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The Open Document Format - ODF was supposed to replace PDF anyway. Why not hasten the process and make a PDF to ODF converter?

The ODF Alliance should be on that case to do a converter program to convert all document formats to ODF format.

I'm in the mood to get reckless and use experimental software to handle my upgrade. I know I'm not the only one using apt-p2p tonight!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6058308

Not that anybody else is reading this

Somebody modded my last one, so we're not completely alone here. :-)

do any operating systems you approve of install, by default, with all listening ports off?

By policy Ubuntu has not had open ports listening on the network in a default install for several years - I don't know if it ever has, or if it started with that policy. There could have been an exception made for zeroconf - there was some discussion about that for a while. OpenBSD has always been this way. Others do it too. Really, there's no reason for a desktop or a server to be listening to the network until it's told to do so - different users have different needs, but one need they all share is not to be exposed to vulnerabilities they don't need to be exposed to. I don't know what SuSe, RedHat or Mandriva do lately, nor OS-X. What I do know is that there isn't an army of millions of compromised zombies on the Internet attacking them so their users click links with gleeful abandon and purchase their MP3s from Amazon without a care in the world. But maybe it's just that they're not using Explorer.

Auto run is there because people want it. [....] Note, lots of business disables this using group policy , it's not hard.

Yes it is hard. For many the people neither the published manual method nor the group policy method of disabling this undesired feature worked reliably until recently and you know it. Does it now? Gee, is there some way to test that every client no longer performs this undesired behaviour in every circumstance? If you can't inspect it, you can't expect it. And as for people wanting it, well, I guess all the people who got Conficker this way have now decided they don't want it so badly. Many of them will be getting a Mac. But not the ones who don't know yet. Those people will be sending spam to you, me and everybody. Their computers will be shutting down legitimate businesses with denial of service attacks. They'll be used to store and forward the intimate details of millions of people to criminals who mean them harm - eventually probably including your details and mine. You never know what databases those millions of PCs were connected to. The "six degrees" rule makes it nearly certain that your banking information, credit report, medical history were all accessible from at least one of the myriad millions of machines that were compromised in the last five years, where those records exist in digital form. That they haven't been exploited yet is just dumb luck. Also, their zombies will become fast-flux hosts for "Bulletproof Hosting" to further exploit computers and defraud innocent netizens of many millions of dollars. All this because their users wanted Sony's rootkit to install when they put the CD in and you won't do the responsible thing and tell the children "No. You can't use the lawnmower until you can figure out how to start it yourself." I'm not saying the feature has to go away. It just shouldn't be the damned default! Let them turn it on, and then it's their fault. Until then, it's yours.

But, you are off the mark in many respects , Vista with well engineered drivers, a BIOS that has been well engineered, and lacking what some people call âoebloat wareâ will absolutely run acceptably well , the limiting factor is the HW not the OS or applications.

Ok, I cited a general case and made an assertion, you narrowed the scope and disagreed. Let's get a particular system like this one out and take it for a spin, shall we? Add 1GB of RAM, A DVDROM drive, a HDD and a decent monitor. With XP: quite adequate performance for a power efficient machine. Boots quickly. Full screen DVDs are no problem. With Flash installed

If you are like me and wanted to keep KDE3 but move to Intrepid, all is not lost. Use the KDE3-maintainers PPA:

http://apt.pearsoncomputing.net/

There's this forum thread to help with issues:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=963695

It's working for me with no issues.

You've just hit on one of the few major obstacles to both adopting Linux as a "daily use" OS as well as getting these problems fixed. The typical linux-user response will likely be some snarky variation on an obscure command line sequence that will automagically fix your problem while condescendingly pointing out how much of a noob you are for not having either known it, or taken 45 minutes that you didn't have to go find/discover the solution yourself. Things like this that don't often bother developers (who know how to fix things like this quickly) are actually major obstacles to most users since they seem such a trivial fix, and since it's a relatively easy problem to fall into.

I can't think of anything to fix the ISP issue (which would be a deal breaker for me) but as far as screen resolution goes, might check out

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=842847

and the site linked at

http://ubuntutip.googlepages.com/nodisplay

to see about resetting your screen res.

