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LinuxWorld Response to 'How to Kill Linux'
aneroid writes "In response to John Dvorak's "How to Kill Linux" column, LinuxWorld has a riposte to the columnist's assertations. From the article: "Because most of the time, with mainstream devices, I work out of the box. For the "savvy user" and OEM builder, the Linux driver "problem" isn't the problem it was. The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone. Sure, if I get slung onto some random old machine there are still wrinkles, but from what I see on the Windows support forums, that's hardly unique." <update> The story is actually from GrokLaw originally - credit where credit is due.
n/t
The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone.
The days may be long gone, but they haunt my memories and have me running XP.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Sure, if I get slung onto some random old machine there are still wrinkles, but from what I see on the Windows support forums, that's hardly unique.
Am I misreading this sentence, or is he saying that this experience is, in fact, really common? If so, how does stating this put Linux in a good light?
There's one of these "LinuxSomething" places that isn't really so much a Linux source as it is just this group of business analysts who are really generally pretty anti-linux. Is that LinuxWorld? Who am I thinking of?
Linux doesn't do things for no reason. If something changed, it's because YOU changed it, not because Windows suddenly decided that, on this hour's autodetection, it would corrupt your IDE drivers.
This flies in the face of science.
one could go as far as to say 'not as long as apple exists'.
the future (should) hold(s) a relationship between OSS and Apple. I think basing some sort of long term migration of the two in to one is the key to survival and reaching a cohesive goal in the comparison status against Microsoft.
I geuss you forget the days of windows 95/98/ME?
You must have really screwed it up then, Slack boots to a command line by default so the x config would have made no difference to you getting to a command line.
If it was something you broke, don't come whining about something being wrong with the distro you chose.
2.6 kernel hangs up with two Bt8x8 cards (one DVB and one normal TV). I had to set one variable in modprobe.conf to get DVB card running. Both of them work ok apart but the kernel hangs up during the autoprobing when they both are inserted in PCI slots. Windows doesn't have such a problem.
are not the problem they were, but they are still a problem and are severe enough to put a lot of people off. That said driver issues will never be the death of Linux. Dvorak was talking complete horse pucky there.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Because we all know that the majority of computer users are "savvy".
I can attest to that actually - these "You visit illegal websites" messages that SpamAssasin has been dumping to the rate of ~50 an hour since last week must be coming into my Linux mail server from an alien civilization, not from stupid people that open ZIP attachements in messages written in bad engrish and then run the executables inside.
Quite a riposte. Not that I thought the original "how to kill Linux" column was particularly insightful, in fact it was down right dumb. Microsoft can no more kill Linux than Sun or anyone else. But c'mon. Why legitimize it with this?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
While I think the issue of drivers is an important one, WHY must some people even give credence to Dvorak's heated columns - knowing full well that he always writes something sensational and occasionally ridiculous - simply to work the ad banners on his site.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This is the man that a year ago predicted that in 6 months, not only would OS X run on x86, Apple would produce a dual PPC/x86 computer to help ease the transistion. He wasn't even remotely right on either of these.
IE he gets paid a decent amount of money to talk out of his ass, and it's not really even worth thinking about a response to the drivel that spews from his (mouth/pen/keyboard?)
Monstar L
I geuss you forget Windows 95/98/ME? Not that it really matters what the support was in the past. What matters is what works NOW, and that is linux (for older hardware).
here is a link to the groklaw story
How Can you kill a movement with thousands of members worldwide?
6 4
Dvorak thinks that just because of a lack of drivers for some hardware, that people are just going to get frustrated and leave? I have just as much trouble, if not more, finding drivers for some of my hardware for windows.
If anything we should just Kill Bill http://www.splitreason.com/productdetail.php?id=1
This is nonsense. A friend of mine with a relatively new Dell machine wanted to install Linux. Fedora Core 3 did not recognize their mass-produced Dell-standard soundcard. Mandrake would not run without crashing every several minutes for absolutely no reason. Now, you may say that my suggestions for distributions may not have been very well researched, but these are two of the most popular personal desktop Linux distributions, and neither worked properly after a fresh installation. That's at least one family that is going to stick with Windows XP because Linux is just simply "not there yet".
People seem to love modding me down for pointing out their stupidity and arrogance...
I geuss you forget the days of windows 95/98/ME?
Well you do have a good point, XP was such a massive improvement over those operating systems I guess I just forgot about how problematic the older versions were.
I suppose if I mustered up the courage to try another Debian dual-boot install and was lucky enough to get it working I could have a change of heart. But then again, I'm pretty short on courage these days.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Troll. The "cmdline" doesn't use the xorg config.
