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Sun Mad Hatter Linux Desktop Revealed
magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."
but promising! Clearly, Sun has cooped something that looks good. Let's hope they'll be a nice player and release this vor x86 as well.
Over at LinuxWorld, Sun was demonstrating the Mad Hatter desktop. However, it wasn't just Mad Hatter on a single computer, rather it was set up on dummy terminals connected to a network computer, with a login simply being a smart card inserted into a reader within the terminal. So, what's special about that?
Well, now imagine if your work (well, porn watching) was interrupted by a nosey boss (or mother). All you have to do is yank the card out, the screen locks itself and renders itself ready to other users. You can go on to another more private terminal and simply stick your card in, and presto - everything you were doing is now displayed on the new terminal. (back to porn!)
Cool stuff, but fairly much in competition with LTSP.
I always think it's great when another hardware manufacturer sees the light of open source software. But when it's coming to sun the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is saying.
Here we have Scott McNealy telling people ""Don't touch open-source software unless you have a team of intellectual-property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece" of open-source code. " yet they're also releasing an open sourced distribution of Linux.
What's the deal with Sun? One minute their CEO is in a penguin suit extolling the world starts with open source, then it's Solaris will save the world, then it's Linux is doomed because of the SCO thing, etc.
I wouldn't want to support someone so wishy washy
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
"First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows."
Man, I wish that were true. I really do, but it's not.
Windows flaws are duplicated.
The flaw that bit my ass a couple weeks ago... auto-numbering in OpenOffice.com's word processor. Faithfully duplicates Word's shitting auto-numbering "feature". Godawful.
It's all about duplication. Period.
--Richard
Is there a new meaning of unique that marketeers use? Unique meaning "not in the equivalent Microsoft product".
Tabbed browsing - unique to mozilla, workspace switcher, unique to Linux???
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
I like the simplicity of it. I'm not a fan of the new XP look and feel though. 98 was a good year.
My main problems with Windows are the bugs, the licensing, and the built in limits meant to encourage home users to upgrade to their $4000 enterprise edition, which gives you comparable functionality to Linux and other free operating systems.
An OS can have a great UI (like Windows), but still be terrible in most other ways (like Windows).
Microsoft Windows is the bimbo that everyone wants to date -- great looking exterior, but nothing underneath the surface. It's it only real purpose is to fuck you over.
Linux is like the mousy looking girl who works at the library. Smart and fun as all get-out, but not necessarily as pretty as the bimbo.
Now Sun is trying to offer a library girl with bimbo good-looks. I say more power to them.
from the article, corporate users, or actually most people, are more likely drawn by the GUI [than the security], thus most linux distros are now trying to copy Windows' GUI, hoping users will eventually switch over.
for example, users might find the 'preview' feature in Outlook very userfriendly and easy, although it might 'preview' some virus for you.
so, my question is - can linux be so similar to Windows without forsaking the important security?
Read Suns position they are right to make it simple. Looky and feely is stupid for offices. Make it work and not have bunghole dep and debug problems. Keep it simple and functional for business they will love you! That is why MS is not selling to small business the way they want. XP, 2003, need 256meg of ram minimum or they will run like a dog on an old hp P2 or P3 slot one! Get rid of all the anime and flash and bells and whistles if you run thin clients and you want to reuse your 3-5 year old machines! Microsoft is bloatware and businesses know this. By MS trying to be Nervana for gamers, music and movies they have lost track of business big time. Sun is right on with this approach, they see the throut and they are going for it, so is IBM. Linux and freedom for the business people right on brother!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Hrm, if Ximian can release their own modified desktop, and Sun can release their own modified desktop, why don't we start a project that reintegrates all those features that had been removed or hidden back into Gnome, and call it "Hackers' Gnome" or something? We all know that the Gnome project likes to remove stuff in order to not "confuse" the newbie, so producing a "Hackers' Gnome" could be our chance of keeping all the functionality that we're used to having in Gnome.
...but I think the software is not. Looking at those screenshots, I sneared. It's no improvement over RedHat's desktop, save for some shinier looking icons (pointless). The arrangement tries to look too hacker-like. We don't want a desktop that looks like most things from themes.org. Overall, this reminded me of what most open source interfaces looked like years ago when only 31337 people worked on them. Again, it's good to see backing from Sun, lending their credibility, but over all, I see nothing impressive about this.