And, Windows has the overwhelming advantage it always did : it has an enormous existing software library that still dwarfs that of Linux.

Actually I think Linux has more software it can run than Windows does but Windows has more commercial software. Windows can only run software ported to Windows, Linux can run Linux as well as some Windows software. Even Adobe CS4 and MS Office 2007 runs in Linux though they may be a bitch to get working.

Mac OS X has both beat, it can run Linux and Windows besides OS X software.

Falcon

I complained about this very type of issue (having to modify driver source code before it will compile for a specific distribution) in a previous post on this topic, but if you are using ubuntu, have a look at this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766850 As always, YMMV. Good luck!

Try this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=360186

Second to last post.

google is your friend, searched: ubuntu mouse sensitivity, and that was the first result.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114223

For posterity. Have fun digging!

[... hopeful, if naive, attempt to address this problem...] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114137

Ubuntu has had readahead as part of it's boot sequence for a few years if I remember right. It essentially reads files that it knows it's going to need into RAM in an optimal (in regards to seek times) way. From there, you can either extend the functionality with a guide like this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651 or just install preload. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon that learns what you are keeping in the cache and makes sure they stay there.

5) It's almost not worth it to put the hard disk to sleep. Modern laptop drives you might save .2-.4w over just idle, but spin up might take 5w. So telling hd to spin down every 3 min for instance might actually use more power.

Power savings isn't always about the direct savings. Putting the disk to sleep and keeping it that way (which is admittedly difficult in linux) generates less heat. That in turn causes the fans to spin less and saves more power.

As for power savings between linux and XP, for most hardware linux is much better at power savings but much harder to configure to get that savings. A good starting point is Intels excellent site: http://www.lesswatts.org/. The Ubuntu forums also have some good information. For example: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=847773

Did you get a chance to file any bugs on the matter? Also, what WM were you using at the time?

HI started with whatever Ubuntu 8.10's defaults were (I think Metacity with Gnome?), but I think I tried other ones.

Here's a link to my forum post describing the end result of the experiment, including the window placement issues. There were just so many buggy things that I didn't bother filing reports (I know, I know, I'm part of the problem).

Multiple game instances? Hardware virtualization?

A couple problems with this approach:

• Since when does DirectX graphics or OpenGL perform nearly as well on virtual PCs as it does on the bare hardware? Google pulls up a post from 2007 saying it wasn't possible then.
• Few PC games support "spawned" copies anymore. I would have to buy four copies of the game, one to run on each virtual PC. Four copies of a $30 PC game are still twice as expensive as one copy of a $60 PC game.

We use the MIME type of the file which is determined by sniffing the content.

When IE does it, the press calls it risky. Besides, you don't always sniff the content: this page describes MIME information files and the glob element in the shared-mime-info namespace, both of which go based on (yup) extensions. And this page on file sniffers appears not to describe how to handle files that are identified by a string of bytes at the end, rather than at the beginning.

And what happens when an app creates a file type that your sniffer doesn't know about? I looked at what it takes to register a new application, and it appears that Windows and Mac OS (even since Mac OS 1) do a lot of these things automatically by sniffing the executable.

"But even in the Linux world, there are people who know just enough to be dangerous." We know

Another issue is the core of the Novell-MS partnership: interoperability. AFAIK, that part is working well.

Not so much.

The last time I played with SLES/SLED was about a year ago, and interoperability was not hugely better than any other generic Linux. They just don't have the manpower now to rewrite core stuff themselves. They do have a nice distro with well chosen components, and a default desktop that is very "Windows-Like", which is nice. They even had the start-bar at the bottom!

However, in the environment where I worked, it all broke down in testing. For example, joining a domain was painful, broken, and flat out didn't work in my client's environment (multi-domain, multi-forest, with users and machines all over the place). It could talk to one domain, most of the time, until you removed a domain controller, which would break it.

