no trouble getting getting things done on their own.

http://www.mepis.org/

Mempis is probably what you are looking for, as it is Debian based and built from the ground up for KDE. It is also nice and user friendly. Enjoy.

Mepis based on Debian

Or just sudo apt-get xubuntu-desktop

people use IE, because that's "the Internet" on their computer

Yes, there are those people. They are usually happy with this. Firefox becomes "the Internet", Pidgin their IM and so on and so forth. Most don't know the difference and think you have done a great job of fixing their computer. For harder cases, you can change the icons and backgrounds then tell them it's Vista. Ha ha.

[shameless plug] Besides, they just released version 7.0, check it out.[/shameless plug]

[shameless plug] Besides, they just released version 7.0, check it out.[/shameless plug]

Wait, last I checked, you merely had to tell people where to get the source. As all (x|edu|k)ubuntu distros have that built into the package manager, they -had- told people how to get the source.

I don't see the standard package manager anywhere in the MPAA UT Admin Guide (PDF). It appears to go straight from the splash screen to the "Peerwatch" configuration.

Besides, the GPL section 3 is pretty clear on this: if you're not distributing source code yourself (option a), or a written offer to sell it (option b), then you must "Accompany [the program] with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code". Unless you count disassembling the install CD, they haven't met this at all.

Or are you suggesting that each distro made from Ubuntu must have its own separate repository for the source? That clearly flies in the face of what already exists.

You're going to have to be more specific. I tried a random sampling of a few Ubuntu-derived distro, and I couldn't find one that didn't meet at least one of the GPL's 3 options:
- Xubuntu's download page has a "source" folder along with all the torrents
- MEPIS's store page has a "Need GPL source code but don't have an Internet connection?" link
- gNewSense seems to have *only* source code (SVN, etc.) on their software page
- Ichthux's download page says "1. Download Kubuntu" -- they're *just* a meta-package you install later

http://www.mepis.org/book/export/html/10222

Since they need flash and java ... no fun browsing internet without these two opened.

Oh twitter, you are so predictable. But to be fair, the aunt Tillys of the world could be just as happy with Linux as they are with Windows if it does what they want to do. What do they do with computers? They write email, chat, write and print out letters, view and print pictures... hey wait a minute, how easy is that last one? A quick visit to MEPIS help shows the camera part of it shouldn't be a problem. What about printers? Looks like MEPIS has a nice guide for that, too.

Things are looking good so far.

But what else do the aunt Tillys of the world like to do? Browse the web. Preferably any part of the web that requires a bazillion plugins like flash. And here MEPIS falls flat. Getting all the required add ons into any Linux based browser has always been a total pain in the ass, and quite frankly is one of the biggest barriers to Linux adoption by all the 'little users' of the world. These are the people who don't want to do much with their computers, and they have no particular loyalty towards nor skill with Microsoft's products. If only they could do all of the few things they actually want to do with computers on Linux, we'd have twenty million converts in a day. But multimedia playback and browser plug-in support have always been a nightmare under Linux, and those are two of the most important issues to the vast majority of potential adoptees.

Autopatcher is for when you are visiting your aunt Tilly and don't want to spend four hours downloading all the latest patches for her over her dialup.

Next time, just bring a CD.

Red Hat is arguably bigger than SuSE and Ubuntu combined (distrowatch numbers aside). Most of the real kernel and GCC developers work for Red Hat.

If anything, Ubuntu and SuSE devs should close up shop and start working on Fedora.

Note, I am a Debian user. As far as I'm concerned Ubuntu's fork of Debian isn't exactly inspiring. And yes, I did use Ubuntu as my primary desktop for more than a year (5.04, 5.10 and 6.06). It was good to see MEPIS switch back to Debian from Ubuntu.

why don't you just pay the upgrade fee and get a complete, well-tested package instead of a bunch of disjoint shareware utilities?

Because the well tested upgrades cost nothing:

• Mepis
• Debian
• Fedora
• Xandros
• and so on and so forth

In the free software world there are no "disjoint" utilities because everyone can share their libraries and common routines in ways no two commercial applications ever can. "Smooth" and "unified" begin with freedom.

it will be really easy to convince about 90% of the population that buying a computer with Microsoft inside is evil...