On a more humorous note, they'll be sorry they put that comments form on the bottom...
Join Tor today!
I was the Linux technical resource for a desktop support team that supported ~50K desktops, of those 10K were Solaris, 36K were windows (mostly 2K), and 4K were RH Linux. Linux was only 8% of the total but still a lot more than 20 systems =) And Sun was showing this desktop running on their thin terminals so I don't think you have to worry about resources too much =) Oh yeah and anything is an improvement from CDE.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've actually started to really disagree with making Linux as close to Windows as possible.
/sigh
For the reason that you described, in a way.. "They're familiar with Windows interface conventions, and anything different from Windows will face an immediate barrier."
That much is true, but there are other consequences to it acting just like Windows.
I'm IT manager for a charity (before anyone asks, yes the pay is crap) and we're currently starting up an older-PC refurbishment scheme where we take Pentium-IIs and the like which companies would normally throw away, format them and sell them on cheaply to those who want a real budget system.
Due to licencing issues (Us: "can you pass on any software licenses with your donated hardware?" Them: "who? wha??? Where? How?") it's not usually economical to provide Windows with the machine. Who wants to buy a 50 machine with a 110 operating system?!!
So I explained (or tried to explain) the wonders of Linux to my boss. At some point I mentioned the word "free" and demonstrated how close it can resemble Microsoft software, and he was jumping up and down with joy.
"Great!" I thought! Good chance to promote Linux amongst the masses!
Boss: "Start a user group here. I'd be glad to use this building to host it"
Me: "Woohoo!"
Boss: "We can use this to sell the computers cheap, then when they have enough money they can upgrade to the REAL Windows"
Ok, I'll bite. What's wrong with the Win32 file locking semantics?
The problem with windows was never it's gui. (Well, not for most users at least.)
At least the GUI is not the major problem with Windows. The Windows GUI is not bad, but there are a few things I dislike about the Windows GUI. For example the virtual desktops available in most Linux GUIs should have been standard in Windows by now. In an earlier comment I told about some of the reasons I like the average Linux GUI more than Windows.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
No virtual desktops, no edge-snapping etc. It's alright, but it's nowhere near "well done". Most of the ideas came from Apple and particularly RISC OS anyway...
This Sun desktop has the same problem with icons that I'm seeing with Red Hat 9. They're huge! The icons and the text are quite large and clunky looking. Same with whatever file manager it is that I'm using out of the box. The icons in list mode are so big and you don't see that many items at a time.
/a/b/c.conf, let me confess: I don't know much about Linux. I've been using Windows for years and am pretty well versed in it, but for a long time I've wanted to switch to Linux, for the freedom, stability, power, what have you. So I'm trying again.
:-)
Now before you flame me as a moron who doesn't know how to tweak
But I can see for myself that the Windows interface does look pretty good and is fairly easy to use. I think the hard-core Linux users miss something when they dismiss everything in Windows. There's good stuff there. I'm willing to dig to figure out how to do stuff in Linux, but I think I'm atypical of Windows users in general.
I shouldn't even post this because I'll probably get flamed in to oblivian, but I'm hoping someone will reply with an answer about how to fix the godawful icons on the desktop
That sounds like the most "optinal" UI to me.
It's not -- it falls prey to the same issues of getting trapped that running simulated annealing without keeping things hot enough long enough runs into.
People *do* seek minima, but they will seek out local minima, not just global minima. If they're offered a feature that will make things easier and better with no cost to them, they'll take it. However, if they have the option to use something better but there is significant relearning time, they may well choose not to put out the effort.
In the case of Windows, many people know Windows. There are known issue with Windows where it does not fit with current best practices in human interface research. Take...oh, say, the use of pie menus, for instance. However, people are familiar with Windows's current linear menus, and even if there was a long-term benefit to changing to a different interface, they are going to be unhappy with the sort term cost.
I believe that the same thing is true of Linux.
How will Linux UI become "better" in the future? Why isn't these things implemented now?