A note to Linux devs working on Active Directory compatibility: When 'joining' an AD domain, a Linux desktop is allowed to ask exactly 3 questions:

- The name of the domain (either the 'short NT4 name' or 'long DNS name')
- A user name to connect with
- A password

Lets compare this to instructions I randomly found on Ubuntu's support site:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=91510

That's about 2 pages of config files! NO. Just NO. It's not even slightly correct. I have nothing against config files as such, but "hard coding" parameters that MUST be looked up dynamically is WRONG. You can't state "compatible with Active Directory" when it is clearly NOT COMPATIBLE.

What happens when the machine and the user are in different domains? What happens if domain controllers move? Why doesn't it automatically locate the nearest servers using Sites & Services?

Correct behavior isn't even one of those Microsoft secret proprietary things. The API for dynamically obtaining configuration data for a desktop's AD connection is well documented:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684291(VS.85).aspx

They need an answer and if there were a single "clueless" -google like- site that they could just click or search then this would probably be enough.

Personally, I find the solution to 99% of my linux problems on the Ubuntu forums. Partly that's because I've run Ubuntu at home for the past year and a half, but the same ratio applies to my Eee 900 running Xandros, because so many "ubuntu problems" are actually generic Linux config problems.

The problem with Linux's usability is that there are far fewer 'experts' around that your average user can turn to.

Linux troubleshooting checklist:
1) Search for your problem in vague terms on Google
2) Try to figure out exactly what's actually going wrong
3) Search again with more specific terms
4) Read 2-3 different forum threads describing similar problems, hoping that one had a solution that applies to you
5) Try that solution (this usually fixes it for me)
6) If you still have the problem go back to 4, after several loops go back to 2.

Compare this with Windows:
1) Try to fix the problem yourself, probably breaking it further in the process
2) Ask your friend/relative/neighbour who works in computing, who can fix it.

Linux *is* harder (ie. requires more esoteric knowledge) to configure than Windows, but the gap isn't that huge. Windows, however, has the advantage of HUGELY much more familiarity among the great unwashed.

Myself very happy with my EasyPeasy eeePC 1000 find it surprising that some people have had trouble with EasyPeasy (other than with the name). I think I installed it when it had only been available as EasyPeasy for about 2 weeks and I have had no trouble other than taking a while to get the BT mouse going right. (the advice here helped with that http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-508847.html) Perhaps wiping the HD first, instead of just doing the upgrade, does not help. If you just follow the directions and do it the easy(peasy) way, maybe you're OK.

I meant that the Dell Ubuntu lpia kernel was initially limited to 1GB, but has since been updated to allow 2GB. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6435627

So after the beginning of January, Dell Ubuntu no longer has the "crippled kernel that only recognizes 1GB of RAM", it supports the full 2GB.

as far as pulse-audio problems are concerned, try this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=776739 you can skip adding that guys PPA. and then when you run windows apps in wine, run them using OSS in winecfg and with the command "padsp" before wine. I do this and i have no sound problems whatsoever

Several products allowed you to examine the source code but do little else.

That product was Windows Vista.

Secondly, where did you get these figures from?

Thats a good question. But do you also ask yourself how statisticians can poll 1000 odd people and get a very accurate reading on 300 million? :) (I'm talking about the pre US elections polling)

Statistics can get fairly complicated and each poll can be model accurately with a low enough margin of error. As a simple example you can give different weights to statistics of browsers from different websites and them compile a grand total. So while given _ANY_ statistic you can find something wrong with it, you cant simply dismiss it as being inaccurate.

You might find these linux interesting:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/10/how_can_linux_market_share_be.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=598383

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

While in general, I would agree with you, MOST users should switch to linux.
However we disagree, because linux doesn't have every app solidly replicated. (Despite claims to the contrary)

It does have a LOT of replicated apps, and some apps that windows will never have.

