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CollegeLinux Released to the Public
YOU ARE SO FIRED! writes "It seems that the Swiss Robert Kennedy College (with the aptly named website) has released CollegeLinux, a Linux distribution based off of Slackware, to the public. If only my employees could've used this in school - I wouldn't have to fire them so much! See the interview with the dean of the school for more information."
but how they are perceived. For instance, there are a whoooole lot of distros based off other distros - based on RH, Slack, Debian etc.
This is all well and good, but maybe we need some other terminology than "distro". A term which implied sort of half-fledged distro-ness [sic], for instance for a distro *based on* something, but focussed in a certain area, would be very useful.
If this were the case, you would have your general distros (Redhat, Slack, Debian), and then, in sub-groups or similar, you would have Redhat-based College Distro, or Debian-based Medical Records distro or whatever....
Why is it that it seems these days every new distro is based upon Slackware?!?!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Dear god, those installation instructions look hairy. NCSU has had its own RH-based distro for awhile now. Of course, the Red Hat corporate headquarters are about 100 yards from my monday morning class...
Odd. I installed Mandrake 9.0 the other day on my IBM ThinkPad, and it was as easy to connect as my girlfriends iBook 800 was. Only one thing was done manually. It found the Lucent wireless card fine, and installed the correct driver. I told it to use DHCP, and that was it. I can even take the card out of my laptop, and put it back in, and it still works. No turning it off and on like I had to with Windows. Now I really understand why hot-swapping is so nice.
Oh, and by the way, ctl-alt-+ and ctl-alt-- changes your resolutions in X on-the-fly,
As much as I love Linux/X11, I find the method you mentioned as less than desirable. Yes, it changes the resolution. It also leaves me with a virtual desktop size of the default resolution. Thus, to see all of the desktop at once is not possible, requiring me to mouse to the edges and have the "view" scroll around.
if you compile your quality sound driver and insert it into the kernel, you'll have reliable sound,
Oh, I agree completely that a quality sound driver in the kernel is reliable. The sound daemons for the X11 desktops aren't so great (arts for kde comes to mind). Of course, joe user compiling a sound driver for the kernel is an interesting thought (READ: not going to happen).
xfreee86 +xinerama works great for MULTI-monitor setups, not just dual-monitor setups.
I have tried both using xinerama and not using xinerama for my Matrox card. Xinerama gave better overall results, but liked to crash under certain applications. Without Xinerama, the crashes didn't occur, but I didn't get what I wanted across multiple screens. All this was done on Red Hat though. On Mandrake, it was setup for me by the installer, and it worked a lot nicer. I didn't check to see if it was using Xinerama or not.
Sorry if I come off as harsh
You did.
but I hate this type of thinking.
You hate thinking along the lines of "easy to use"? Remember, easy to use for an adept and a common user are tottally different things (and a lot of people have better things to do, the computer is just a tool to them).
Some people are so lazy, but expect the world of others. Parasites.
"Some people" as you put it, also cannot program. Like myself. You don't want me contributing to (insert project here), because the code would suck (which is why I left the comp sci program and went into admin instead). Obviously, "normal users" need a computer to do certain tasks (productivity apps, etc..), but cannot contribute. By your definition that makes them parasites, but they cannot do anything about that.
Yes, I can read man pages. Yes, I can use vi to edit the X config file. Yes, I edit apache's config in the same way. But I am in the field. The average office worker isn't. And at home, there is no help desk other than emails and newsgroups -- non-instantaneous help. (Users like instant help).
All of this bitching about Linux on the desktop is making me tired. Why don't you got try an older Linux distro like Redhat 6.2 or SUSE 7.3 and then compare it to the current offerings? Guess what? Linux gets better and better daily. AND YOU DON'T NEED PROPRIETARY HARDWARE TO RUN IT, UNLIKE A MAC! I like Macs and I understand brand loyalty but I don't let Sony, Acura, or BMW define the way I think.
This guy is way out there
Linux is great...as long as you have VMware
Having tried OS X for a while and liking it, I can't agree that it will "beat" Linux.
While using 10.1-10.1.5 I was pleased with the "beauty" of the thing as most people are. But when it came to running anything that didn't come pre-installed I didn't find it any more reliable, or easy to configure than a typical Windows machine.
I purchased SEVERAL peripheral devices and got most of them at an Apple store... just to be on the safe side. Even so, whether these devices would work or not was a crap-shoot.
Still I hung in there waiting for the promised benefits of Jaguar. When it came out I went and *purchased* a copy, even though I hadn't had my machine for 6 months yet.
Jaguar for me, and for many other people posting on the Apple forums was a total disaster. Not only did it provide few improvments that I could see, but the system was completely unstable.
Like so many other people at the Apple forums I wondered if maybe my hardware was at fault. People there have been advised to send their machines in for repair (at their expense) in order to cure Jaguar problems. Getting their machines back the glitches remain and they are out another $300. The level of support from what I can see is hardly any better than what a typical PC user would get from Microsoft and any name brand hardware vendor. You would at *least* expect with hardware and software comming from one company that there woul be no finger pointing about random lockups. But there is.
The happy ending to my story is that I used the unreliability of my iBook as an excuse to try out Yellow Dog Linux. I figured if *that* didn't work I'd take the machine back to the Apple store for another one.
That was 6 months ago and I don't think the machine has crashed or locked up once. I'm running Mozilla and Apache and PHP and all sorts of things that never worked right under OS X.
I prefer Evolution for email and calandar to anything OS X provided. I load picture from my camera into file folders with automatic thumbnail viewing. The KDE desktop looks as good as OS X in many respects and better in some too, plus it is more configurable than OS X is likely to be.
Updating is as easy as the OS X update program was. I type "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get upgrade" every week or two and its all taken care of. I could easily automate this, or make an icon out of it.
Did I have to study a bit to get all this stuff working? Yes I did. But I've spent far less time getting Linux to work the way I want and ultimatly succeeded whereas I spent far more time stuggling with my broken Jaguar and ultimately gave up. Which was the time better spent?
Maybe you're right and OS X will beat Linux, but to do so, Apple will have to make a quantum leap in support services. They will also have to do a much better job of herding hardware vendors into the OS X corral than they have so far. They'll have to do this without raising their prices, because PC prices continue to drop.
I can't make the math work for it. Maybe you can.
Actually, cards that work on a Mac need to have an F-code driver in ROM that OpenFirmware can read. So it's more than a few lines' difference.
Sorry, I'm not an MS apologist, but this is unfair. Sure, Windows has a *terrible* history (I've been a user since before v3.1), and MS is a pretty horrible company, but your comment simply is not true any more. Windows 2000 is very solid, and the system for installing drivers is quick and painless. "Computer Management" through MMC and auto-detection of new hardware are both impressive bits of coding, IMO.
"and you get no information about what is really going on to troubleshoot!"
Now this I totally agree with. I want to know what's going on too, but 99% of computer users don't want, and shouldn't need, to know.
An example. A new graphics adaptor is a piece of consumer electronics these days, with a nice shiny box and everything. Would I prefer to perhaps recompile my f**cking OS kernel to get it working, or pop in a CD and wait? Hmmm... (And both methods require rebooting and nervous anticipation, BTW, Windows does not have the monopoly on that).
--
I like Linux AND Windows. Shoot me.
I'm spoiled by my 'Setup.exe, [Ok], [Ok], [Ok] *bam* you're up and running' expectation I've developed from using Windows 2000.
That's funny, this is an experience I've *never* had with windows 2000. Software yes, drivers no. maybe now, 3 years after the initial relase of the new hardware abstraction layer, maybe NOW companies are finally getting it right, but not back when I actually used that stupid OS.
Aside from that, the Linux kernel scans the hardware at boot time and loads whatever modules it needs. It's got some conf files in etc to configure the modules with. So all the hardware vendors have to do is give us a 2.2.x and a 2.4.x module with some basic instructions on installing it. It's just not that hard to do, especially comparing it to making Windows drivers.
For windows, sure you can click your setup.exe and it's up and running, but did you bother to consider that your installer had to see if it was win95/95, winMe, win2k, nt4, or winXP before it installed a driver? That's FIVE (count'em) different HALs they provide for! With Linux, there's only 3 relevant stable kernels at the moment. Lots of subversions of them, certainly, but only 3 when it comes down to it. Write for the LCD of each of them and make a driver for 2.0.x, 2.2.x, and 2.4.x.
BETTER YET. Get your driver programmers to submit the drivers directly to LKML and see if they're accepted. I imagine they would be if there wasn't a better one already available. They might rewrite it, they will almost certainly audit it. If you are serious about supporting Linux, you'll check with the kernel developers.
Like what I said? You might like my music