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When I started using linux for the first time, I first visited these sites to get my problems solved. I list some of them below.

http://linuxquestions.org/
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/
http://linux.org/
http://tldp.org/

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Hi Charlie,
1. First of all, grab Knoppix, burn it to a CD, and spend a few days (or a few weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with) playing with it. The base CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, so you can't harm anything. This is a completely safe, non-intimidating way for you to initially get your feet wet.

2. While you're exploring Knoppix, there are a few things to read which will really help you. This will give you a very good introduction to Linux, in terms of a little history of the system, how to begin using it, and how some basic things work. Here is another in-depth document about using Linux, leading on from the previous one.

3. Once you've gone through those two, (take as much time as you need) this, written by the same man as the introduction, will introduce you to the Bash shell, the textual command interpreter where as a sysadmin in particular you'll likely be spending a lot of your time. This will ease you into scripting in what I think will be a very non-intimidating way. You will be able to try out all of these exercises with the Knoppix CD, and again, because the CD doesn't install anything to the hard drive, you needn't worry about destroying your existing system's contents while you learn. This is another book on Bash scripting which to a degree follows on from that one, and will go into somewhat greater depth. Both of these should lead to you feeling very comfortable writing shell scripts and moving around to a degree on the system.

4. Here is where we get to some meat. This document goes into compiling and installing generic Linux/UNIX software, and offers some basic applications and examples. Once you've gone through this, coupled with the material above, you should now have sufficient understanding to be able to compile and install at least a basic application yourself.

5. The Pocket Linux Guide will take you step by step through the process of learning to make a small, bootable Linux system on two floppy disks. Although compiling a basic custom kernel is part of this process, the Guide contains a link to another document which explains very clearly how to do this, and given the background you will have received from the previous documents, this should not be difficult.

6. Once you have completed the Pocket Linux Guide, you will then be ready to proceed to this site, which is the homepage of the Linux From Scratch Project. Here you will be able to read an HTML-formatted book which will give you the necessary information to successfully build an entire base Linux system of your own, and a more pure boot CD than Knoppix to initially build it upon. The Linux From Scratch Project also has a sequel book, Beyond Linux From Scratch, which describes how to install, among other things, a full graphical user interface with the X Windows system.

7. After you have completed all of this, although it is not crucial, I thoroughly recommend reading this book during idle moments. (It's still a good mealtime accompaniment for me) It will give you a detailed knowledge of the history and philosophy behind the UNIX operating system in general, which I am sure you will find enormously useful.

(Slashdot flamers, start your engines. I'm aware I'm likely to get a ton of abuse from corporate droids in particular about how I'm not telling him to find hand-holding tech support/this isn't practical advice, blah blah blah. For anyone considering res

Beta software is supposed to be feature complete.

I don't know if your trolling or really serious, but I feel your post elicits a response either way.

B) To call yourself a fairly technical user then start whining about having to drop into the command line is simply disingenuous. A command line is far more efficient and easy to work with than a GUI. Many times GUIs are a crutch which allow non technical people to do things they shouldn't be doing. Most technical people I know prefer the command line.

A) Recompiling the kernel? Come on. Only in very rare cases do you have to do ANYTHING that requires recompiling the kernel. Your making that problem up. It simply doesn't exist for most users.

C) Just because you don't like MAN pages, doesn't mean you have to villify them. Many volunteers have written great docs on sites like The Linux Documentation Project. If you don't like MAN pages do a little searching on the internet.

If you are going to call yourself an advanced user please act like one.

Do you mean this? Because it's clearly listed in the lilo mini how-to...

If you get X configured to use it as an input device it will.

Well, I personally learned it from the Linux Mandrake manual (there is - or was - a section on building software from source). In fact, all in all, it was a useful guide to installing, using and understanding Linux. There's probably also a HOWTO at the LDP (a vital resource)

Also, normally (there are a few exceptions) there's a text file named "INSTALL" in the base directory of the source code instructing you to do roughly these commands. In any case, this particular sequence of commands is used by nearly all open-source software, so once you know it...

My point is that it's not entirely clear which OS supports more platforms, since "supports" and "platforms" are both variables that would need to be nailed down before the conversation even begins. My own first impression is that NetBSD is still the winner, since you can actually boot into each of its listed platforms, install software from pkgsrc, and generally treat them as equals except for the obvious performance differences. Others could effectively argue the opposite, I'm sure.

