Slashdot Mirror
Dell's New Linux Blog
comforteagle writes "I've just written up an interesting find: Linux engineers at Dell have started their own Linux site and weblog about Linux at Dell. From the announcement: "Welcome to the Dell Linux Community Web. This site is dedicated to providing any information that may be useful regarding your usage of Linux on your Dell equipment. While Dell primarily works with and officially supports Red Hat Linux, many of our customers choose to run other distributions." And perhaps more importantly it appears that the new site and weblog is run and maintained by the engineers themselves. It certainly has that 'made with vi' look." And kudyadi points to this PC Magazine interview with Michael Dell, in which Dell talks "about Dell's expanding product line, the company's late entrance into the Media Center space, and where the PC giant and the industry go from here." He touches on Linux just a bit, too.
... cos if they haven't, then the U.S. military could buy Dells for their aircraft carriers, install linux, and then they'd have a reliable warship that didn't have to be towed in because windows crashed, and in rough seas the computers would flex as much as the ship.
I wish Compaq had this type of support.
A good friend has a titanium iBook. He treats it like glass to avoid mars and shattering the display (because the lid bends and flexes so much, it is possible to shatter the LCD display), but a hinge on the thing still broke. He tried to get a replacement, but because Apple ships the things all glued together, he was told that he could not obtain the part from Apple short of a $600 replacement display. He ended up spending hours and hours fabricating a new hinge, and disassembling and reassembling the computer to get the parts into place. The back of the display also seems to have fallen off.
I've been stunningly underwhelmed with the general sturdiness of Apple's laptops.
On the up side, Apple laptops had chronic problems for *years* with the port-covering panel breaking off. Apple seems to have fixed this, as the panel is firmly attached on his Mac.
OS X is usable without being incredibly irritating, a la Windows, but it still isn't Linux. You are stuck with a single mouse button trackpad, and you should be aware that purchasing a Mac is more than the initial purchase price -- software and hardware from Apple is pricy and a lot of software that Linux folks take for granted as free are quite expensive packages on the Mac. Finally, the PowerPC isn't what it once was -- the PPC used to be an incredibly cool (thermally cool) processor back in the day, but it's steadily consumed more and more power.
It all depends on what you like in a computer. I would *definitely* use a friend's Apple computer for a while before buying an Apple machine, unless the money really doesn't even measure on your financial radar. You may like the thing. It has plenty of eye candy, a much better UI than Windows, better commercial software support than Linux (well, for typical cubicle-worker stuff), and is fairly straightforward.
While it *does* have a CLI, it lacks the GNU utilities, which is *incredibly* annoying to anyone who has gotten familiar with them. If Solaris or BSD (well, sans GNU utils) drives you nuts with the more limited featureset in the CLI utilities, you are going to be equally irritated with the Mac OS.
If you're aware of what you're getting into, Macs can be a good deal.
Note that, before people get crabby about me bashing Apple, I have a Mac right next to me at the moment, and I've used and coded on Macs for years in the past. I think Apple's done some good stuff, but that people also tend to get an overly rosy view of their products.
May we never see th
Wow... internetweekly is a pile of biased "non-facts". I can't believe anybody would read that site for any real political insight. The technology section is good though. Moderate me offtopic please.
Go into the startup menu of an ME system and you'll see Normal, Logged, Safe Mode, and Step By Step Confirmation. The thing is, it still runs on a DOS architecture, and to fix some of the major common errors with the OS, you need to get into DOS, which means you need a boot disk, which means that if the computer won't start up, you're screwed if you don't have another one at hand.
Microsoft was mostly working on Win2K when they suddenly felt they needed to provide a consumer-level OS for people to buy so they could make more money from the OEM PC market. So they took 98, threw in some, but not enough Win2K components, and called it ME. As a result (and as was mentioned below), drivers have to be specially built for ME so that they work with it, and a lot of old hardware, and for that matter, new hardware, isn't supported at all, or has very unstable drivers. It feels like something that was released half-complete, which is pretty much what it is.
Microsoft, in their wisdom, decided "Hey, let's not let the user change ANY system files AT ALL," so they created the Windows File Protection mechanism whereby a user couldn't easily change certain OS files that allowed it to run. Of course, viruses and spyware could easily get around this. They also removed the System File Checker program that allowed users and techs to scan the system for altered files (this has since been put back in XP), as they figured it would never be needed. They then replaced it with System Restore, a feature which works, oh, about 40% of the time, and even then rarely solves the problem. (I figure they were beta testing it for the later final version inclusion in XP.) So basically, it's a lot more investigative work than necessary to figure out what went wrong in a system without SFC.
So yeah, use XP if you can, or use 98 if you can't. ME is a hodgepodge of poorly thrown together components that will cause you and us pain and suffering.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs