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Seattle Times Reviews Desktop Linux Distros
prostoalex writes "Seattle Times section on Personal Technology compares Xandros and Lindows as two alternatives to Windows for desktop computing. Their verdict: installation - excellent; OpenOffice - good enough; digital cameras, printers and other peripherals - excellent; CD burning - no problems; video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats); digital camcorders - poor; burning audio CDs - poor; Net access and Web browsing - no problems."
Audio CD's are no problem with applications such as K3b. Heck, even regular cdrecord burns audio cd's without a problem.
Seriously, Audio CDs - Poor ????
K3B is the best piece of buring software that I have ever used.... makes nero seem pretty shocking....
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
"video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats)"
how is mplayer and xine not sufficient? mplayer has OSD progress bars even and quicktimes movies has never been a problem.
Are you running kernel 2.6? I used to have shit like that all the time on 2.4, but it never happens with 2.6. I'd definitely upgrade if you haven't.
Especially now that all programs that use cdrecord's library (libscg, I think) can write directly to ATAPI burners instead of having to use SCSI emulation. That took care of a lot of the problem for me, too.
I think they might also try to get real-time priority if you run as root, as there is usually a message complaining about something like that if you don't run them as root. Sudo is your friend.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
they normally only offer a complete wipe or split-in-two, but still need to reinstall your alternate OS
:)
About the only "proprietary" software I use rather frequently, and on Windows.
PowerQuest Partition Magic, allows resizing and moving of existing partitions without damaging the contents. Allows you to make room for Linux without breaking Windows. I always first repartition the drive from Windows with it, then boot Linux installer and skip repartitioning, just format and mount Linux partitions. Unless of course it's a dedicated Linux box
Does anyone know of some similar software for Linux? Mandrake people supposedly developed something alike, but with broken NTFS support in the kernel, I doubt it could work.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
In the first paragraph he suggests that worms, viruses and popups are somehow the fault of and only restricted to Windows, and using Linux will solve all those problems.
This is not the reason to switch operating systems, it is a reason to use better software, patch your system, have better security practices etc. Articles that start with this proclamation don't warrant reading any further.
Given that this article was written for the average computer user, I'd say you're dead wrong. My housemates all run Windows (98/XP) and they have constant problems with viruses and spyware. I help them where I can, but even with me around, they, as your average users, get screwed by it.
I moved my girlfriend and my family over to GNU/Linux, and they've not had any problems. All of a sudden they don't suffer from worms, viruses, popups and adware.
Average users simply do not protect themselves from crap like worms, viruses, popups and spyware, for whatever reasons. So you see, it's a perfectly valid reason to switch for many people. If Windows can't protect average users from that crap, average users should be looking elsewhere.
ATAPI support isn't quite there yet. If you have a good burn, it works great. If you have a glitch (e.g. with CD-RW media), the drive tends to be locked in some kind of retry loop, and you have to reboot or even power off to clear it. I didn't strike these problems using SCSI emulation. It's no biggy - the more I break, the more data gets fed back to the developers. :-)
I think that this is it, but you'll need a NYT-style free login.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
camstream is a nice collection of tools for webcams and other video-devices that uses video4linux2. Combining it with some Image Processing Library(gimp?) and a fancier gui should make it a decent enough tool.
Games choices are somewhat limited.
I've never had a problem because I mostly play Quake3 and lately the UT2004 demo.
The Quakes (1,2,3) all work natively in Linux. The Unreal Tournaments work natively. Neverwinter Nights works natively. Tribes2 has a Linux version. Plus a handleful of other games I've never played.
For all the other stuff you'll have to check out Transgaming's WineX. A few of the most popular games are supported but there are many good games that won't work perfectly (BF1942 comes to mind).
It feels much more polished than current Mandrake or Fedora do. Everything seems to just work. My only problem with it on the desktop was outdated Mozilla (1.4) but I found an upgrade script. Package installation via Xandros networks is an excellent idea for those who would be scared by apt-get install cryptic-package-name.
I tried CrossOver and most of the stuff installs and runs, including Quicken and Internet Explorer. Seeing Windows Update running in KDE is truly scary. Fonts on Windows apps are terrible.
Now, on my laptop Xandros did not shine quite as well. Once again, no proper power management support. I know for a fact, that if I get a recent Fedora or Mandrake I can get the power management to work (after tons of twiking), but I would except Xandros to take care of it for me.
If I could suspend/hibernate my laptop with Xandros, i would have absolutely no reason to boot Windows anymore.
Why are you concerned?
The beauty of Linux is that it comes in so many flavours and variants, so nobody forces you to use Lindows.
If security on Lindows desktops will ever be an issue (so the user is running as root, so what? Right now there aren't any viruses or worms on Linux) then I'm sure Lindows will adapt and change the defaults to no longer run as root. But since there is much, much fewer piracy on Linux, I have my doubts that even if everybody would run as root, a virus could propagate. Because most distros ecourage the user not to run as root, the chances of a virus actually propagating is even slimmer.
But it's irrelevant because it won't be your problem anyway, so why should you be worried?
There is a need for extremely dumbed down Linux distributions, and Lindows fills that need.
The nature of OpenSource is that it can be customized to every need. If there is a need for a run-always-as-root distribution, then somebody will satisfy that need. That's the beauty of it. Nobody can force anything down the user's throats.
Well, it's not as typical as people from all over assuming that Microsoft Corp. has some kind of stranglehold on the culture and community in and around Seattle. I've lived in Redmond for about 2 years now (girlfriend works for MS, she uses Linux almost exclusively). As I tell everyone who asks, you're probably going to meet many people who work for Microsoft, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer, Safeco, Boeing, etc. in everyday life here. Many of them are free-thinking people who use alternative OS's. Some of them are total cult of Microsoft weirdos. To answer your question, this isn't the first time the Seattle papers have published material that puts down Microsoft.