In this situation, however, I suggest that you find another algorithm that is good enough and use that instead. It's not like there's any shortage of them...

The result is fonts are hinted differently than Windows and OS X. Whether the hinting is actually worse is mostly a matter of opinion -- I prefer FreeType's hinting over Windows's for the most part, although there are specific typefaces (like Verdana) that are hinted pretty badly with FreeType if you don't use anti-aliasing.

At any rate, if you live in a country that isn't covered by Apple patents (or if you just don't care about violating them), you can unofficially enable the patent-protected hinting in FreeType by getting a copy with said code enabled. Instructions are available here.

I don't experience what you describe. Almost all apps start in a microsecond and everything is blazing fast on a full fledged gnome 2.10. I'm on gentoo and on old hardware, athlon-tbird.

Granted, if you're on old hardware and you haven't done any optimisations on your distro, you might experience slow responce times. You don't have to install gentoo to make your system fast. You can still optimise your favorite distro, by compiling your own kernel with the features you want/need, compiling programs and libs for your arch(not all libs and progs course :) only the ones that are used alot, like glibc).

The only problem is that these procedures are a bit involved on other distros, while gentoo does everything for you. But if you insist on staying on your distro, there are lots of guides on optimising all over the net. eg. if you're on redhat distros, have a look at this book, Securing and Optimising Linux[6.2mb PDF]

Just face it, any computer which an intruder has physical access to should be considered compromised.

Why does EVERYONE seem to believe this?

They may be able to boot to their own OS, but there are ways you can prevent them from getting root access to YOUR OS, and screwing around with YOUR files.

Encrypt the root filesystem, and have the computer boot from USB. Then, without bruteforcing your encrypted partition, there is no way for them to mess with your stuff.

However, way way back in the great anscestry of this thread we were talking about consolidating newbie distros to make starting out easier. My argument was that it would be easier to choose but perhaps another would be consolidated effort on the UI part

Right. I was arguing that your experiences don't seem to shed any light on the distribution issue. Whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with whether there is one or many distributions. So in other words I'm playing tech support here because I think your evidence regarding the original discussion is "ignoratio elenchi" (literally Irrelevant Conclusion).

Right now - at least as I remember - Linux gives you a "cannot assign address" error and nothing else. XP, by the same token, says "Limited Connectivity" (yeah, no IP address would be limited). We're talking just via UI here, not the commands you mentioned.

Which is a worthless error message without a "more details" box. The reality is though that your bug is only going to be useful with a resolved problem. Right now its just unclear to anybody what your bug is beyone "I'm a user things aren't working and I don't know why".

In other words figure out what's going wrong by doing the commandline versions of getting an address up and for example. If the commandline fails and it doesn't give you a decent error message than use the excellent diagnostic tools that are out there. Start with the network card
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag2/index.html
Will walk you through doing everything manually until you really understand what's going wrong. At the end of at most 3 hours:

1) You will really know what's going wrong
2) You'll have learned a great deal about how networking actually works in an operating system
3) Most likely you will have resolved the problem and now can just modify your init scripts and your hardware is fixed.

http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/q/all_hacks
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Tips-HOWTO.html
http://souptonuts.sourceforge.net/how_to_linux_and _open_source.htm
http://cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/vivek/blogger/blogge r.html

Yep. Look into VPNs.

1. Never underestimate the power of a plain old FTP server. When I worked for a company with a Citrix machine, it was found that the SMB access to the mainframe would only allow for one connection per IP. (Thanks alot Unisys.) So we setup a go between machine that ran an FTP server mapped to the SMB drive. The Citrix users then used the Netscape FTP support to download and upload files.

2. Here's precisely how to do what you're looking for on a standard *nix machine: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Apache-WebDAV-LDAP-HOWTO /

First Google result, even. :-)

Well, it isn't installing Linux on Legos, per se, but it using Legos on Linux. http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Lego/intro.html

Some Links:
Linux Accessibility HOWTO
The Blind Linux Project with mailing list
brltty for your braille input needs
Or, get an all in one distro

Get a machine with two NICs and connect both as a bridge between your clusters of machines. Install Linux and use this as a guide. Add an additional NIC if you want to be able to login to the box remotely.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Linux Logical Volume Manager subsystem. It has many of the features of RAID arrays [such as spanning across multiple drives] with the added flexibility of being able to dynamically add [and theoretically remove] drives.

Unfortunately, aside from RAID'ing the volumes or something similar, I haven't been able to find any information on making the system redundant.

Read about it more on TLDP. It's a very robust system that works well on both servers and desktops.

The Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start. Here is an article about the optimal use of fonts. It has a section called "Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward?" and a section called "The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop" with KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, and FireFox configuration examples.

The Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start. Here is an article about the optimal use of fonts. It has a section called "Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward?" and a section called "The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop" with KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, and FireFox configuration examples.

The Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start. Here is an article about the optimal use of fonts. It has a section called "Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward?" and a section called "The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop" with KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, and FireFox configuration examples.

The Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start. Here is an article about the optimal use of fonts. It has a section called "Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward?" and a section called "The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop" with KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, and FireFox configuration examples.

The Linux community likes to hide behind the mantra of free and open
software for all and as such has the twisted mindset that all software
should be free for everyone. This should come as no surprise seeing
that the Linux community seems to take pride in stealing anything they
can get their hands on and breaking laws designed to protect IP at the
same time.

Linux users have been advocating downloading Microsoft True Type Fonts
for years mostly because their own fonts and font system in general
has been so horrific that Linux screen fonts in most stock installs
are almost unreadable. Of course they will claim that Linux fonts are
great but if that were really the case why is the internet clogged
with Linux Font DeUglification documents written by Linux users?

They even have documents that give a step by step procedure for
stealing the Microsoft fonts and installing them on Linux systems!
Notice in particular the instructions for the Tahoma font.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU/truetype.html
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

Next we have Linux users violating the EULA for the X-Box and
tinkering with it so that it can run Linux.
Why on earth any sane person would want to take a bitching game
machine like X-box and ruin it by installing Linux is a mystery to me.

http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/index.php

http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/faq.php

Pay particular attention to the question about it being illegal and
how they avoid answering the question.

They are also doing the same thing with Sony Play station as well.

http://playstation2-linux.com/faq.php

None of this is going to hold up in a court of law and the Linux
people who are leading these projects are looking for some serious
trouble should Microsoft and Sony decide to pursue this matter.

Finally we have the suit filed by SCO which claims that the Linux
community at large has incorporated stolen code into it's open source
programs.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,936269,00.asp

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the Linux
movement from the day Linux wrote the kernel.

The Linux community has proven themselves to be a fight to the end,
steal whatever can be stolen from big business because it is big
business that is killing Linux.

The Linux community has absolutely no respect for the property of
others and will resort to any type of clandestine tactics to steal
whatever isn't cemented down all in the good name of Linux.

So if you are thinking of betting your business on Linux software, you
had better think it over carefully, because if SCO should win, Linux
will be out of business.
And if SCO should lose, do you really think it is wise to bet your
entire business on software that is supported by a community that
promotes stealing and in fact is full of thieves?

Food for thought.

Kerning is supported in X font renderers. Stop spreading false informations.

I'm sure that's true. But it ain't workin'. Go look for yourself. Type Wo or Ya or Tu and tell me that they look right to you. Get somebody to fix it and I will happily stop spreading false informations.

I removed the /etc/rcX directories completely

That's fine. I was talking about /etc/rc, though, not the scripts under /etc/rc.d. When you typed "/etc/rcX," I was confused about what you meant. Sorry about that.

If you hose /etc/rc or /etc/inittab, your system will not boot. Jacking with init scripts like /etc/rc.d and /etc/init.d and other service config files like /etc/crontab will result in other run-time errors, but they probably won't be system-fatal.

That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".

So if it were just the torch-and-pitchfork-waving Internet mob and not Moglen and his cadre of fanatics, that would somehow be okay with you?

I am also sure you'll find websites like http://i18n.kde.org/ worth reading.

Yes, I certainly did. The lesson? You have a very, very long way to go. I mean come on. Environment variables? And four different ones at that?

In order to localize, you have to adapt not just the UI language, but the number and currency formats, date and time formats, the system calendar and measurement units. For example, if you pick up your computer and move it to Tel Aviv, you have to switch the language to Hebrew and the writing system to right-to-left. You have to use the Hebrew calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar. You have to use 24-hour time instead of 12-hour time. You do get to continue to use the ###,###.## number format, but you have to switch currency units to the new sheqel and units of measurement to metric.

That's localization. Linux can't even approximate it yet.

Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous.

You know we're not talking about DHCP here, right? We're talking about the fact that the routing table dynamically reconfigures itself based on available interfaces via configd. We're talking about the fact that if you're currently using your AirPort card and you plug in to an Ethernet port, all your services will invisibly move over to the new port instantly without interruption.