The UI on Linux has been *steadily* (and compared to competitors, extremely rapidly) been improving. About twelve years ago, Linux didn't even exist. About ten years ago, you needed to be a bit of a kernel hacker to consider touching Linux. Seven years ago, a fairly serious techie experimenter, comfortable with poking around with your bootloaders. Five years ago, you had to still be a pretty decent power user, be comfortable not having a GUI for configuring much of anything, and be able to deal with lots of incompatibilities with Windows software, much less little hardware support. Four years ago, you had to be willing to deal with pretty alpha-ish, flaky or archaic desktop environment software, and still had to worry pretty constantly about hardware compatibility.
Frankly, Linux as a general user desktop environment has essentially gone from zero to threat #1 on Microsoft's worry list in the last three or four years. In some areas, UIs on Linux have surpassed their Microsoft equivalents. KDE's use of detachable panes or GNOME's complete user-configurability of keyboard menu equivalents are pretty neat. Four years ago, Linux multimedia was a pretty sad thing -- there was a commercial mpeg player called mtv and a couple of projects. Today, properly set up Linux boxes smoke Windows in latency. Microsoft has not adapted will to the tougher security requirements of an Internet-connected age, as Linux has.
Linux still has issues that keep some people from using it. A lack of entertainment software (most traditional video games do not make very good open source projects) is significant. Poor inter-distro binary and library compatibility is also an issue. If I had to ship something in binary format that I knew would run on Linux boxes, I'd probably ship it in PE format, because Wine can provide stronger guarantees about binary compatibility than Linux itself can. Linux also does not currently, IMHO, cater as well to the power-user-but-not-techie as Linux does. The light user, who uses a spreadsheet, word processor, email program, and web browser (oh, and Solitaire), has little problem with Linux other than an inability to interact with Microsoft Office file formats reliabily, and enjoys increased stability. The techie loves Linux's ability to be remotely administered, its performance, customizability, scriptability, huge (and free) suite of development tools, and availability of source to fix irritating bugs. The almost-techie-power-user, however, runs into problems. Linux has a thinner layer of GUI over the internals than does Windows. They're probably going to have to interact with the CLI. The power user may want to install unusual software, the sort of thing that doesn't come packaged, but be incapable of dealing with any problems in compiling that software.
So I believe that Linux is getting better for most desktop users much faster than Windows is, but there are definitely categories of users that will not be happy with Linux.
May we never see th
I rather liked the old windows gui. That's one reason why I use icewm over kde: the stock look and feel. XP seems a lot like KDE though, and I don't particularly like having everything lumped together. For most people, the problems with windows are really problems with select pieces of commonly used windows software: Outlook Express and IE's security (or lack thereof), MS Office being bloated, Winamp/Media Player/RealPlayer/what have you getting into advanced versions and starting to get slow and bloated. Stability is only a minor annoyance anymore as most people figure out workarounds to windows (sad but true).
Open a terminal window in Windows to a directory. Then try to move or rename that directory (or a parent directory). An error will come up -- sharing violation. Linux will let you move the directory and simply use the new location.
Open a file, and try to move or rename that file while it's open (drives me nuts when using less in cygwin). Sharing violation. Doesn't happen in Linux.
Try running any kind of update or setup program. You generally get told to reboot. Why? Because Windows forces you to close all libraries, which means closing all programs using libraries, before they can be removed and the new versions of the libraries slapped into place. Linux uses UNIX file locking semantics, so the files can simply be deleted. They won't actually go away until the library is closed, but any new instances of programs started after an upgrade will use the new libraries. These poor file locking semantics are the reason for almost all of required Windows reboots.
I was particularly irritated when I noticed Microsoft's (IMHO dangerous and complexity-inducing) workaround for this. In XP, some MS exec realized that constant sharing violation error dialogs coming up when users tried to rename or delete files or directories containing open files or directories were pissing off users, so they ordered that this be fixed. Instead of fixing the NT kernel to be more capable, they made a workaround in XP's Explorer. From now on, failures in moving or deleting files and directories would be silent. Furthermore, to provide the user the illusion of his operation succeeding, XP's Explorer will even remove the directory's icon from any open windows. However, it is not actually deleted, and upon refreshing a window showing the directory's icon, you will notice that the icon returns.
