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http://www.pclinuxonline.com/?PHPSESSID=ea0f3bea1301c2c17d046d3a4d4ffac0

run mainstream software that is available to the average user.... Can Linux do that? No.

Mainstream software like MS Office? Runs in WINE.
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/InstallingOffice Wine

World of Warcraft?
run mainstream software that is available to the average user.

Or even running Windows XP and applications that run on XP?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=183209

Interesting, because I always thought that GNOME looked closer to OSX and KDE looked closer to XP.

I still run SuSE 9.2. You already know about LinuxQuestions.org. If your ready try these links:

http://www.justlinux.com/
http://www.yolinux.com/
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/

Some online magazines (I suggest you read the past issues):

http://www.linuxmagazine.com/
http://linuxgazette.net/

Enjoy,

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/QuickStartSynapt ic

As easy as the steps for Linspire CNR, and all at a cost of $0 per year.

Synaptic is even more of a killer application than CNR.

http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/
http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/action.html

If you dislike Mandriva for certain reasons, but actually like it otherwise, you might want to give PcLinux OS a spin. I can't vouch for it myself but I've read several people at distrowatch claim that it's what Mandriva should be. Even though PCLinux OS is still in beta, these folks say it beat Mandriva but was still very Mandriva-like. I dunno myself, but I thought others might want to know.

Great points on all the embedded linux systems already in the market place (heh, I may even mention the fact they may be using linux already the next time someone asks about linux!) However I think to be really mainstream Linux needs more *advertising*. Such as a major brand computer manufacturer offering it as a choice on their new home user systems (and not just the el-cheapo wal-mart pc's). If the computer comes with the OS installed and brief instructions on how to use the package manager to get more *free* software then I can see more Joe sixpacks saying "well hell, sign me up!"

When people say how much better/easier Windows is because it's more popular I can only think about car factory stereos. Sure they suck ass, or some are adequate or maybe fairly good, but you know for your money you can get a helluva more bang for your buck with an aftermarket unit, but you have to go through the trouble of an *install* and slightly alien interface. Sound familiar?

We need to get a distro or two to put up a joint ad with a respectable pc manufacturer a la Firefox NYTimes ad. I'm sure quite a lot people saw the name Firefox for the first time with that one ad (or maybe just the buzz from the ad). Heck, maybe just an ad telling consumers they should demand OS choices from their pc manufacturers could get some to consider including the option (heck if the commercial distro takes care of the software support I could see this happening). I can see it, a nice ad along the lines of: "Tom spent his whole weekend cleaning out spyware out of his Windows(tm) machine. David learned how to use (insert distro name here) - with the security and power of Linux - and within a few hours he was on his way to surfing the internet, balancing the budget and at long last making that wedding album photo cd he promised his wife 2 years ago..." "Linux, get it, learn it, do more done with your time. What can you accomplish today?"

BTW, I used to think alot of Linux distro's were maybe too complicated for the average user, then I experienced the simplicity of the choices laid out in Ubuntu and the glory that is the control panel in Mandriva, now I believe the average person can handle Linux (if the applications they want to use fall within the choices available that is) with just some simple education. If you havn't seen the Mandriva control panel and you don't want to install it to see it, just try out PC Linux OS. It's based on Mandriva and has pretty much the same control panel (just a little hidden in the menu).

Proper video detection seems to be one of Ubuntu's weaknesses. On three different machines, it failed to detect the video properly and defaulted to 640x480, which is useless because most dialogs don't even fit onto that screen resolution, I know I can go into xorg.conf and add HorizSync and VertRefresh, but come on, every other live CD's been able to properly detect the video on these boxes. But I digress...

It also gave me a slew of errors on critical packages in the post-install process, so something was really going wrong for me. After downloaded the CD again and two more installation attempts, I gave up. It's too bad, because I really what I've seen of the live CD. Maybe next time.

Instead, I went with PCLinuxOS, a Mandrake/Mandriva derivative. It's also got a live CD, but (unlike Ubuntu), you don't need a seperate install CD. As always, disk partitioning was a bit of a hassle (I dual boot), but once that was out of the way, everything was smooth sailing. Nice KDE environment, and everything stays up to date with apt-get. I managed to wipe out the boot manager at one point. I did a complete reinstall and got everything back.