Beyond that, yes, we have Bonjour. Which, incidentally, we give away for free in a POSIX-compliant reference implementation on our Web site.

The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.

And that would have been really cool, had anybody actually done anything about it. Nobody did until we came along. We took the Zeroconf spec and turned it into Rendezvous, which thanks to a trademark settlement is now Bonjour. In the process, we built it into everything, created a compliance logo program for it, and distributed reference implementations to vendors. Now Bonjour is built into every network printer ... thanks to us.

Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.

I've lost track of which article you're quoting. But believe me, okay? I'm sitting in front of a computer with Tiger right this very second. The cron daemon is not running.

See for example http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/

How is a blind person supposed to read a lengthy tutorial? Aside from that, the document you refer to consists of a lengthy list of third-party work-arounds for services that should be a core part of the operating system. Should be? No, in this case, they have to be. It's a bootstrap probl

Um. No. Have you seen it? I mean actually looked at it? Looks like crap. There's this wonderful new technology that you guys might be interested in. It's called "electronic kerning." It's brand new; it was only invented about ... um ...forty years ago. You should totally check it out.

Kerning is supported in X font renderers. Stop spreading false informations. Go read the docs, please.

Damaging one of the /etc/rcX isn't sufficient to prevent Linux from booting.

Try it sometime. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.

That's what I did. I did even more - I removed the /etc/rcX directories completely. Guess what ? I still got console access. You are loosing credibility each time, you should stop speaking about what you don't know.

Every couple of weeks there's a story in the technology trades about another company getting accused of some heinous crime by the Gnu people.

That's quite different from "being harrassed by lawyers".

I'm not talking about keyboard input or character sets. I'm talking about localization. You know, the ability to have your program switch from an English user interface to an Arabic or a Hebrew or a Farsi or a Chinese user interface based on the user's system-wide language preference. Linux has no facility for doing that, which is kind of okay, because if it did, there would be no facility for Linux applications to actually have localization built into them.

Go make some research about terms like the environment variables LANG, LC_LOCAL, i18n and i10n. I am also sure you'll find websites like http://i18n.kde.org/ worth reading.

Beg pardon? Are you saying that because Linux users are totally happy to live in a world where every computer and peripheral has to be configured by hand (an assertion which I totally dispute), that Bonjour was no big deal?

Network autoconfiguration tools existed for a long time before Rendezvous. You didn't need to "manually configure everything" on the client machine. The goal of ZeroConf was to provide a way to do it (for network services) without the need of a server.

But cron is no more. It doesn't run.

Quoting the same article again: When a file does appear in that directory, cron automatically starts running.

Accessibility
See for example http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Accessibility-HOWTO/

Cocoa
See for example GNUStep.

I could continue by taking your list point by point. I could also talk about virtualization (Xen), data security (Encrypted mounts, distributed fs, software raid), remote management (webmin), portability, high-level portable development APIs (SDL, GTK), networked installation, dependency-aware software installation (apt), on-site optimization (gentoo), support for handheld devices (uCLinux), free and native Java compilation (gcj), abstract data management (kio), mass storage virtualization (LVM)... But you wouldn't probably listen anyway.

Come back after you have informed yourself better about both the various operating systems available today. You'll understand that not only Linux and BSDs aren't as late as you'd like to see it, but also that their existence contributed to improve the overall quality of software in general. And in the meantime, let the Linux and OSX fans debate on sane grounds and exchange ideas on what computing would mean in the future - this proved much more productive than blindly uninformed bashing.

Do a minimal MINIMAL Linux or FreeBSD install. I mean just as small as you can get, but include NFS and IP-over-Firewire.

That's about it really, set up a nice link to mount your device when you come in, plug in your firewire. Heck, I think you can configure the automounter to detect when the firewire network becomes available and mount it for you. That's really all there is to it. Should work out pretty well. On a side note, if you plug in a third drive, even if your SCSI card doesn't support it, you could use Vinum on FreeBSD or LVM on Linux to add capacity, and at least on Vinum you can do RAID5 or RAID10. It won't be as fast as hardware RAID, but hey when you're going cheap, you use what you can. Besides, I somehow suspect that you're wanting capacity over speed anyway, and if that's the case, use the best redundancy you can, right?