I use about six Windows machines operating off of a single share on a regular basis. Since I frequently have consoles open in a directory (or Explorer windows open to a directory on other computers), I constantly get sharing violations. This is annoying and time-consuming, but harmless. However, Microsoft trying to play work around poor kernel design choices in Explorer is, IMHO, pretty awful.
I could also mention the poor workaround in Explorer for another NT kernel shortcoming -- the lack of support for symlinks (Shortcuts), and a host of other technical issues I have with Windows. (Remember the 8.3->long filenames issues?) The thing is that Microsoft isn't as interested in issues internal to Windows as Linus and friends do. Microsoft developers work to get a paycheck, and don't care what happens as long as end users don't see any obvious flaws. Linus is trying to produce a code showpiece, and if people can use it to help themselves out, fantastic. As a result, most Linux failings are due to the fact that developers weren't interested or motivated enough to deal with some issue that was of interest to end users but not developers, and most Microsoft issues are due to the fact that Microsoft made a customer-driven poor engineering decision in the past.
May we never see th
but you need to realize that Microsoft and others have poured a lot of money into making it's system very user-friendly -- perhaps a little too much for nerds who aren't used to friends. As such, they front-end of their system (I would like to see a critique based on the actual interface) is very intuitive especially since us kids have been using Windows as long as we've used computers. So the Windows feel and the "this looks like Windows so it should act like it" is actually something we should want. Linux can only catch up in terms of end-user usability, but once it does that, it can then start to innovate. That's what I'm looking towards Mandrake and others to do.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
GPC is indeed a requisite for building OpenOffice.org for Linux (see http://tools.openoffice.org/dev_docs/build_linux.h tml#GeneratingtheBuildEnvironmentandBuildTools ) .i ndex.html, "This software is free for non-commercial use. Anyone wishing to use the gpc library in support of a commercial product please email gpc@cs.man.ac.uk." OpenOffice.org is non-commercial. It is not sold but obtainable for free from the website, http://www.openoffice.org/. But, of course, it would be more in keeping with open-source work methods if all the tools needed were open source. Thus, if you can create such a tool, or persuade the owner of GPC to open-source his tool,or point us to a satisfactory open-source equivalent, please go ahead. It seems a better strategy than to complain that OpenOffice.org is a sham.
According to the GPC site, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/alan/software//
Louis
OpenOffice.org
People HATED XP when it first came out (and most still do) because it was "different" and they couldn't find anything.
Um, no. In fact, Windows XP sold more than Windows 95 did at its launch.
What's different about XP? I keep seeing this FUD about how "everything's moved around," and "nobody can find anything," when the only major things that are changed from 2000 is a bunch of icons moved from the desktop to the Start menu (configurable). Oh, and Common Tasks (also configurable). The only other thing I can think of is file permissions, but Simplified File Sharing can be turned off so that it's like--you guessed it--Windows 2000.
In other words, I never get what's so radically different about XP other than better application/driver support, as well as minor interface changes like thumbnails, camera integration, etc. It's Windows 2000 but designed for home use. When I upgraded some 98 machines to XP for a network once, I found that nothing had even been moved around at all, because it was smart enough to retain all settings. The users didn't even know any better (except less crashing and faster startup times).
"Sufferin' succotash."
Why do you think hackers hated the Mac?
The perfect GUI would be one that had the n00b-simplicity of Finder (MacOS 7), the taskbar of Windows minus the word "Start" (perhaps, instead, the name of the GUI; cf. KDE), and the ability to run a full Bourne shell in a window (Win9x, using MinGW's ash or Cygwin's bash; *x, using an xterm; even NeXT's os could do this, and so can AtheOS, AFAIK) and a lot of the typical utilities. And I like to run a program by hitting Win-R and typing the name of the program.
And...keep the eye candy to a minimum by default, Please! My bloody eyes!
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Still, FVWM95 has not helped Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market even though FVWM95 has been available for at least 3 years.
However, there is good news. The vehicle that is helping Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market is the powerful 80x86 chips by Intel and AMD. Numerous small American companies (like those in Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128) are moving en masse away from Unix workstations with crappy processors like UltraSPARC to Linux desktops with powerful processors like the Pentium 4, the Athlon, and the PPC 970.