"Let me spell it out for you: I get used because I'm open, trusted, free and reliable"
Are all us, Linux users, like that? My guess is "no", even my hope is "yes"
It is good that LinuxWorld has dismissed Dvorak's FUD. Dvorak is more of a source of entertainment than real insight. I remember Dvorak ranting about the "System Idle Process" in the Windows task manager "eating" 98% CPU. If we want his FUD to stop, we need to stop paying attention to him and editors of Slashdot and others need to stop articles linking to his BS.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
What the hell does Xorg have to do with the commmand line? You are a fucking lying idiot FUD spreader. How did you manage to go directly into a login manager that requires xfree or xorg after a slackware installation? You obviously either did something to the Slack installation or you are lying.
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect. ...from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project ...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows. ...from all the elitist snobs who's answers to newbie questions is RTFA. ...from all the newgroups you have to subscribe to even ask a question, for project leaders that are to lazy to set up a modern communication portal. ...for all those distro's you still have to manually tell when you've inserted a CD into the drive ... those vi and emacs preaching freaks (sorry couldn't resist :-) Yes they are fine if you like them but don't push them on the rest of us.
You get the idea...
Blender And Linux Fan
Driver support on Linux is fine. I have always bought bleeding edge hardware I only run Linux and everything works fine. The last time I had a problem was when I bought my IBM Thinkpad T40, only the wireless card wasnt support, which wasnt even a problem for me since I didnt have a wireless router. It is now fully supported by an open source driver(ipw2100). I fix computers as a part time job and I run into driver hell more often on win then any other os. The other day I was updating a win xp computer and it said the ATI drivers had to be updated, so I let windows update update them. A few min later I could only get 4bit color. I had to uninstall the driver from windows update and revert to the old one. Going to ATI.com and downloading the offical driver said that I was getting a driver for the wrong graphics card. Even if a peice of hardware is reconized on win you have to track down the driver and many times if you lost the cd your screwed.
The article is released under CC license, written by A. Linux Kernel.
So if A. Linux Kernel doesn't want to marry A. Windows Kernel, it won't. A. Linux Kernel has much more open mind than any Mr. Kernel I've met and I believe A. Windows Kernel would go red on some of his details, if they got out.
Linux on laptops has improved. You can get a basic install working on a modern laptop, but getting all the things windows users take for granted can take work. Lots of work, including installing kernel patches and patches to those patches. You also frequently have to sacrifice goats to get certain features working.
The worst offenders are (in no order of importance or difficulty): suspend (to disk or ram), accelerated 3d graphics, DVD playing, battery life monitoring (and general ACPI stuff), wireless networking, bluetooth, power-saving features (like CPU throttling) and making them extra buttons do things.
We buy laptops for new students each year and stick linux on them, and it generally takes us a couple of weeks to iron out all the kinks, and sometimes we dont bother. If anyone knows a UK supplier of laptops with Linux pre-installed that do all the above things out of the box, let me know, I might want a dozen in October.
Baz
(it is realizing Dvorak is a troll.)
sulli
RTFJ.
The point of the article was that you can run Linux as a layer on windows for drivers. The problem is that MS is not going to "kill Linux" by offering a Linux distro, if anything it would just bring more software and driver support to Linux. No to mention issues of cost, OSS, and people moving to Linux to get rid of MS in the first place.
The article was just so retarded on so many levels it should have never been posted to slashot in the first place.
Microsoft could probably write an OS that would give Linux a run for its money, but if they did then who would upgrade to the next version of Windows?
Why are so many technical writers and journalists so fucking stupid?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I've been having one heck of a time finding Linux drivers that support wireless cards, and allow you to use WPA. (Not like Netgear or Linksys are unheard of brands, by the way.) I LOVE Linux, but it still has a way to go before it is ready for prime time. It is still largely for saavy users and the back end, not the mainstream public and the desktop. Unfortunately, "Joe Mainstream" and his $$ keep a company in business.
"Nature bats last..."
>> The days may be long gone, but they haunt
>> my memories and have me running XP.
ACPI is not ready for realistic laptop use at this point, and all kinds of forums are littered with posts from users who had some major grief from setting it up. I'd predict that 95% of people who attempt to use Linux on their laptops revert to Windows XP/2000 sooner or later.
Driver support for wifi is kinda there (with ndiswrapper), but setting it up is _well_ beyond the capabilities of a Linux newbie, especially if this newbie wants proper WAP security.
I was trying to think of the words to describe this jack ass, and you took them right out of my mouth, thank you :)
moo
Sorry, but the Linux driver issue is real - not because the drivers are nonexistent, but because they are (1) often poorly maintained and (2) not supported by major distributions.
I have finally gotten my wireless card - which was a DLink one purchased at Best Buy, not an obscure brand - to work on Mandrake a couple weeks ago. Before that, I had been unable to use it for months, because it simply wasn't supported. Some searching on Google led me to the madwifi drivers, which would only compile on my machine after some tweaking and then didn't work because it could only handle particularly strong signals. My Windows driver worked fine. In newer versions, it now appears to work, and only recently have I found rpms for it that are Mandrake-friendly.