It would be nice to see some componentization of the kernel to allow for easy stripping of unnecessary features,

Umm.. ever heard of kernel modules and the plethora of kernel configuration options and methods? I honestly cannot see how you could get even more 'componentized'

It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.

If the OS had an automated method to install and configure third party apps like RedHat's kickstart or equivalent, then it would be less of an issue. But as it is now, a re-install on MS-Windows weighs heavily against third party applications and their protocols and formats.

That gives me an idea. What about GMail-Root in replacement of NFS-Root ?

I now ran several times into the problem of sites which do not respond correctly (or at all) with fragmentation requests, see for example IP-Masq-HOWTO.
Its a very similar problem and causes some websites/tcp connections to hang without any apparent reason. Why the hell can't they configure this properly? It is not like that an immediate DOS attack results from sending back fragmentation requests...

To start the typical /. rant: :-)
IMHO it is neccessary to have some kind of "RAW IP" consumer label which would guarantee that:
1. my or my peers packets are not blocked willingly (no port filtering etc.)

2. my packets are not traffic shaped, at least not in other ways than I specify by setting TOS fields. I'm not arguing about the possibility of different TOS due to different prices, but rather a telephone/ISP combination slowing down my VoIP traffic to the competition. General disparity in handling traffic should be marked as such, though!

3. DNS and all other provided 'additional' services (eMail accounts etc.) follow all RFCs and other standards (i.e. this TTL problem).

Of course, such a label could come in different forms (for example for people really wanting to have a firewall which blocks traffic for them).

But one needs to be informed to make the decision for the right ISP. The current situation is rather
intransparent and it steadily gets worse.
And websites deserve a similar label too. There are "HTML x/y compliant" stickers on some sites, but they are rare and this should be only the beginning.
I'm still not really sure about who would own these labels (if at all), though.

On a side note , you can have linux on your legos or legos on your linux http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Lego/
Its funny to think how simmilar linux and legos are , i mean i build space-ships out of legos and NASA builds space-ships(OS) out of linux

ocusing on corporate desktops though is hard - they are well seated on Windows. Anything is an upheaval. We'll need to seed it into new companies. For existing companies, we need to find ways of mitigating (where WORTH mitigating) the others.

(XLive CD +
XDMCP server anyone??)

I like the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide quite a bit, but I'd also like to learn about other shells, without reading through a mountain of manpages, nor reading through webpages, and just for general interest while riding the El (not because "I need to do x!").

Although I have never set it up myself so it is possible I'm talking out of my ass.

From what I read about the Persistent Super-Block and from what The Software-RAID HowTo says, you can boot from a software RAID setup.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-5.ht ml#ss5.9/

I went through the same thing you did. I bought and retured several RAID cards. One was unsupported and the others had binary only drivers. So, I just got an extra drive controller and let Linux-2.6 work it's magic. On my worstation, I have been using 3 plain-ATA drives in both a RAID5 and RAID-0 configuration for about a year now. I highly recommend this method unless you have some need to access your disks from a lesser OS.

The logical disk's read speeds with RAID0 are (as expected) three times faster than normal (162 MB/s). The RAID5 partition reads at almost 2x, but writing is slow because of the parity. RAID5 writes also take up about 5% of my CPU which is an Athlon 2500+. Not really a heavy load for a modern processor.

Using pure linux also gives you much more control of the organization of your data. As the device mapper operates at a block device level, you can RAID partitions or even files instead of whole drives like with a card. This is what enables me to use 0 and 5 by partitioning the drives.

General Infomation

You were very lucky then

Nvidia and Ati 3D graphics drivers dont come with the free versions of Linux (only basic 2D support is given). So you must download and install the drivers for your graphics card to work in 3D. ...and the Ati driver is crippled with respect to anything other than 24bit colour and only works in XFree86 versions 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and X.Org 6.8
http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#1

Also check this list of unsupported hardware in Linux. Note that the sound card list is huge and theres a few SCSI controllers there too.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/

1. RAID
2. Automated offsite backups

Yeah, it was done before lunch, and I'd never installed any other databases in my life. Try installing db2. Now that is a pain in the ass.

Really? I thought you said you hadn't installed any other databases... anyways, installing DB2 is a matter of:

./db2setup
[click through GUI installer:

• enter password for instance user
• enter password for fenced procedure user
• enter password for database administration server user

... and you should be done before breakfast, let alone lunch.

There's a DB2 HOWTO at the Linux Documentation Project that provides detailed instructions for many popular Linux distributions, including special prereqs or workarounds for distros like Gentoo.