One of these days I need to learn to do backups, through.

Proper video detection seems to be one of Ubuntu's weaknesses. On three different machines, it failed to detect the video properly and defaulted to 640x480, which is useless because most dialogs don't even fit onto that screen resolution, I know I can go into xorg.conf and add HorizSync and VertRefresh, but come on, every other live CD's been able to properly detect the video on these boxes. But I digress...

It also gave me a slew of errors on critical packages in the post-install process, so something was really going wrong for me. After downloaded the CD again and two more installation attempts, I gave up. It's too bad, because I really what I've seen of the live CD. Maybe next time.

Instead, I went with PCLinuxOS, a Mandrake/Mandriva derivative. It's also got a live CD, but (unlike Ubuntu), you don't need a seperate install CD. As always, disk partitioning was a bit of a hassle (I dual boot), but once that was out of the way, everything was smooth sailing. Nice KDE environment, and everything stays up to date with apt-get. I managed to wipe out the boot manager at one point. I did a complete reinstall and got everything back.

One of these days I need to learn to do backups, through.

Not too many but here's some I could find:

The Inquirer
HTML FixIt.Com
PCLinuxOnline

PCLinuxOnline seems to be the original news breaker as both the above articles refer to it.

link

The original article was at PCLinuxOnline and contains a lot more information. http://www.pclinuxonline.com/article.php?sid=9792

For server use either FreeBSD/OpenBSD or Debian

for the desktop PCLinuxOS http://www.pclinuxonline.com/ is very hard to beat in features/look and updates.

Unlike SuSE and Redhat you don't have to go somewhere else to get important parts to make it a full featured distro such as DVD/MP3 playback and all possible plugins.
And the support community is A+

Yes, you can make most other distros reach a similar level but only after significant efforts and work.

Of course, you'll want to load it with lots of games before sending it out.

Texstar also created a new distro, based on Mandrake, which is here.I'm not sure how different from straight Mandrake it is, I've only played briefly with one of their live CDs. Might be worth a look for anyone who likes Mandrake, but isn't 100% satisfied with it. Personally, I've found Mandrake 10 good enough to stop installing new distros for now.

Texstar has his own distro now :)

http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/index.html

I never had much luck with the SuSE liveCDs. The best one I tried was PCLinuxOS. It detected and configured all my hardware automatically and it gave me a beautiful looking desktop.

The pclinuxonline folks have, IMHO, a really good Mandrake live CD put together. You can find it here. They are currently working on the next release which is due...anytime... (They had put an ISO out on the mirrors, but then yanked it right away.)

TurboTax online is great for me with T1 at work, not so much for my Dad at rural 15,000 baud. It would be even cooler if TurboTax arrived on a self booting CD like Knoppix or PCLinuxOS, which is a Mandrake Live CD. I should not have to install TurboTax on on a hard drive every season.

I don't know about WINE, but I do know how to Install iPod Update v1.4/v2.2 in GNU/Linux.

Bart Lagerweij of Bart's Boot diskfame has created a Windows Live CD very similar to Microsoft's Windows Pre-installation environment. The BartPE disk is "a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on." It has specific packages which enable you to perform work on a Windows NTFS system without booting from the hard drive. I find it still very cool and useful.

It compares favorably, to me, the functionality of the PCLinuxOS Mandrake live CD. Both enable me to boot, plug in my USB hard drive and copy files from my Windows XP/2000 NTFS partition with no security checks!

Not that I care but looks like Slackware is sticking with XFree86 4.4.0.

Well if you go on over to pcLinuxOnline TexStar has his own LiveCD of Mandrake 9.2. It can be installed to the Hard Drive and he has a package repository that uses apt-get.

The Debian social contract is a pretty good indicator of their intentions.

Maybe have a look at the history of the project as well.

Debian is by far the most stable and easy to maintain distro I have ever used. Nothing comes close for a server. For Debian with a desktop flavor check out Mepis. Mepis is a Debian-based distro so you get the Debian package management with a better installer and some more up-to-date packages. Mepis rview.

