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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."
Linux is great and all but I feel half the reason it isn't doing as well as it could is because there are just so many distros in general. I know the nature of Linux is about choice and open software but this hurts Linux in itself. Why don't hardware companies put out Linux drivers as much as they do Mac drivers? Because they expect certain things within the Mac OS, not everything is different from system to system, which makes it easier and more attractive to companies to write Linux code and drivers...
http://www.pchopper.com/mirror/linux/
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
Carnegie Mellon University has had its own Red Hat-based distro for at least 5 years now, called Andrew Linux.
Enjoy!!!
http://mirrors.sunsite.dk/collegelinux/
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
Colleges are ahead of the curve regarding wireless. GNU/Linux is nasty to prepare wireless on. This comes from experience. I had to pull the packets to my Thinkpad by hand!
Really valuable for a college environment would be a completely idiot-proofed wireless network setup utility. This utility or package should:
-Have all the driver modules compiled, and the configuration files kept up to date about different manufacturers' model identifications.
-Have a convinent popup tool, ideally triggered at the card-insertion time, and iconifying shortly after, that provides helpful stats and diagnostics. How hard would it be to convert 700 lines of iwconfig, ifconfig, and driver messages to:
"Discovered SSID "foo"."
"No IP number available after 20 seconds. Respawning DHCPCD." (to make up for some setups that seem to make DHCP have a fit if you pop the card and suspend, then pick up later."
"DHCP results: IP number is 127.0.0.43"
"Current situation: Signal/noise = 54/40. 353 bad sends, 107 bad recieves"
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
screen shots at
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Also be sure to check out the latest release of Dropline GNOME--it now works with CollegeLinux and adds a beautiful GNOME 2.2-based desktop and XFree86 4.3 to a great base system. Details and downloads can be found at www.dropline.net/gnome.
http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution= college
Having so much effort wasted on many different distributions is stupid. Can you imagine what type of improvements could have been made to Linux in general with the programming time invested in maintaining many different distributions?
You mean you would already have a free clone of YOUR favorite OS NOW if everyone would just team up and agree that your favorite GUI and OS's philosophy is the best?
The problem is, there are people who actually work on projects, and those who criticize other's projects. The reason that there are so many projects is that people disagree on what the 'correct' way of doing things is. If you want a windows clone, use windows. Otherwise, choose the distribution that fits your computing style the best.
Oh, and by the way, ctl-alt-+ and ctl-alt-- changes your resolutions in X on-the-fly, if you compile your quality sound driver and insert it into the kernel, you'll have reliable sound, and xfreee86 +xinerama works great for MULTI-monitor setups, not just dual-monitor setups.
Furthermore, the developers that work on making different distributions have totally different skill sets than driver developers and applications developers. In other words, you can't assume that if these people weren't developing their distribution they would be fixing problems with sound, video, etc.. In fact, if they weren't developing their distribution, they would probably be posting nonsense on slashdot, and complaining about how all the current distributions are crap.
Sorry if I come off as harsh, but I hate this type of thinking. Some people are so lazy, but expect the world of others. Parasites.
If it's not one thing, it's Steve's Mother
I went to college, heck it was eight or ten of the best years of my life! (you degree collectors out there know what I'm talking about) I don't see anything particularly collegiate about this distribution... no more than any other distro. CollegeLinux seems to be to Slackware what Knoppix is to Debian. Nothing spectacular or collegiate.
Go Penguins!
So does it stay out late, drink a lot and not function well in the morning?
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
No other slashdot submission has pissed me off more then this one.
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."
Let's recap it -
YOU ARE SO FIRED!!. If only my employees could've used this in school.
I can just say that this bullshit additude towards different people pisses me off. Don't fire them. Teach them. Just because someone learns something different does not mean that they can not learn something different. Don't be such a total fucking asshole towards people and slashdot should be higher then posting this crap.
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
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.
and probably the most so of the vast universe of linux distros. Does this make it better? Thats for you to decide, but to me consistency and building upon what was already a good foundation seems like a good thing.
Actually, Linux isn't the problem. The Linux kernel is not a bad piece of software. The problem is X. X is a truly ancient solution to the problem of drawing windows on the screen. It was designed beck in the days when a graphical terminal was just that; a machine connected to a mainframe which had a graphical display instead of a textual one. X advocates claim that it has great network transparency. In a way, they are right, but the transparency is at too low a level. Compare X and MS Remote Desktop over a low-bandwidth link for an example. Modern features, like alpha blending are not supported by the X11 protocol, and adding 3d acceleration has to be done by hacking in an kludge of OpenGL, which destroys the network transparency.
There are some open source projects, like Fresco that aim at providing an alternative to X, but Apple have actually created one with Quartz Extreme. A lot of the problem with Linux is that it is living in the past, trying to recreate X/UNIX from decades ago. When they find a bit that's too antiquated to be useful, they hack it a bit until it looks kind-of modern.
Microsoft threw out DOS with NT (although they supported it until Windows Me), Apple threw out the old Mac OS with OS X. Th *nix crowd are still trying to adapt legacy ideas to modern computing. They will probably be able to for years to come, but eventually they will discover that you have to break backwards compatibility, or end up with a horrible kludge of aging ideas.
An aside: Have you noticed how many Linux users claim x86 is good, in spite of being a hideous architecture, because it's popular, but refuse to accept a parallel claim about Windows?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, you should use the modules to test the hardware, then compile the kernel with only the drivers you need, and one with LKM on, and one with LKM off (Default). When you add new hardware, you reboot into the lkm-enabled kernel, load the proper modules, recompile the kernel for the new hardware, one with LKM, one without, and schedule a reboot.
By the same token, you should wear a seatbelt when riding in a car, but not everybody does.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
The problem is X.
Joy. More unwarranted X bashing.
X advocates claim that it has great network transparency. In a way, they are right, but the transparency is at too low a level.
Why?
Modern features, like alpha blending are not supported by the X11 protocol, and adding 3d acceleration has to be done by hacking in an kludge of OpenGL, which destroys the network transparency.
What, you mean the RENDER extension? And I've coded in OpenGL under X11, and I have no idea what you mean by "destroying the network transparency" -- OpenGL is quite transparent over the network. In some ways more so than X11 itself.
Apple have actually created one with Quartz Extreme.
Which isn't network transparent and uses an insane amount of resources. Less features, more resource usage...why is it good again?
When they find a bit that's too antiquated to be useful, they hack it a bit until it looks kind-of modern.
Oh, for Chrissake. OS X doesn't look like anything but a large collection of not particularly usable eye candy to me. So I guess it's all in the taste.
They will probably be able to for years to come, but eventually they will discover that you have to break backwards compatibility, or end up with a horrible kludge of aging ideas.
I've found that the merit of a design is in how long it can run before it has to go. Windows 9X, for instance, lasted a little over five years. The classic Mac OS lasted a good fifteen. UNIX is at about 30 and shows no signs of slowing down.
An aside: Have you noticed how many Linux users claim x86 is good, in spite of being a hideous architecture, because it's popular, but refuse to accept a parallel claim about Windows?
What, that there's benefits to using something popular? Sure there is. That doesn't mean that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in all cases. Windows is popular, so it's easy to find software for, etc, etc, but it's expensive, somewhat buggy, and a pain to know what's going on in the internals. x86 is popular, and while the instruction set is old, it's the only real contender out there. Alpha's dead, SPARC doesn't kick ass any more, the (desktop) PowerPC may one day become important again but lost a huge amount of ground when Apple trusted Motorola instead of IBM to do development.
I don't think anyone loves the x86 instruction set. It's just that the best bang/buck processors currently out there happen to use it.
May we never see th