90% of the population wants nothing to do with Vista already. M$ is breaking XP, and a nice live CD like Mepis can seal the deal.

Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now ...

BIOS makes it hard to boot from external media and PCs have all sorts of M$ damaged hardware attached to them. M$ has played the same sorts of games with BIOS that they have played with Winmodems and word docs. Their specs are usually over complex "extensible" non standards that encourage wasteful customizations that no one but M$ can deal with. The success of Linux on such hardware is a miracle that proves the power of free software development. You can make linux system images that are 60MB and smaller, but you are hard pressed to make the average PC boot off anything but a CD or hard drive.

The workaround is to cart a "liveCD" and a USB flash home drive. Live CDs pack in 2 Gigs worth of system files, which is enough to haul around a complete and auto configuring system. A DVD can contain an insane quantity of software. Flash drives are now large enough to carry lots of files, but it's still easier to sftp to your home box.

Mepis used flash for your home directory, with optional encryption, in 2005. Here's the announcement. You booted off the CD and logged in as the "onthego" user. This is not as quick sounding as yours, but it's easy.

I'm not sure if they had it set up to install applications to the flash drive, but that should not be hard. It would also not be hard to make a custom boot CD with Debian.

So I'd be glad to have something that's KDE based that I can recommend to anyone, but if it's Kubuntu based, I'm very weary.

The further away you get from M$, the better off you are. IE is the pits but other browsers on the platform will use M$'s flawed underlying code at times for compatibility. There are lots of IE specific bones on this one but once the machine is compromised anything is possible. You keep IE around for that one page that needs it, right? All it takes is a rotten banner ad to blow you out that one time you use it. M$'s internet services are starting to mirror their PC performance when it comes handing out malware. The more you use M$, the worse off you are.

The next time you end up wiping and reloading because of problems like this, why not save time and install something that just works?

The only story I want to hear about Vista security is what it fixes. We already know what Microsoft broke.

I've been telling you for years and I'll tell you again. The fix is:

• here
• and here
• and here
• or here

Diversity is the only solution to internet security. The user gains immediate security in the short term. The community gains security in the long term as weak platforms are eliminated and can no longer be used to attack strong ones. Everyone wins when the monoculture ends. Free software provides both transparency and a diversity of hard targets. Confronted with rising costs, criminals will go back to their usual meat space businesses.

Mepis (http://mepis.org/) is the distro Kubuntu should have been. It defaults to KDE & uses the Ubuntu repositories but it's set up correctly out of the box and is pretty snappy even on my 500mhz notebook.

Checked mine, its present :( Anyone know if its safe to make that file and its registry entry 'disappear' ?

Sure, just go get the Mepis Patch. This will end all of your activeX problems. It won't end your Flash, Adobe and other problems but those are minor in comparison.

Really, do you think eliminating this one control will make your computer safe? Chances are there are coppies that will "respawn" later, a common malware trick, and that there are far nastier controls you don't know about. The malice is built in from Redmod before anyone else gets it.

Make sure to install the non-free media libraries (e.g. libxine-extracodecs, Adobe Flash 9 beta, libdvdcss2).

Mepis comes with all of that but decss, which is against the law to distribute in the US. Mepis now uses Ubunto as a base but still has the same KDE look and feel it always did. You might also have to get the "essential" Windoze Media codecs listed in the xine comand line dump, if you want to play some types of WMV. For all that, Mepis is a great time saver on installation for "normal" users who want all of the above non free junk.

You are asking for the impossible, as long as you keep them on M$. There is no end of effort required, as the last six years of "security is job #1" have shown, and none of it is easy to explain. When your parents lose data they care about, it won't be their fault it will be yours for not moving them. It is indeed only a mater of time before their computer is malwared out. It is much easier to move them to Mepis, Ubunto, Fedora or Debian, than it is to explain all of the easy to do things they should not do that won't mater in the end anyway. Microsoft's operating systems are so flawed that no amount of user inconvenience will fix it. It's better to offer them software that's designed well to begin with.

Want friendly? Try MEPIS. MP3 codecs out of the box and the same repos as Ubuntu.
It's the best kept (non) secret out there.

If you can't make a difference, who can? You are the expert and the customer has come to you for advice. If you think free software can meet the customer's needs, it's your duty to tell them so and why it might be better for them.