In fact, the CEO of one company developing radio-frequency chips deploys only Linux desktops and servers. The Linux desktops are powered by Pentium 4s. To quote her, "Linux running on an 80x86 chip creates a desktop that gives 3x the performance and 1/3 the cost of a Sun workstation."
The bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
Something clean for a change. I hate the clutter most Linux distros have. And if it looks like Windows, well maybe it's because the windows design works because of itself, not in spite of itself.
One thing I never quite understood with Microsoft was the shear number of variations of the same OS. Surely having so many variations of the same operating system they are giving themselves a support nightmare? Apple and Sun seem to have two versions of their OSs, server and non-server. This simplifies support issues a whole bunch. Maybe Sun is not such a good example since they are 100% workplace, but Apple on the other hand is found in home and in the workplace.
Generally the only differences between a workstation version of an OS used the workplace are the networking features and the groupware style apps, but then again the latter is extra anyhow. Sure the kernel may be optimized differently, but the core components are architectually the same. Maybe I am missing something, if I am then please let me know?
Although I didn't mention Linux, it too, for any single distro, comes in a limited number of flavours.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
On pressing start to shutdown, the history of this is contained in a blog here.
And to quote from the article: "Short answer: The same reason you turn the ignition key to shut off your car. " The long answer ultimately has to do with usability studies. So much for the theory that it doesn't make sense.
First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows. Windows contains a lot of good ideas (which originated at many companies over many years...Apple, for instance, is a major contributor). Just because it isn't as good as it could be and isn't improving doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
I used to, but I hardly know what the flaws are anymore, except for the ones that have remained since Windows 95. Once I stopped having a Windows partition I had less and less opportunities to be annoyed by them, and much more likely to send patches to KDE projects with no idea if the UI problem I encountered exists in Windows or what their solution was if it didn't. I think it was maybe two years ago since I switched completely, but the two years before that I basically used Windows only with Visual Studio and the Cygwin tools for development. So I wasn't really exposed to much beyond changing the screen resolution and installing WinCVS for new developers and setting the clock. (The latter required you to log in with root privledges, though a Windows using friend tells me they have a Mandrake like "right click to run as admin w/password prompt" feature now.) I wrote up some docs on installing the IBM JDK and installing an NTP deamon too, but still it only required a half hour of actual exposure to Windows.
The point is the emphasis on Windows flaws will die out naturally as fewer Free Software and Open Source developers are exposed to their tools. Just using a Mac can be an entirely frustrating experience these days, "What do you mean there is no way to change the TCP/IP Window size? You need to sign over IP rights to even look at Apple's code? The MTU calculation has been broken for several releases and a patch was sent to them a year ago? So the user I'm trying to help is just screewed? Okay..." I actually managed to help that user by reprogramming the router to only send packet fragments to that machine, insane workaround in my book, the user offered to buy me a dinner in addition to the bottle of wine she gave me, at least Mac users are nicer than the Windows users you try to help.
PS It's not that I hate the Windows GUI, I absolutely drooled over Win95. Windows just evolves at such a glacial pace, and they don't seem to fix interaction bugs in any kind of organized way. Open Source is much maligned for only fixing interesting bugs instead of easy but annoying ones, but Gnome and KDE really are organized when it comes to improving the interaction model.
Last week in amongst the Blackout of 2003 and Blaster/Nachi worm taking down the Internet as well as the network at work, MY WINDOWS BOOT DRIVE DIED!
/proc a bit, I figured out that the USB reader gets mapped to a SCSI device. A simple:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/camera
:)
./configure, make, make install or rpm -i package.rpm isn't exactly rocket science. I typically like to compile the code myself so it's better optimized from my processor and libraries.
Not having the time or desire to replace it, I decided that I would throw my Linux box in as my primary desktop. After a few short days I am happy to report that the Linux Desktop is actually VERY usable and VERY stable.
First I needed an MP3 player capable of working with Shoutcast (streaming MP3's). RedHat decided not to include one. I headed over to source forge and picked up XMMS . XMMS is very similar to Winamp.