With that said.
Cinelerra doesn't replace After Effects or Sony Vegas Pro.
Particle Illusion, DAZ, Poser, Magix, Micrografx Picture Publisher... on an on and on (before you say you can get these running, do they have plugins? And are you doing production work?)
TurboTax (no I don't use or qualify for turbotax freedom--it's unsuitable--as is doing the shit by hand.) doesn't install on linux natively. in Wine or VMware perhaps, but you still need windows licenses.
Photoshop+1000's of plugins isn't gimp. (and never will be, on the other hand gimp runs on windows.)
Wavelab (not audacity with no VST's), soundforge (not audacity with no vsti's), 1000's of VST's (cough). not solid on linux. Maybe you can get it to run under wine, but you won't be very productive
TVUPlayer - bzzzzt.

All these are simply popular, I haven't even got into weird shit.

hardware?
off the bat I can say.
Lexicon Rack effects, Pinnacle AV/DV capture cards (not reversed), etc..

There's a place for each OS, it depends on what you want to do.
You would be stupid to use win98 + some package for a firewall, when ipcop would kick it's ass.
Nor would you be wise to dump a LAMP stack on top of an XP box, when debian and modsec2 would do the job.

If your not being a complete jackass about this shit and not a troll, and actually have knowledge, and are being honest, you clearly must agree with what is said in this specific post. While I do realize I am addicted to the microsoft drug, it's for a specific reason (audio and video production), and windows xp firewalled off serves one hell of a purpose, it's extremely productive. No it's not fear, clearly I am running plenty of *nix boxen. But they have different purposes. And again I remind you some do things my windows workstations don't. Yeah some things cost money. Some things cost in the *NIX world as well. It's all what you need to do.

OTOH - vista and win7 doesn't really look like it has any useful migration path other than bla you can use the rest of your 4 gigs or bla DirectX10 (neither of which I give a crap about) Add in the waste of money and bzzzzt. we ain't going there. XP will live behind a firewall forever.

OTOH #2 - three process's--that's a straight up no starter! Sounds like winME. vapor.

PS: trying to stay on your friendly side, we both agree about outlawing electronics in elections. That's definitely an abusive use of electronics.

You're doing it wrong.

First, why use 32 bit compiled software at all, just get the 64 bit (or compile it yourself).

Second, 32 bit stuff should work fine, as long as you have the requisite 32 bit runtime libraries installed.

While I do not bother with this (no 64 bit, no use) you may wish to view: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

I've always thought that Debian was a great Distro. Stable, lots of packages that can be installed, and lots of resources on the web. Ubuntu (based on Debian) ties it all together with a nice, easy to use installer and GUI. Great choice for desktops, but I'd stick to Debian for servers.

Ubuntu doesn't tie it all together. It loses some main advantages of Debian including pretty through testing of packages (unstable->testing->stable). In Ubuntu if there's a major software bug originating from upstream it will rarely get fixed until you update to new release version.

I remember Ubuntu 7.10 having a bug in kernel which rendered lot of HP laptops - including my friend's - near useless. (cpu usage being constantly near 90% due to polling interrupts) Ubuntu didn't give an option to upgrade to newer kernel version or downgrade to older one of which neither would have had this bug that was affecting thousands of users. Because it was LTS release their guidelines prohibited switching to the next kernel version. There was two ways for user to get a working computer. One was disabling another one of Turion x2 cpus and other would have been compiling another version of the kernel. If it was my laptop I would have just switched to another, less problematic distro.

Also I've found upgrading from relase to another flaky at best on more customized installs. With Debian one can use 'testing' or 'unstable' and upgrades happen in gradual fashion whenever newer packages come available. You never have to take that rather uncertain jump from old release to new one.

Ubuntu has it's pros and cons. What it gains in being ready to use with thoughtfully selected, preconfigured features and having many things automatized it loses in stability and ease of maintenance. Also it's update cycle is very different from that in Debian. I'll stick with Debian on desktops too. Ubuntu is something I recommend for most friends and relatives, but not without reservations.

