Slashdot Mirror
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....
Carnegie Mellon University has had its own Red Hat-based distro for at least 5 years now, called Andrew Linux.
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
ss1
ss2
ss3
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
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.