Once I had my tunes, it was time to get the core services working i.e. (Printing, Office Automation, and Digital Camera). Since I have an HP printer which handles postscript setting up printing was a no brainer. My color printer is an EPSON CX-5200 attached to a windows machine via USB. I know I can get connectivity via Samba, but I am not sure how the driver is going to work out. I'll tackle color printing later.
Open Office works extremely well, is compatible with MS Office and prints very nicely. For kicks, I went back to Sourceforge and downloaded and compiled the latest version of WINE and then, installed MS Office 97. My first attempt went poorly since the paper clip assistant crashes WINE. I wiped out the install and started over and minutes later I could run MS-Word and Excel under Linux. Let me repeat that, YOU CAN RUN MSOFFICE UNDER LINUX.
Next it was time for getting the pics off my digital camera. I have a USB Compact Flash reader plugged into the USB port. I stuck the compact flash card in and the harddrive blinked a bit but nothing mounted. After digging around in
mount
and VIOLA! Pictures!
Next I needed an image editor. I played around with GIMP, which is very very nice but longed for Photoshop 6.0. I tried to install Photoshop with WINE but had no luck. I googled for help and found the only way to do it was to use CrossOver Office. After downloaded and installing Cross Over Office I was able to install both Adobe Photoshop Elements V2.0 and Photoshop 6.0 . I haven't shelled out for the 7.0 upgrade yet but 7.0 supposedly works as well. Photoshop works well under WINE and I haven't had any problems except with the ALT-key. In GNOME pressing ALT and clicking in a Window is the shortcut for moving a window. You have to remap the ALT-Click to something else and I chose the WINDOWS/Logo key. I never knew this feature existed, but I find it quite useful
I was in bliss... GNOME, Photoshop, XMMS, OpenOffice, MS-Office, Ximian, and Mozilla with everything running in it's own workspace. If you haven't tried Linux as your Desktop, give it a shot. It's not as easy and point, click, install however,
Next I needed to get into work. Using SSH, I created a tunnel into work and cranked up VNC to my Windows 2000 box. VNC was running mightly slow, 40 secs for a screen update. The version of VNC that comes with RedHat 9.0 is pretty crusty so I went and obtained the new version and performance is much better (1-2 sec screen updates). Note: In VNC PRESS F8 get execute a remote CTRL-ALT-DELETE or shuffle clipboard contents.
I also used SSH to create another tunnel and used rdesktop over the tunnel to access a Windows Terminal Server. Very impressive and FAST! Between VNC and rdesktop I can access my remote deskop Windows box at work.
I haven't got any games to work yet. My favorites are Star Craft Broodwar, CIV3, and Age of Mythology. If anyone has gotte
Linux may get some traction by being a cheaper Windows with fewer bugs, but keep in mind that you're putting Microsoft in the drivers seat in that situation. All they have to do is make a free, secure version of Windows. It would be pure arrogance think that they (a) are incapable of doing that or (b) that they wouldn't sacrifice the razors to make money on the blades. Ultimately, the Linux UI has to stop copying Windows and innovate on it's own terms. You've got a better foundation? Why is your UI layer so bad then? GNOME and KDE users: use Mac OS X exclusively for a month, and you'll see what I mean. Yes, it's getting better. GNOME 2.4 promises to be the most polished release yet. But you're still five years out from Mac OS X.
It's just like driving on the right hand side of the road. It's more dangerous when shit happens, because nine times out of ten, you'll pull to the left - into oncomming traffic. Driving on the left hand side of the road fixes this, as you'll be pulling off the road. It's just that pretty much everyone is used to driving on the right hand side of the road and changing that is not going to go over well with the general public.
Another example is how you open a door. Here in Denmark almost all doors open inwards, which is extremely stupid in an emergency situation, because in a panic and/or stampede you'll be unable to open the door. In most public buildings the doors open outwards for safety reasons, but it's a pain in the ass to get used to, when you're not dealing with automated doors.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Yet Another Distro
.tar.gz but the system doesnt have it in its package database. Once you force the RPM package to install and fix scripts by hand, the system doesnt know the RPM application is installed since you didnt use Sun's package. Damn.
