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Linux on the Desktop: More Balls Through Windows
doom writes "There's a story up in the free area of The Economist site about 'Linux on Desktop PCs' called:
More balls through Windows. Pretty much the same old stuff, but if you wanted something new you wouldn't be reading slashdot, eh?" Cynic.
"Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing."
Gnucash pretty much has Finace wrapped up, whilst for organising digital photos, you can't go wrong with gkam and gphoto2 to get the images from your digital camera, gimp to touch them up, and the rather excellent Nautilus to view thumbnails and organise.
Or am I missing the point here?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Ah, you guys just don't get it, do you?
....2003, 2004, etc.
:-)
Linux has indeed been taking over more and more desktops in 1997, 1998,
Sensing a trend?
Every year is the Year of the Linux Desktop!
okay, I'll bite. 'Organise' is the British spelling. 'Organize' is the US spelling. The Economist is a British magazine (they call themselves a newspaper).
So, you really just made yourself look like an idiot.
hmmm... flaming really *is* good for hangovers...
They've been running this exact story (Dell! Sun! HP!) for at least four years. The new article even starts by acknolwedging that.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That, I'm hoping, will draw enough complaints from everyday people
Never underestimate the apathy of everyday people.
If there isn't a popular uprising and they don't complain, then the net result is: a large corporation has used the current legal system and intellectual property law to keep the barriers to entry for competitors high.
Here's an interesting though: without the development of Linux and FOSS on the x86 platform Microsoft would not have been able to make quite as strong a case during its anti-trust trial that it had genuine competition.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.
People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.
Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Solution:
Samba shares mounted Read Only. Update data through rsync/scp or something equally cumbersome.
Yes, it's a truly shitty solution. Totally defeats the purpose of network shares (read-only isn't sharing, it's archiving).
Still, it's how I deal with my MP3 shares. I hate the files OSX leaves all over the place. I'm just glad I don't have to deal with multiple users trying to access/modify data from a central location (again, the whole purpose of network shares..)
> Since the dawn of time, ctrl+C has been copy in
> each and every app. ctrl+x has been cut. ctrl+v
> has been paste. Windows have three icons in the
> upper right hand corner for minimizing,
> restoring/maximizing, and closing. There's a
> "File", "Edit", "Tools", and "Help" menu in almost
> every app. I don't know how you get more
> consistent than that.
I'm in KDE and I have about 7 applications open: Acroread, Kdevelop, Netscape 7.1, Limewire, Konqueror, K3b, and OpenOffice - all their interfaces are pretty much consistent. I can drag and drop, click the file menu, hit the min/max/close buttons, drag the menubar as well as windowshade it, resize my windows, etc...
I'd say that's pretty consistent.
As for windows, the three buttons in the upper right were not there until Win95. Not every app in DOS/Win uses or understands the ctrl+c/x/v hotkeys either.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm "{}" ';'
At least it gets rid of the damn files.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Apps and polish and $$$'s. Apple hardware is too expensive compared to generic X86 boxes, so they'll continue to fill the niche of being the BMW of computers. Microsoft is like Ford, circa 1970 when their cars were falling apart. And Linux/x86 is like Toyota, also around 1970, when most people had barely heard of them, but the few who had knew that they were a high-quality product.
Yesterday, my brother called me because its newly installed Windows XP operating system was behaving mysteriously. After upgrading from Windows 2000 (which I installed for him), he connected to the Internet via a modem.
At this point, everything was OK but a worm exploiting a vulnerability in Windows XP infected him at his first use of the Internet. Wow! This is a slam in the face for an average user!
He brought his computer to my home. Since there was no easy solution for his problem, I had to format its hard drive and restart the installation. This morning, I started the update process which is time consuming - you need to be in front of the computer to update it.
My opinion is that Linux is ready for the desktop due to the lack of security of Microsoft products.
Try the veto files directive in Samba
veto files =
in you smb.conf files.
I used veto files before to geep you the pesky "My Music" folder that windows plops down when it thinks a smaba share is a "My Documents" folder.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Add parameters to your smb.conf file.
/._*/.DS_Store/
hide dotfiles = yes
You might try some or all of these options, read the man page for smb.conf if you have questions.
fake oplocks = yes
strict locking = no
veto oplock files =
I'll be continuing to experiment next week...
*grumble*
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
The Win98 boxes do leave a lot of Desktop.ini files around. Win XP-2000-Me leas a lot of thumbs.db files when it finds images. Strangly RECYCLER directories pop up in the weiredes places from Windows.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I'm not sure what one can do about ._filenames. These are used by OSX to store resource forks on filesystems that do not support them directly. All but the most modern Mac OSX applications depend heavily on resource forks. e.g. if you take a Final Cut Pro project file, and delete its corresponding ._file, Final Cut will no longer be able to open the file (I found this out the hard way :).
._ resource forks, in the hope that most applications would eventually switch to using conventional files and directories. But I wouldn't hold my breath; most companies with Mac OS-based products would rather stick with the Carbon compatibility layer than re-write all their filesystem code to use the POSIX APIs.
:)
Given that OSX must support many legacy applications that rely on resource forks, I see no other option for Apple. Perhaps they could offer a mount option to disable
Depending on your point of view, resource forks are either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to filesystems
Also, there is an issue with NFS file locking on OSX - it uses unusually large cookies, which are rejected by some NFS servers (including Linux 2.4.x, at least until recently). You may need to patch NFS servers if you are getting file lock problems with OSX. (don't know about samba though)
I'm also interested to hear if anyone else is getting rather poor NFS read/write performance. My G4 gets only about 50% the performance of Linux clients (on the same gigabit network with the same Linux server). And finally, OSX's automount daemon seems to drop NFS mounts and then not be able to get them back. The only way around this I've found is to reboot. (or mount the NFS shares manually, but it seems automount is strongly preferred on OSX)