I ain't saying nothin'. It's the users the ones who are doin' the talkin'

I looked at all of these links and personally I never experienced ANY of these bugs during my 2 1/2 years with Ubuntu. I did have some problems, granted, but I also installed Windows XP at least 20 times in 3 years because it screwed itself up so badly that it couldn't be saved. So this is a common experience for all OSs. I don't want to play that blame-game anymore. Windows is buggy, Linux is buggy. Windows has shit support hotlines and costs lots of money, Linux has enthusiastic users (which sometimes don't know their ass from their face) but is free. Some of the things you linked here were "I hate Ubuntu because I had that problem" type blogs. No explanation of what actually happened just "I used it and it was shit". A post titled "Ubuntu sucks ... get a Mac" is not exactly what I would want to use to make a point. One of the things you linked was an OpenOffice bug. How do you make an argument out of that. That's like saying "MS Access crashed on my SQL database ... windows sucks". Apples and Peaches wha...?

Ubuntu is buggy. Period. The fact that Vista, or any Windows for that regard, might be buggy too, does not invalidate that perception.

Ack! You're right about that. But let's be fair. You use Ubuntu's bugginess to discredit it as a "good desktop" and I do the same for several Windows versions. We're all happy.

Don't compare apples to oranges. Compare Ubuntu (a distro, or a complex of distros) to other distros: CentOS, PCLinuxOS, LinuxMint, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Slackware... you get the idea.

It was YOU who started the apples and oranges cars against Operating systems analogy. Nevermind.

I stand by my point. Putting a slow, buggy distro with a GNOME frontend = big mess. I've seen that before (summoning Red Hat Linux versions from the dead...).

You might get a decent implementation of GNOME on another distro, who knows... (Debian, perhaps?). You might also get a good, stable distro who also happens to be very fast (Vector Linux).

But these two damning factors (GNOME and a slow, buggy linux) are present in Ubuntu and this is a trend that is only going to get worse as far as I can see.

Maybe slow and buggy is the compromise to make for the regular user? No, but seriously. I use Ubuntu for a while now, I did have problems, still have some inexplicable bugs but compared to some of the other distros the work that has been put into the usability outweighs these minor flaws for me. Compared to the non-existing debugging in Windows I even fixed a host of my problems myself simply by analyzing the error logs and actually looking through the sources. That might not be the average user's business but at least I can do it here. Back to Linux in General: I tried installing Arch Linux one of the distros that is heralded as exquisit, I got it onto my machine and got stuck. Gentoo, same thing, compiling everything as a guy like me with ten years Windows experience and all time already spent on learning other Linux basics? I tried but failed miserably. I don't know

I ain't saying nothin'. It's the users the ones who are doin' the talkin'

I looked at all of these links and personally I never experienced ANY of these bugs during my 2 1/2 years with Ubuntu. I did have some problems, granted, but I also installed Windows XP at least 20 times in 3 years because it screwed itself up so badly that it couldn't be saved. So this is a common experience for all OSs. I don't want to play that blame-game anymore. Windows is buggy, Linux is buggy. Windows has shit support hotlines and costs lots of money, Linux has enthusiastic users (which sometimes don't know their ass from their face) but is free. Some of the things you linked here were "I hate Ubuntu because I had that problem" type blogs. No explanation of what actually happened just "I used it and it was shit". A post titled "Ubuntu sucks ... get a Mac" is not exactly what I would want to use to make a point. One of the things you linked was an OpenOffice bug. How do you make an argument out of that. That's like saying "MS Access crashed on my SQL database ... windows sucks". Apples and Peaches wha...?

Ubuntu is buggy. Period. The fact that Vista, or any Windows for that regard, might be buggy too, does not invalidate that perception.

Ack! You're right about that. But let's be fair. You use Ubuntu's bugginess to discredit it as a "good desktop" and I do the same for several Windows versions. We're all happy.

Don't compare apples to oranges. Compare Ubuntu (a distro, or a complex of distros) to other distros: CentOS, PCLinuxOS, LinuxMint, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Slackware... you get the idea.

It was YOU who started the apples and oranges cars against Operating systems analogy. Nevermind.

I stand by my point. Putting a slow, buggy distro with a GNOME frontend = big mess. I've seen that before (summoning Red Hat Linux versions from the dead...).

You might get a decent implementation of GNOME on another distro, who knows... (Debian, perhaps?). You might also get a good, stable distro who also happens to be very fast (Vector Linux).