I can't believe nobody has mentioned Textar's PCLinuxOS project yet. It's based on Mandrake 9.2 plus Texstars enhancements.

You can find more info here: PCLinuxOS Homepage

It's still early in development but looks really promising! They just released Preview 5 on the 20th.

As far as Live CDs go, Knoppix is still superior for the development tools, and setting up persistant storage that plays well with FAT32. But this last release is starting to close that gap. And it looks stunning.

I use Mandrake 9.2, but PCLOS is so much better... My wife likes to watch Starting Over, but she can't see any of the previews on the website because they are in Quicktime. Naturally, there's no QuickTime for Linux plugin available. With PCLOS, it just works.

I've managed to muck something up on my Mandrake desktop, because I have to wait an additional minute after the desktop is installed while it's doing something - I can't figure what, probably trying to get the soundcard to work - and reinstalling Mandrake hasn't taken care of it. CUPS doesn't want to talk to my laser printer, but it works just fine under lpr... It's a complete mess.

I'm not quite ready to dump Mandrake (PCLOS is still beta), but some of Texstar's RPMs will be installed on my machine Real Soon Now.

As far as Live CDs go, Knoppix is still superior for the development tools, and setting up persistant storage that plays well with FAT32. But this last release is starting to close that gap. And it looks stunning.

I use Mandrake 9.2, but PCLOS is so much better... My wife likes to watch Starting Over, but she can't see any of the previews on the website because they are in Quicktime. Naturally, there's no QuickTime for Linux plugin available. With PCLOS, it just works.

I've managed to muck something up on my Mandrake desktop, because I have to wait an additional minute after the desktop is installed while it's doing something - I can't figure what, probably trying to get the soundcard to work - and reinstalling Mandrake hasn't taken care of it. CUPS doesn't want to talk to my laser printer, but it works just fine under lpr... It's a complete mess.

I'm not quite ready to dump Mandrake (PCLOS is still beta), but some of Texstar's RPMs will be installed on my machine Real Soon Now.

Or he could try MandrakeMove or Texstar's live CD based on Mandrake, PCLinuxOS 2K4.

PClinuxOS Preview 4 Bootable CD based on MDK9.2.

PClinuxOS Preview 4 Bootable CD based on MDK9.2.

For anyone interested in MandrakeMove, you may also want to check out PCLinuxOS. It's a similar project lead by Texstar (famous for many Mandrake RPM contribs), based on Mandrake 9.2.

More info can be found here.

Get it here.

From
pclinuxonline.

I took the liberty of calling some of the toll free numbers of the companies on the Canopy Group list. What I found out is that the Canopy Group is an investor in each of these companies and also the majority investor in SCO-CALDERA.

One of the people I talked to indicated that at the time I called, the entire management team of her company was in a meeting with their legal council (Man I would have loved to be fly on that wall).

My thinking is that the Canopy Group filed the IBM suit with full knowledge that they were destroying SCO-CALDERA by doing so. But, because SCO-CALDERA was not making any money anyway, it was not a big sacrifice, and the potential benefit was a large financial pay off if they could get IBM to settle. However, I think the weak point in their strategy is that they may not have expected the fallout to extend beyond SCO-Caldera, and threaten to destroy all of their other investments as well. They may have thought that they could keep the negative response localized so that SCO-Caldera was their only investment that would need to be sacrificed to pursue the strategy. My speculation is that if their other holdings are threatened, then they will need to reevaluate the cost/benefit equation of their actions. Therefore I think that it is imperative that we demonstrate that we can bring pressure to bear, not just to SCO-CALDERA, which was already a lost cause, but to all the Canopy Group companies. I would therefore urge a massive campaign against these companies, beginning with a flood of phone calls and e-mails. Next, we should do everything in our power to insure that the entire industry knows that these companies are on the black list and are associated with SCO-CALDERA by way of the Canopy Group, and should be avoided like the plague. The Canopy Group web site also has information on their executive team: http://www.canopy.com/aboutus/managementteam.htm

I believe that we need to make our intentions clear to all of the members of the executive team. Next, with a little research we should be able to find out who the customers of these companies are and inform them of the problem.