I've had better luck with Mepis and Xandros than Ubunto or Fedora. Mepis is now based on Ubunto, so things might change, but it has been by far the easiest distribution to give a normal Windoze user what they want. From a live CD, you get KDE, Firefox with working Flash, OO2 and more. Xandros is better for users with heavy application dependencies. They make it easy for you to get and use Crossover Office and now Parallels, so the user can easily use whatever legacy application they need for business. Fedora is beautiful and makes system administration very easy for the user but comes at a price of relative installation complexity. I have not worked with Ubunto enough to find it's strengths, mostly because I prefer KDE over Gnome. KDE, for one reason or another, is easier for a Windoze user to navigate.

OS details are unimportant. What matters is that you, the expert, can tell the user that there's something better out there. As the Vista monster rolls over the major vendors, the user will remember what you said. If everyone is brave enough to say what they are thinking the user will remember a regular chorus.

Bro, gear up for MEPIS. Debian-based distro that uses the Ubuntu repositories.
64 bit coming next month, but you owe it to yourself to rip a Live CD and check it out.
I'm freaking loving it. Seriously. Warren was a NeXT developer.

Since I've never been able to get anything other than XFCE to run in 128MB, I'm sure as hell neither KDE or GNOME are going to like 128, never mind 64, unlike Windows 98/SE/ME which functioned just fine for the most part. Go ahead and prove me wrong. And running a custom haxx0rz version of FVWM doesn't count.

The first thing to note is that XFCE is just as good and better than a Windoze GUI. It gives you everything that Windoze does and virtual desktops.

The second thing to note is that 128 MB is enough for most distributions. The minimum required memory to run the Mepis Live CD, which uses a KDE desktop. Knoppix is even lighter and provides a little better performance. The default Etch install is Gnome 2. If you have not tried it in the last six months or so, you have missed some very impressive performance gains which make it very fast. A default Etch install will boot in less time than w2k and run with comparable speed.

Finally, I've see it done with less. For a year and a half I did all of my graduate classwork with a 233 MHz PII running Sarge. It started with 128 and I moved it to 196. I ran KDE but moved to Enlightenment. Uptime measured in months and it could run OO. I've seen Mepis run on a 133 MHz PI. It was slow, but it got the job done. With more memory it would have been fine. People who want to run OO should get 256MB for performance reasons. That's not hard to come by. People who want to run with even less hardware should look into Puppy, Feather, DSL or Xubunto which do all Win98 ever did for anyone.

A binary search would be better. Split the search space (the set of startup programs) in half. Enable or disable one half. If the problem appears, adjust your search space to that half.

Start with zero, all of them turned off. If this does not work, and it won't, you better wipe and reload. Boot off a liveCD, backup data files and start the reinstall.

Windoze never gets better, so you are better off with an ,alternative that installs in 20 minutes, does everthing you want and then keeps doing it. I once swore that I'd never suffer through a windoze install again, the reboots, the driver hunt, the software hunt, the endless screens of "I agree master" and now, I'm told, multiple reboots over "security updates". I've only had to break that vow once but never for my own computers.

Nowadays, we need to support not only people at the office, but friends, family, friends of the family, family of the friends....

You are not supporting them, you are supporting M$. Why should you make it cheaper and easier for them to surrender their freedom? When you ask them why they use Windoze, they will tell you it's because Windoze is cheap and easy. It's neither. The solution is to quit supporting Microsoft.

The only help I'll give people is to migrate them to free software. I'm not going to waste my time keeping up with all the arcane Windoze patch, AV and firewall nonsense, much less waste all day applying it. The closest I'll come to supporting Windoze is to right size their NTFS partition and let grub point to it, and I'll only do that after the client has run M$'s pathetic defrag software all night to clean it up. If their computer is too far gone for that, they need to take it to a local computer store to have it wiped and reloaded. The free software part is easy, just boot off suitable live CD. A nice touch is to make a fat filesystem and move all of their work to it so they can manipulate it from either boot. People who migrate seldom look back and they require much less "support". Giving the user free software on a non free platform won't solve your support problem directly. Sooner or later, the system preferences will mysteriously revert to the M$ default and M$ style bit rot will take the whole computer down anyway.