But these two damning factors (GNOME and a slow, buggy linux) are present in Ubuntu and this is a trend that is only going to get worse as far as I can see.

Maybe slow and buggy is the compromise to make for the regular user? No, but seriously. I use Ubuntu for a while now, I did have problems, still have some inexplicable bugs but compared to some of the other distros the work that has been put into the usability outweighs these minor flaws for me. Compared to the non-existing debugging in Windows I even fixed a host of my problems myself simply by analyzing the error logs and actually looking through the sources. That might not be the average user's business but at least I can do it here. Back to Linux in General: I tried installing Arch Linux one of the distros that is heralded as exquisit, I got it onto my machine and got stuck. Gentoo, same thing, compiling everything as a guy like me with ten years Windows experience and all time already spent on learning other Linux basics? I tried but failed miserably. I don't know

Oh boy, let's see...

I don't know which Ubuntu you are talking about but the three machines that I run don't have any problems that they wouldn't have under (or because of) Vista. And I can maintain all three free of cost. ... Just because it doesn't fulfill your expectations doesn't mean it's not a good desktop. Windows doesn't fulfill mine ... so what do you say to that?

I ain't saying nothin'. It's the users the ones who are doin' the talkin'. Ubuntu is buggy. Period. The fact that Vista, or any Windows for that regard, might be buggy too, does not invalidate that perception.

Correction: It's a FREE Ferrari that outruns the MS Ferrari at many many occasions and you don't have to buy a special screwdriver for thousands of dollars to open the hood. What is KDE then? A Lamborghini in first gear? Same here, they do a lot of stuff but it has it's problems too.

Don't compare apples to oranges. Compare Ubuntu (a distro, or a complex of distros) to other distros: CentOS, PCLinuxOS, LinuxMint, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Slackware... you get the idea.

I stand by my point. Putting a slow, buggy distro with a GNOME frontend = big mess. I've seen that before (summoning Red Hat Linux versions from the dead...).

You might get a decent implementation of GNOME on another distro, who knows... (Debian, perhaps?). You might also get a good, stable distro who also happens to be very fast (Vector Linux).

But these two damning factors (GNOME and a slow, buggy linux) are present in Ubuntu and this is a trend that is only going to get worse as far as I can see.

Having that handed out as a flagship Linux desktop is like having a Ferrari in first gear.

btw, want a decent Linux desktop and don't want to use KDE? Great, just use XFce, which is a great desktop too.

So, who is the fanboi here...? ;-)

Oh boy, let's see...

I don't know which Ubuntu you are talking about but the three machines that I run don't have any problems that they wouldn't have under (or because of) Vista. And I can maintain all three free of cost. ... Just because it doesn't fulfill your expectations doesn't mean it's not a good desktop. Windows doesn't fulfill mine ... so what do you say to that?

I ain't saying nothin'. It's the users the ones who are doin' the talkin'. Ubuntu is buggy. Period. The fact that Vista, or any Windows for that regard, might be buggy too, does not invalidate that perception.

Correction: It's a FREE Ferrari that outruns the MS Ferrari at many many occasions and you don't have to buy a special screwdriver for thousands of dollars to open the hood. What is KDE then? A Lamborghini in first gear? Same here, they do a lot of stuff but it has it's problems too.

Don't compare apples to oranges. Compare Ubuntu (a distro, or a complex of distros) to other distros: CentOS, PCLinuxOS, LinuxMint, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Slackware... you get the idea.

I stand by my point. Putting a slow, buggy distro with a GNOME frontend = big mess. I've seen that before (summoning Red Hat Linux versions from the dead...).

You might get a decent implementation of GNOME on another distro, who knows... (Debian, perhaps?). You might also get a good, stable distro who also happens to be very fast (Vector Linux).

But these two damning factors (GNOME and a slow, buggy linux) are present in Ubuntu and this is a trend that is only going to get worse as far as I can see.

Having that handed out as a flagship Linux desktop is like having a Ferrari in first gear.

btw, want a decent Linux desktop and don't want to use KDE? Great, just use XFce, which is a great desktop too.