So, without further ado, here is the Canopy Group black list. Most of these companies have toll free numbers listed on their web site. Please help out by giving them a ring:

http://canopy.com
http://www.altiris.com
http: //www.avenueme.com
http://www.axiompress.com
htt p://www.center7.com
http://www.cerberian.com
htt p://www.clearstonehealth.com/
http://www.cogitoin c.com/
http://www.communitect.com/
http://www.da tacrystal.com/
http://www.devicelogics.com/
http ://www.devicelogics.com/
http://www.directpointe. com/
http://www.fatpipeinc.com/
http://www.geolu x.com/
http://www.gmmi.net/
http://www.helius.co m/
http://www.homepipeline.com/
http://www.iarch ives.com/
http://www.industrialtrainingzone.com/
http://www.januslogix.com/
http://www.learningop tics.com/
http://www.linuxnetworx.com/
http://ww w.store.yahoo.com/thewirelesswave/
http://www.max stream.net/
http://www.mi-corporation.com/
http: //www.mti.com/
http://www.myfamily.com
http://ww w.northfacelearning.com/
http://www.perimeterlabs .com
http://www.sabertoothtools.com/
http://www. power-innovations.com/
http://www.caldera.com/
h ttp://www.smartchiptechnologies.com/
http://www.s urfchina.com/
http://www.trolltech.com/
http://w ww.tuglet.com/
http://www.viawest.net/
http://ww w.vultus.com/
http://www.wrenchead.com/

I would urge the employees of all of these companies to take up the matter with their management. If you feel very brave, you should threaten to resign if they continue their relationship with the Canopy Group.

Let us do everything that is leagal to defend our investment in open source.

More to it, even if SCO does collect damages from IBM, there's no reason to believe that this money wouldn't be used for similar acquisitions. I'd be surprised if the folks buying into the SCOX stock lottery saw any real dividend.

If this anonymous post is to be believed, SCO has already tried to buy up more Canopy companies in July but was thwarted because of the spotlight thrown on it by places like Slashdot.

Quote:

As an employee of a company in the same office buildings as SCO and partly funded by Canopy Group, I strongly encourage a boycott of all companies funded by the Canopy Group.

There was a lot of buzz about mergers a few weeks ago. It seemed that everyone was going to join into one large company called, you know it: SCO! .......

original post

As an employee of a company in the same office buildings as SCO and partly funded by Canopy Group, I strongly encourage a boycott of all companies funded by the Canopy Group.

Taking money from Ralph Yarrow (Canopy) made all of us sick to our stomachs but we held our noses and moved into their offices in the hope their stake would stay small. And we were out of business if we didn't.

There was a lot of buzz about mergers a few weeks ago. It seemed that everyone was going to join into one large company called, you know it: SCO! That buzz ended yesterday. Now the talk, all over the group, is how to distance ourselves from SCO and Canopy. The mention of our company on Slashdot resulted in very negative feedback and two potential customers walking away. Other's got it even worse. I hear Trolltech spent most of the day on the phone smoothing things over with their customers. Upper management meetings were held all afternoon among the group's companies (I'm not privvy to those, but can guess the subject matter). Companies that were considering a merger with SCO (some as close as 5 days away) are now backpedalling as fast as they can.

Canopy Group is the key to pressuring SCO. Thats where they get their money and their actions could harm the whole group and Canopy's plans. Pressure on the Canopy Group's members will result in pressure on SCO.

Save me from SCO! Boycott Canopy Group. If they want to point a gun at their own head, I'd rather they do it away from me. Write letters to the all the Canopy Group companies. We are all very small and even a few letters would have a major effect. The three we received yesterday sent management into a tizzy. Oh, yeah. And start at the bottom of the alphabetical list of companies, please.

Thanks for listening...

See here.

More info here.

You support how many users?