My thumb drive is only useful for getting things off Windoze systems. A USB drive is handy for saving out files your friend wants to keep before you send the computer into the shop for a wipe and reload. Thumb drives are useful for getting small files you want from computers you are forced to use.

I like google groups better than the google linux search, but I don't think either are the best sites. IMHO any site that purports to have all answers to all linux questions isn't going to do very well with any semi-complex question. They just can't have the know-how.

IRC channels are good, but it is kind of like IM - if the devs aren't on you're out of luck.

I think it really depends on the distro. For Ubuntu, there is Ubuntu forums for SuSE there are SuSE forums. The same goes for Gentoo, Mepis, Debian, Redhat, Fedora or any other distro out there. The larger projects also have their own forums.

Getting as specific a location as you can will help (e.g. the google group on Debian is better than the one on Linux users for Debian problems). That is why IRC is great when you have a reasonably well-researched and specific question. Before you ask a dev (who may be working on fixing the problem, or may have already fixed it, or may be plagued by the same question over and over again) please read how to ask a question properly. That way you are maximizing the chance that you get the right answer, people won't get mad at you, and you won't be wasting anyone else's time.

Check out Ubuntu, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. All of those are easy to use and one of those should give you the right mix of hardware support.

I mean if Microsoft is evil then they'd do something like this and doing something like this would prove Microsoft is evil - it's a perfect circle!

It's much easier to point out that free software users don't have these kinds of problems and give them a copy of Mepis to solve their problems. Yes, M$ has taken the upgrade train and user extortion to new lows but it's nothing new nor is it the worst part of running non free software. Following every detail of the M$ lie machine is a waste of time.

MP3 is not a completely free format, RedHat just chooses to stick with free software, same goes for DVD playback. Windows isn't much different, with no support for Divx, Xvid, CSS's DVD's, or Ogg/Theora files without finding and downloading codecs.

2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.

You've most likely installed patches for your Windows kernel, you just didn't realize it was a kernel patch when you did it.

3. Point 2 also breaks my nvidia drivers. I don't want to re-compile new drivers everytime there's a new 'patch'. For the love of god, why?!

This I wholeheartedly agree with, I hate this, and wish that there was some mechanism to deal with this. Some distros that have precompiled binaries for Nvidia drivers will do it with thier kernel update, but RedHat doesn't, since the NVidia driver isn't completely free.

4. X-Windows. What a mess. Why do I have to tell it my x & y refresh rates for my monitor? Windows just 'knows'. Many more things here I feel that X-Windows should just 'know' - the number of buttons on my USB mouse for-instance. If Windows can do it, there's no reason why Linux can't. Also, X-Windows 'feels' slower than Windows. I'm sure there's good reasons for this, but I don't care; Windows is snappier.

Windows isn't very good at picking your optimal refresh rate though. It simply gives you a nice and safe 60Hz, and leaves it at that. The slowness you feel is more likely an issue with Gnome over X-Windows. Try a KDE based distro, I think you'll agree.

5. Lack of decent file-browser. The best I've come across is Nautilus in a mode that resembles Windows Explorer. It'll do for now, but as far as I'm aware, offers no context-sensitive menus for applications (like the Winamp "Play in Winamp" right-click menu on folders.

Try a KDE based distro. Konqueror is the cats meow of file browsers. I find myself missing is uber functionality when I'm in Windows. It really does kick ass for the poweruser.

Actually, I think that's largely it. In all, Linux has, and is continuing to be great fun to play with. So many cool tools - yum being one of them. I'll stick to Linux @ home; it can only get better, but I'd be interested to know what people think of the above points - any suggestions maybe? I want this to work after all...

I would highly recommend trying the lasest beta from Mepis. I think you'll be much happier. Go here: Link, hit one of the mirrors, go to the 'testing' directory, and grab SimplyMEPIS_6.0-beta5_i386.iso. It's a live CD with a nice installer that you can run from there.

Fan-fucking-tastic! M$ is finally going to turn off all their spambots and DDoS units that regularly explode their portion of the net. What? It does not do that and they don't care? Yep, no change detected.

Here's the quickest way to turn off this Gary and Ace "tool".

IMHO, it's a lot easier for a Windows user to pick up and use than Ubuntu - It Just Works.

It's a LiveCD so you can check it out before commiting to installing it and it's got a great installer that on a modern machine it only takes about 15 minutes to install and happily sets up dual-boot with Windows.

Ubuntu is very good - I used to use Ubuntu. Mandriva is also worth a look - I used Mandrake for years and I think it's the best of the RPM based distros. But for my money, Mepis has them all beat.

If you'd like to get a feel for Linux before installing, try out Mepis (which I'm pretty sure is a LiveCD) or Knoppix (which is not very polished, but does give you a KDE desktop to play with - but Ubuntu is leagues better eye-candy/usability wise).

There is Kubuntu, but it doesn't have Gnome at all, which will eventually cause you problems. You can install Kubuntu then Gnome (which is what I did), but I'd suggest Ubuntu + KDE (as I had to fiddle to get all the necessary parts of Gnome installed under Kubuntu). Then run Automatrix and you've got a fully functional system ready to go.

I started out with SuSE 9.3 (a buddy of mine at work installed it for me). Then within a few weeks 10.0 was out and we did a fresh install. SuSE took a bit of hand holding to get "up and running" (decess for DVDs, mp3 decoding, etc - PackMan is your friend). After playing around in SuSE for a few months (including getting VMware running, then attempting unsuccessfully to install Xandros and Linspire, but successfully getting Win2k running), I got my wife a new laptop (same model as mine with SuSE) and decided to try Kubuntu out.

Frankly for new Linux converts, (k)Ubuntu rocks. The weird issues I have on my SuSE laptop's Synaptic touchpad do not occur under (k)Ubuntu, and it correctly recognized the widescreen monitor (SuSE didn't). Updating is a breeze - just last night I updated her system... 10% of her packages needed to be updated (1500-ish IIRC) and it took a grand total of 25-30 minutes including a kernel update!

I was about to go from SuSE 10.0 to (k)Ubuntu when 10.1 was released a few weeks ago. So I though what the hell and did an update. 10.1 is nice, but it's got some MAJOR issues - the autoupdate, well doesn't, my ATI Drivers no-go-no-mo, Azureus and eventually kTorrent stopped working despite repeated program reinstalls... Basically 10.1 is not for you (or me).

I'll be installing (k)Ubuntu on my laptop this weekend.

I've gotta say, after a bit of a teething process (a good 4-6 weeks of Google searches to get "simple" shit to work, like my ATI drivers, VMware, etc) I'm sooo very much more happy under (k)Ubuntu (even under SuSE 10.0, which is good, just more fiddly)! That 25-30 minute update I mentioned above was while I was surfing the web with 15-20 tabs open in Firefox with the system being responsive the entire time. You just don't get that under Windows!

Good luck on the migration! And if you need help, I'll toss as much your way as I can (being a 4 month old Linux n00b myself).

You are not doing your users any favors. M$ is going to push the cosmetic changes on them anyway but nothing else will change for them.

Is Windoze really worth the never ending exploits and all that entails? How many times can people put up with software reinstalls only to watch hopelessly as the same pop up advertisements mysteriously appear and already poor performance steadily degrades to useless?

Now is the time to move. In the next year or so, Microsoft will release the biggest cosmetic changes to their software ever. You could buy all new hardware for the pleasure of this learning experience, or download a CD and install some software that just works. The free solution has been stable and annoyance free for eight years or so, while the M$ people have boasted the same but never delivered. The middle road, in price and freedom is Mac. I've never had to spend the money to find out if it's worth while.

Moving away from Windoze has been great in more than theory for me.

That's strange, the version available in Debian Etch has worked well for half a year or so.

I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?

Users I've talked to complain that it's clumsy. For instance, you can't collapse the tree, there's no file system view, etc.

Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task.

I named my favorite programs for each task, you don't have to use all of them. Still, all of them come with most distributions, such as the excellent Mepis, which runs from CD and can walk you through a GUI install in 20 minutes or so. The braver could take the hour or two to install Debian proper and get those things they like best. Dependency resolution is only difficult when you use non free or legally suppressed software like DeCSS to watch DVDs.

No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.

I'll bet there are more Amarok users than there are WMP users. WMP has that bad a reputation, and that's one of the big reasons Apple has thrived.