So, who is the fanboi here...? ;-)

If I get bored tonight (doubtful), I may give it a go.

Add the HP repos and grab the glassy-bleu-theme.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1021351

Right.. I shouldn't have said it never causes problems. As if Linux is any better though, right? But I think most people don't encounter issues. Of course all we'll hear on google searches are the complainers.

And what is RA3? Red Alert 3? If you're wanting to run a program designed for WINDOWS you need Wine installed first. Linux isn't Windows

No shit Sherlock. As if the people asked on the street would understand this though, which was the whole point of my comment. If they ended up with the computer demoed, they'd likely be at a huge loss when they buy software and have it not just work.

And again, Google is not research. I actually play RA3 myself, and had absolutely no problems with it. Given the advice is usually FIRMWARE updates to the drive, I suspect it's not a Windows problem at all, but a CD drive problem.

Your personal opinion on the game itself is irrelevent.

Except all their doing is fancying up the interface, the drivers are already there for everything. I installed vanilla Ubuntu Netbook Remix on one of these pre-Xmas and it ran perfectly out of the box:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997590

That was basically my point, about the summary. I didn't have high hopes for the article either.

Also, not to sound like a fanboy, but unless I am mistaken most linux filesystems don't suffer from serious fragmentation problems like FAT32 and NTFS. link

I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong about that though.

I'd like to see the Flash benchmarks.

For that, you could start the Flash on Ubuntu machine, boot up and install Windows 7, watch / play the Flash on Windows 7, make a sandwich, and then come back to the Ubuntu machine for the flakey jittery Flash that will have to be shut down because it doesn't work.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-647743.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-647743.html

But hey, it's Adobe's fault, so mod me as a troll for pointing out a critical flaw in user-friendliness.

(Posted from an Ubuntu machine)

I'd like to see the Flash benchmarks.

For that, you could start the Flash on Ubuntu machine, boot up and install Windows 7, watch / play the Flash on Windows 7, make a sandwich, and then come back to the Ubuntu machine for the flakey jittery Flash that will have to be shut down because it doesn't work.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-647743.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-647743.html

But hey, it's Adobe's fault, so mod me as a troll for pointing out a critical flaw in user-friendliness.

(Posted from an Ubuntu machine)

Ubuntu still has some way to go, I successfully installed Ubuntu and was plagued by 1/10th speeds relative to my Windows XP (50 KB/s vs 660 KB/s) including others http://ubuntuforums.org/search.php?searchid=55345208. Tried to stop my IPv6 although it confused me when I had to use the terminal. Didn't seem to work though. Since I did not want internet being restricted even though I disabled the firewall, I switched back to Windows.

Plus the OS is anything by a layman's OS. Partition? I had no idea how much space Ubuntu needed. There's no help once you're stuck trying to install it. Command line? Wow, it seems secure but time-consuming to research how to do them.

I need a layman's OS if I'm going to convince people to switch from Windows where people can learn on the fly.

Or, if you don't believe me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=788169

Yeah.. stuff like that never happens: http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249

ACPI sucks on Linux. E.g.

http://mjg59.livejournal.com/96270.html
Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.

Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.

There are two issues here. One is that vendors don't test with it, the other issue is that the developers don't test it with enough hardware. Ok, that's one issue. The manufacturers don't care either way and developers don't test all kernel releases on all hardware.

Because of this lack of testing the Linux ACPI code is buggy, which is what Matthew Garrett spends time working on.

Actually there are deeper issues like this one

http://advogato.org/article/913.html
The single biggest problem is video hardware. The spec doesn't require the BIOS to reprogram the video hardware at all, and so often it'll come back in an entirely unprogrammed state. This is an issue, since we (in general) have absolutely no idea how to bring a video card up from scratch. One of the easiest workarounds is to execute code from the video BIOS in the same way that the system BIOS does on machine startup. vbetool lets you do this from userspace, and it works a surprisingly large amount of the time. However, there's no guarantee that it'll be successful. Vendors often unmap that section of BIOS after the system has been brought up, since they've got far more BIOS code than will fit in the BIOS region of the legacy address space. In the long run, the only solution is drivers that know how to program an entirely uninitialised chip. The new modesetting branch of the Intel driver aims to do this, as do the developers of noveau.