Totting up all of the users who directly interface with machines I've set up, probably about forty. Solo. Indirectly (as in, I might see one call a year from or on behalf of each), probably about 200. Extra staff is hard for a small place (the difference between one and two is huge, two and three still large but not so drastic, and from there to about a dozen it's no sweat), PFY tend to be incompetent when it counts, and the next notch of competence above that tend to be independent enough to run their own show.

easier to just image machines from a generic install image

Evidently they've not tried automated network installs of Linux. (-:

Windows Update kicks the snot out of any linux distro update that I've seen so far (Red Hat, debian, SuSE)

That surprises me. While apt-get does require command-line fiddling to set it up, after that it's fire and forget. URPMI is the equivalent Mandrake tool.

I'll try putting Mandrake along side XP Pro and see if I change my mind.

Add some toys from here or the "Mandrake RPMS" section of this site's "RPM/DEB Outlet" and see if it helps. I recommend Thac for audio toys, the Penguin Liberation Front for video CoDecs and Drakian if any particular Debian package took your fancy.

Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this?

Here is a link to how to very easily get KDE to have its own little "start new session" button. Took me about a minute and a half to set up. I hear Suse has this working by default, and I would bet that Mandrake and Redhat will follow suit soon, given how easy it is.

urpmi and texstar are the reason that I absolutly LOVE mandrake. For a while after I installed 9.1 there were a bunch of things that just weren't working right, and my kernel source was out of sync with my actual kernel so I couldn't compile some drivers (like my linmodem driver) - in short, it sucked. Then I found easy urpmi which help me get urpmi up and running, including Texstar's rpms. Well, now my system is running the best it ever has in my 6 years of running Linux. That Texstar guy, he must just sit around all day adding cool new goodies to his RPMs, I swear he comes out with updates faster than my poor modem connection can download them!

-micah

"Hey, we have dis ting called no business model of any value, see, so I come on board, because I am a Don in da making anyway, and I decide to sue everyone or demand payment for having a freakin' computer. Surprisingly, da udder side just won't give in so I figure I make dem an offer dey can't refuse. I offer dem da chance to pay me lots of money for doin nuttin' see, or I will cause such a stink like dey ain't never gonna hear da end of it. I got my button man Chris here, he goes to da papers, we buy a few stories here and dere, and we make all kinds of accusations and allegations. Pretty soon, Don Gates and Don Ballmer come around, they wanna do a deal see? They wanna make like dey ain't doing nuttin' wrong or underhanded, but hey, we are paisans, no? Dey eben offa me some of dere reporters and shills in da press to use for free too.

I would like to point out, that nowhere in the article does it say that closed-source software will be prohibited. It only says that Brazil is migrating 80 percent of their desktops to Linux. It was a commentator and then a Slashdot editor that misread the "Linux OS" part as "All Open Source Software."

In theory Brazil could continue to use Oracle, Corel, or any other Non-OSS they so chose, assuming they did so on a Linux platform.

This isn't a business philosophy decision, or even a broad software purchasing decision. This is just an OS decision, and one that can be viewed as a wise choice by the Government of Brazil. They chose the best tool for the job.

The interview to SCO Information Minister is here

REDMOND, Washington - March 10, 2003 - Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), the proven owner of the patent for Most Hated Company of All Time, today announced that it has filed legal action against The SCO® Group (SCO) (NASDAQ: SCOX) in the State Court of Washington, for misappropriation of corporate image, torturous interference, unfair competition and breach of contract. The complaint alleges that SCO made concentrated efforts to improperly destroy the monetary value of Microsoft's image as Most Hated Company of All Time, particularly Most Hated Company of All Time in the Information Technology sector, to benefit SCO's licensing division.

Taken from: Microsoft files lawsuit against SCO

It's funny. Laugh. :)

Join us now and boycott the assholes!

--
Add me to your .sig

Join us now and boycott the assholes!

--
Add me to your .sig

When our site was slashdotted last year, we were able to cope with the load after putting our database into RAM. It's probably not the best solution, since the RAM would get deleted if the system crashes (or the power goes out, etc.), but it's a good temporary measure.

Good interview, I like the quote:
We're the source of AIX, HP UX, Solaris, Linux, Mac OSX.

I'm not sure how much of NeXT was from SVR4, but the Mach end has nothing to do with SVR4, and BSD fricken helped create UNIX and USL sued them for the troubles.

More information on SCO, it's lawsuit, the many boycotts against it and why they aren't exactly the ideal company can be found here.