Still, you are right the lack of major computer vendor advocacy of free software and massive FUD makes it too much trouble for all but the most motivated of users. That's what makes iTunes the best easy choice. They just don't know what they are missing. We will see what kind of a deal they have actually gotten when the RIAA decides it's time to resell everything again and DRM takes it's bite. If the Purge deal is not a good enough demonstration of their intentions, I'm not sure what is.

Think of Vistas new features as similar to what you might find on a new model car shiny new mag wheels, a finely tuned suspension and a set of high-performance, all-season tires. It still looks like a car and youre still going to know where the pedals are and how to drive but you will find that youll be able to push it to a new set of higher limits.

You can say that about KDE with a straight face. I can say it about Gnome and Enlightenment too. Oh yeah, Mepis' GUI install won't wipe your XP or your files in the half hour it takes to get everything right.

Everything is in place for a GNU/Linux desktop revolution. M$ has shot itself in the head. They've gone six years without a new release, despite bragging that all sorts of fantastic features were just around the corner for years. As the corner finally becomes visible, as the worst OS experience ever, the only thing left of the promissed features is massive hardware requirements, DRM and media that won't work. To make matters worse, they think they have the world by the nuts and are tightening all their usual anti competitive nonsense. Being free has never been so easy. M$ has lost it.

"Premium Ready" is this and this:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero, that is:.
  • Has a WDDM Driver. Wonder how much the SDK for that will cost.
  • Supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware.
  • Supports 32 bits per pixel.
  • 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels (1280 x 1024)
  • 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels
  • 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304, 000 pixels
  • Vista Upgrade Advisor running on Windows XP will tell you.
• 128 MB of graphics memory. WTF? it't 64M but it's really 128M
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive3.
• Audio output capability. What, no mention of drivers?
• Internet access capability.

Oh yeah, and you paid a freaking Premium for what's going to be XP + 128MB RAM performan ce. 15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office, there's no room on this system for Linux now is th ere, chuckles Bill Gates to himself. Meanwhile, Mepis g ives you all the same programs and features for a mere 2GB disk space and 128 MB of RAM, and not a lot of comput er. I've run with a lot less.

Hot Air Graphics are here compared to KDE :

• a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE.
• a more integrated browser, KDE's Konqueror does much more We're talking seamless network integration, like ftp, sftp, htt p, smb, whatever to local files on top of the rest, not to mention complete user choice ins tead of the "helpful" world of extension stealing and Google blocking "integration" M$ is s o fond of.
• Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to th e late 90s, Mr. Gates.
• Window Preview Thumbnails and a useless 3d toy, because they have yet to develop a decent multi desktop and virtual screen window manager. Once again, this seriously lags free software like the 1999 kpager. Kpager looks nicer now but Enlightenment's is better still

"Premium Ready" is this and this:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero, that is:.
  • Has a fucking WDDM Driver.
  • Supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware.
  • Supports 32 bits per pixel.
  • 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels (1280 x 1024)
  • 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels
  • 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304, 000 pixels
  • Vista Upgrade Advisor running on Windows XP will tell you.
• 128 MB of graphics memory. WTF? it't 64M but it's really 128M
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive3.
• Audio output capability. What, no mention of drivers?
• Internet access capability.

Oh yeah, and you paid a freaking Premium for what's going to be XP + 128MB RAM performan ce. 15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office, there's no room on this system for Linux now is th ere, chuckles Bill Gates to himself. Meanwhile, Mepis g ives you all the same programs and features for a mere 2GB disk space and 128 MB of RAM, and not a lot of comput er. I've run with a lot less.

Hot Air Graphics are here compared to KDE :

• a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE.
• a more integrated browser, KDE's Konqueror does much more We're talking seamless network integration, like ftp, sftp, htt p, smb, whatever to local files on top of the rest, not to mention complete user choice ins tead of the "helpful" world of extension stealing and Google blocking "integration" M$ is s o fond of.
• Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to th e late 90s, Mr. Gates.
• Window Preview Thumbnails and a useless 3d toy, because they have yet to develop a decent multi desktop and virtual screen window manager. Once again, this seriously lags free software like the 1999 kpager. Kpager looks nicer now but Enli ghtenment's is better still, and I still routi

Rather than move to Vista, these people should seriously consider distributions like Mepis or Xandros. Both install in a snap and Xandros makes it easy to use Crossover Office for those few unfortunates who must still use M$ Word and other terminally kludged junk. I had a look at the Vista Ready page myself and here's are requirements and a feature compare with KDE, the desktop used by both distros. They work great on the computers your neighbors throw out too.