See the hardware manufacturer writes a Windows driver that does this right. Maybe they write a Linux driver, maybe they don't. If they do, that driver is most likely closed source like NVidia's and therefore not installed by default. Or it is open source and not complete yet (ATI's). Or you can use the freetard reverse engineered NVidia driver which is not complete. Hell even the closed source driver might have been broken by some freetard developer trying to persuade them to open up by breaking it as often has he can.

Basically hardware manufacturers by and large care about Windows working because it has 90% market share. They don't care about Linux. Since the Linux developers don't test and patch on all hardware it is up to the end users to kludge around the defects.

So suppose you make USB widgets and want to support Linux. You want to test S3 or S4 but you need to fiddle around getting S3 and S4 to work at all on the laptop before you can test your driver's support for power management.

Of course the freetard response to all this is to blame the manufacturers. Famously Ryan Farmer accused Foxconn of a conspiracy to break Linux because his Foxxconn motherboard had these issues

http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php

Apparently there is a serious risk of data loss at this time in case of power loss (at least in ubuntu). http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1040199

There is an ongoing discussion about the possibility of porting Gnome 3 to use the Qt toolkit over at Ubuntu Forums.

There also exists an Ubuntu Brainstorm Idea with several possible solutions, with Solution #4: Change Qt to render using the Gtk widgets my favorite.

People usually don't sign up for Open Source or Free Software. They just do stuff, put it out there and let other people use it. To quote one Mr. Torvalds, real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.

I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?

Have you thought about starting a blog?

How about taking an active part in one or more major distribution's forum?

• http://fedoraforum.org/
• http://forums.opensuse.org/
• http://ubuntuforums.org/
• http://forums.gentoo.org/

Just publishing (in a reusable format under a nice CC License)

• market research
• technical business direction
• explainations of what is possible to the business types
• what you (as a marketing professional) learn from techies

If your work is of high quality, it would make an impact.

Your script wouldn't work unless you first adjusted the journal commit time of all your ext3 partitions and adjusted the dirty page writeback time. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=839998

In my (admittedly limited) experience, SWAT has a bad habit of producing overly verbose config files that do not necessarily coincide with what the user is actually trying to do -- SWAT sets options that the user hasn't touched (example), instead of relying on the already-sane Samba defaults, resulting in unexpected behaviour. GSAMBAD is even worse.

Of course, it's been a while since the linked issues were posted, and YMMV. :)

Cheers,

In my (admittedly limited) experience, SWAT has a bad habit of producing overly verbose config files that do not necessarily coincide with what the user is actually trying to do -- SWAT sets options that the user hasn't touched (example), instead of relying on the already-sane Samba defaults, resulting in unexpected behaviour. GSAMBAD is even worse.

Of course, it's been a while since the linked issues were posted, and YMMV. :)

Cheers,

I had the pleasure of formatting our Windows 2003 server this summer and completely replacing it with an Ubuntu Samba OpenLDAP Domain server using this tutorial... http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=640760 The server has been working flawlessly at our school since September! We ran out of CAL's and our school is expanding very quickly. It didn't make sense to purchase more and continue paying the micro$oft tax..

Trolling again on slashdot are we Mr. Gates? If you had been paying attention, you would have known about it, since it was all over the internet when it happened.

I'd become quite fond of enhanced cut-&-paste (multiple) clipboard capabilities under Windows. Again, UKF to the rescue: Tip 306 let me know of an open source (KDE) clipboard enhancement known as Klipper (it's in the Ubuntu Repositories), which scratches this itch most satisfactorily.

For Ubuntu's GNOME (since that's not Kubuntu Kung Fu), of course the choice should be glipper instead to avoid some KDE overhead, especially now that it's in the official repositories too, and easily installable through apt-get or the Synaptic Package Manager.