/opt

Wikipedia, Wikibooks, plus various wikis and websites all over the web for more detailed texts, like TLDP, Internet FAQ Archives etc. Good luck!

>- the software support isn't there. No CATIA, no
>ProE, no etc. Can't be an engineer using Linux
>alone.

They sound like rather obscure/unusual applications. What is their function?

>it is still fucking slow. Hate to break it to
>you, but as a long time xfce4 user, XP is still
>faster.

Get a 2.6 series kernel, and compile it with the pre-emptible feature turned on, and SMTP support turned off if you've only got one processor. Make sure you also have a swap partition. In terms of distributions, this one might interest you.

In terms of window managers, if speed is important to you, don't use KDE. Compile a stripped down version of Enlightenment and use fbpanel in conjunction with it. I will be very surprised after you've done that if your RAM usage (before any other applications) is above 50 Mb. What hardware are you using?

>But it's slower for getting things done because
>double-clicking an icon is easier than typing
>/usr/share/baoeu/otehu/ -x -die. Pressing a
>flurry of keys might feel faster, but it isn't
>actually faster.

I strongly recommend that you familiarise yourself with the contents of this document, and also this one, if you have not already done so. You can download a version of make compatible with that tutorial from here.
You may also be interested in downloading this program and learning about its use.

If after having a look at some of these tools and taking some time to learn/evaluate them, you still desire to remain GUI based, that's fine. Some people genuinely *are* more visually oriented, neurologically. But in order merely to set the record straight that use of the command line can indeed be remarkably powerful for those who are oriented towards it, I would invite you to as I said at least evaluate the above documents and tools. The command line takes some time and mental effort to become confident with, but once you are familiar with it, the levels of flexibility and automation it can offer you truly are unavailable anywhere else.

That's not bad, but it's not very Linux specific. There are thousands of Linux sites that have articles, papers, and presentations some with forums and community news. Most Events, Conferences, Expos, and LUGs archive their own presentations . Some are GPL, but many are copywrited by the individuals or published in magazines in various formats. Try to find some older presentations from the Linux World Expos http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/. Point is there should be some quality controls, standard formats and GPL restrictions...

What's different is the increasingly strenuous tone calling for people to reign in the number of licenses. In many ways, this basically demonstrates that OSS/FS has matured. Lots of people have created new licenses, essentially experimenting with different approaches. The marketplace of ideas has selected a few "winning" ideas, and it's getting increasingly hard for even a good new license idea to overcome the many problems of incompatibility with what already exists. Commercial development and use of OSS/FS is now widespread; a consolidation of common licensing approaches appears inevitable as the whole approach becomes common.

There's at least one simple test: make sure your license is GPL-compatible. You can do this by using the GPL, using a different license that is known to be GPL-compatible (in particular the LGPL, MIT/X, or BSD-new (modified BSD) licenses), or by dual-licensing the program (and ensuring that one of the licenses is the GPL). See my essay for info on why GPL compatibility is so important.

In many ways, this license winnowing is happening anyway. My paper More than a Gigabuck found that only a few licenses were used by nearly all the code; at the time it was (in order) GPL, MIT, LGPL, MPL, and BSD (counting by lines of code). You can look at Freshmeat's statistics, which counts the licenses per project. Today, 2005-02-16, the OSS/FS licenses in order of popularity were (from most popular) the GNU General Public License (GPL) (67.99%) GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (5.89%), BSD License (original) (3.54%), BSD License (revised) (1.92%), Artistic License (1.80%), MIT/X Consortium License (1.26%), Apache License (0.72%), Mozilla Public License (MPL) (0.57%), Perl License (0.39%), and Apache License 2.0 (0.26%). I see a short list here, and notice that even in this list of the most popular licenses, the dropoff between the most-popular licenses and the next most popular licenses are really steep. Every project whose license is incompatible with all of these has a serious liability, and in fact, being only compatible with the lower-popularity licenses is a real problem. Few think Sun's CDDL code is going to go anywhere, solely because it's an odd license incompatible with the millions of lines of code already out there.

I wish he'd used proper terminology - I think he meant "proprietary" not "commercial". Last I checked, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Sun, and many other distributors of OSS/FS programs (including those using the GPL) were commercial companies.

encrypted root fs howto. note where you can boot from cdrom or whatever.

the easiest way from there is to set kdm to automatically log you in.