The Mac charge to X86 is starting to more G3s to the trash as well, and most of the same free software runs on them too.

"Premium Ready" is this and this:

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
• 1 GB of system memory.
• A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero, that is:.
  • Has a fucking WDDM Driver.
  • Supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware.
  • Supports 32 bits per pixel.
  • 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels (1280 x 1024)
  • 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels
  • 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels
  • Vista Upgrade Advisor running on Windows XP will tell you.
• 128 MB of graphics memory. WTF? it't 64M but it's really 128M
• 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
• DVD-ROM Drive3.
• Audio output capability. What, no mention of drivers?
• Internet access capability.

Oh yeah, and you paid a freaking Premium for what's going to be XP + 128MB RAM performance. 15 GB for the OS, 25 GB for Office, there's no room on this system for Linux now is there, chuckles Bill Gates to himself. Meanwhile, Mepis gives you all the same programs and features for a mere 2GB disk space and 128 MB of RAM, and not a lot of computer. I've run with a lot less.

Hot Air Graphics are here compared to KDE :

• a program menu with a search feature, old hat for KDE.
• a more integrated browser, KDE's Konqueror does much more We're talking seamless network integration, like ftp, sftp, http, smb, whatever to local files on top of the rest, not to mention complete user choice instead of the "helpful" world of extension stealing and Google blocking "integration" M$ is so fond of.
• Transparency, finally. This has already been compared above. Welcome to the late 90s, Mr. Gates.
• Window Preview Thumbnails and a useless 3d toy, because they have yet to develop a decent multi desktop and virtual screen window manager. Once again, this seriously lags free software like the 1999 kpager. Kpager looks nicer now but Enlightenment's is better still, and I still routinely run it with 24 or so virtual

What planet do you live on? There's lot's excitement for people who discover GNU/Linux. Expectations are typically low, thanks to massive FUD campaigns. A by product of that FUD is an air of the dangerous and new that's irresistible to many. Those that bother to try and stick with it long enough to overcome the bad habits of commercial software are amply rewarded. In the end, they find the joy of free software, which continues to grow. Browsing software repositories is like walking through a candy store where everything is free and the candy only gets better as time goes on. New programs make it feel like Christmas all year long. What does the five year and counting M$ train wreck release cycle have to match that? Zip, zero, zilch, hype, FUD and other hot air.

Most of the people I know have barely heard of free software and are heavily FUDed about it. They have this strange notion that it's hard to use and won't work with their hardware. Some even confuse it with copyright violation and think it's somehow tainted and immoral. Big players, like IBM, Lowes, Chrysler, etc, have helped to alleviate the "rebel" image but the FUD still stick because the big dumb vendors like Dell still don't offer a GNU/Linux desktop machines for end users.

Anyone who's used a GNU/Linux system for any length of time knows the FUD for the BS but the discovery never ends. Media players are a prime example. I've been using free software since Red Hat 5.x in 1998 and I've watched a steady and constant improvement. Back then, things were so nasty I did not even bother with sound. Then came vorbis, sox, autoconfiguration, ALSA, xine and suddenly audio is easy. Today, you can get live CDs that run Amarok, which has to be one of the finest media players available. Amarok excels as a media player as Konqueror and Firefox excel as browsers. Everywhere you look at a GNU/Linux system you see more excellence. The product is greater than the sum of the parts and M$ can't keep up to save their life. Hell, they are finally getting a browser with tabs and a multiple desktop GUI, but it's so bloated and top heavy with, virus checking and DRM it won't even work.

The final, unmatchable and exciting discovery is how free software really works. Far from being evil, free software is morally superior. No free software project has ever sued a public school for copying a text editor and none ever will misuse the government and laws in such a hideous way. What Microsoft dissmisses as "Communism" is actually co-operative capitalism and free market innovation at it's finest. Getting something for nothing and finding out that's the way it should have been all along feels great. The lies and harm M$ heaps on free software all backfire and the user is left with an unshakable commitment to their own software freedom.