Now I like the looks of the desktop, the fact that Sun is bringing forward Linux and that my skills will have a bigger market in the future. But yet another distro confuses me. Why anyway?
I can understand Knoppix being based on Debian. It is Debian only prettier, so all debian packages will work with Knoppix. Knoppix also brings great hardware detection with it. Theres RedHat and SuSE, while I hate the fact that these two are incompatible with debian packages, they at least have compatible RPM packages with each other. Theyre also quite big and proprietary which makes it worth learning them. Hate it also that RedHat is not LSB, makes it tougher for software developers to package them for RedHat and SuSE.
Theres Gentoo and Slackware, each in its own niche. Then theres Lindows, Ximian Lycoris all competing with each other on the desktop (I know lycoris is based on debian too). Thats too many distros already. More so than the niches among current Linux users. One step forward is several distros use deb packaging and almost all can install RPM packages. But it still instills dependancy mayhem. Now you have a Sun distro that possibly uses its own packaging as WELL as RPM. So you need to install an RPM package that depends on another package on Mad Hatter. The other is already installed from
And of course you'll definitely have to install all of GTK and KDE dependency libraries to use various X applications. Total install size will exceed 2GB and overall the system will run slower and in the desktop, will have more problems than Windows XP. THATS how badly standards are needed in Linux.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Huh...didn't know that the NT kernel understood symlinks -- I thought it was just hard links.
I'm not an NT systems coder, so I can't respond to some of these. I don't know why you'd need kernel-level support for thread pools. I don't agree that not having an OOM killer is more advanced design. I used to think that the OOM killer was an awful hack, but I've come to feel more and more that it's a lesser-evil solution. The overwhelming majority of software, and all large software packages that I can think of, simply do not check to ensure that they can succeed on all memory allocations. In a system where you don't have an OOM killer and run out of memory, things generally simply grind slower and slower, a couple apps get failed allocations (which may lead to crashes or odd behavior later in the lifetime of the app), and fairly soon something (generally one of the worse-written apps) crashes. So, essentially, you *have* an OOM killer on NT. It's just a bit less intelligent about choosing what to kill, and can wipe out more apps. The days of classic MacOS-style fancy application-level memory management are pretty much dead, IMHO. Too much programmer work. Finally, checking malloc() results doesn't do you a damn bit of good if the allocation is a stack allocation -- what are you planning to do, other than wedge the application or kill it?
Some of the things you mentioned seem to be features that are more useful in a Windows-like environment, where there's more of a focus on threads than processes. Given that UNIX coders have thread-based models and process-based-models available these days and tend to stick with process-based-models, I feel that this is more of a Windows flaw -- that if Windows allowed a decent fork(), process pools would eliminate the need for completion ports.
Finally, I think your argument supporting NT's file locking semantics is based on a misunderstanding of how UNIX file locking works. If I have a file open, it may be deleted. However, the file is refcounted, and each hard link and each open file table entry for that file counts as a reference. So the space for that file and all of its data remains valid until the application closes it. The only guarantee NT makes that UNIX doesn't is that if an application has a file open for read, then opening it again for read will not fail to deleted -- but it *could* change for a number of other reasons, like permission modifications. So NT's semantics provide very dubious benefits, and huge problems by way of forced rebooting and killing of applications.
Finally, WRT to FILE_SHARE_DELETE (which I admit that I did not know about) -- the thing is simply not a solution to UNIX semantics. First, it only works on NT, so no programmers will use it for anything but custom apps for at least a few years. Second, as far as I can tell, it requires the process deleting the file to take abnormal action to delete the file (OpenFile() with the FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE). Third, I don't believe the file is deleted until it's actually closed (no Windows box handy to test on, however). This means that if you open the thing, you cannot create a new file with the same name in the same location until the process is closed. Fourth, it requires the process opening the file to take abnormal action (pass in the special flag). Fifth, there is a huge installed base of libraries and other functions that do not allow you to pass in FILE_SHARE_DELETE. The NT object loader doesn't do so, so DLLs cannot be replaced when an application is running (which means closing apps, rebooting computer, etc). It's a good bet that many userspace libraries also do not allow you to pass in this flag. This effectively makes it useless from the user's point of view.
May we never see th