I know other people with experiences like this, too. Do you really expect Linux to take off if this kind of user experience is routine? You may think these things are no big deal, but they were a waste of my time and a serious obstacle for people with less Linux knowhow.
I have been using Linux for many, many years, I am really not the one who needs to be converted. But I have to admit that just this weekend I spent I dunno how many ours with kernel-recompiles and trying every possible settings, drivers to get MIDI working on my box. And I failed.
On my Windows XP I fired up the utility which came with the driver and hit "Test MIDI" and there it was, out of the box.
Thus while it might be true that the for most of the people and for the most generic cases the driver hell is hopefully gone, there is quite a bit left to go until hardware manufacturers ship drivers which work out of the box just as easily as for Windows.
How to Kill John Dvorak's career ~ stop reading his articles.
I know others who have given up on installing Linux because of that one piece of hardware that they just couldn't figure out how to work with any distro. Linux will not "be there" until there are one or two distributions on which ALL common off-the-shelf components install correctly the first time, or perhaps with another RPM install. No "./configure; make; make install", no tweaking text files, etc. Even when the drivers are there, the distros frequently aren't providing the updates quickly enough.
But there are many, which have cleared up their mind. Just a few days ago TuxMobil has announced the 3.000th Linux laptop and notebook installation report.
Odd this should come up. I recently became the proud owner of an Inspiron 4XXX laptop from Dell. The hard disk was done, so I popped in Knoppix to see if the rest of the hardware worked.
Everything, repeat everything hardware-wise was recognized on the laptop, right down to a battery indicator on the task bar that indicated (fairly accurately, I might add) the remaining battery time. The built-in NIC connected directly to my network and I was browsing the Web in minutes! A quick configure of K3B and I could burn CD's on the built-in CD burner. The only thing that didn't seem to work was the reason I was offered the laptop in the first place: the dead harddrive. Now this wasn't an exhaustive test by any means, but it shows that hardware autodetect has come a long way on Linux.
As far as Windows on laptops goes, I have many many buckets of blood in my garage from getting windows 95, 98, 2000 (I quit after that!) trying to work on laptops, too!
How DARE you insult our fellow Linux comrades? Get back to the commune immediately for your daily dose of homo-erotic Linus worship.
I've just installed SuSE Linux 9.2 to a Sony Vaio. The installation was easy, and without prompting it kept the Windows XP I intended to abandon. GRUB provided dual booting, so I actually have both OS's operational. This e-mail is from the SuSE system. No bloodshed.
Kill Linux? Hardly!
Beat slashdot! News at 11.
Windows never tells you that you *have* to upgrade a driver. You sir are a silly trolling astroturfing drone. And I love the line about Linux drivers being "fine". That was classic ;)
Those days are long gone , my primary x86 laptop( Gericom , not well known outside germany ) runs debian unstable, after a quick ftp install all i have to do is type "apt-get install acpid" it really couldnt be easier , well infact it could and can be. .
Simply use suse 9.2 , it fully recognised my laptop and configured it perfectly
also iirc it has predefined configs for hundreds of laptops
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Has anyone tried making wireless work on *Windows* lately? Sometimes it works out of the box. Usually, on the same machine even, with high-quality hardware and complete driver support, it fails inexplicably, or worse, the error message report conditions inconsistent with observed behavior. Wireless on Linux may be a pain, but at least it's deterministic.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Debian is not exactly a distro reknowned for its friendliness - Mandrake might have been a better choice as a first distro, IMHO...
Debian, however, is amazing if you're adminning 200+ machines for demanding scientific/engineering users. Nothing comes close to the attention to detail of the package system because debian treats even slight upgrade issues as bugs. Almost everything users ask for is already in main or contrib.
With newer hardware, I think there's a future for driver wrapper projects. Look at FreeBSD's NDIS driver wrapper (aka "Project Evil"): that way, FreeBSD can use Windows network card drivers out of the box, it's convenient, and it's even reasonably fast.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Wow, that was a good belly laugh! Man, you are a funny dude. Whew! I nearly keeled over from that sharp wit of yours. Have you considered a career in standup? You REALLY know how to banter about the repartee. You, sir, are definitely not wasting oxygen!
How hard would it be to chuck a Knoppix disk in your CD drive and boot from it?
Nice troll otherwise though.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The whole point of the article is that Windows has more drivers than Linux has, so if Linux was to get support for Windows drivers, everybody would use Linux. Right? Wrong (of course)! Why?
The programs you are used to on Windows don't run (or don't look as good, and don't run flawlessly) on Linux. Wine is great, but Microsoft is starting to attack Wine, as Slashdot has recently pointed out. Until all programs are being built for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it is no easier to use Linux.
Even if people aren't that attached to Windows programs, many Linux programs look very different and are much harder to use than Windows equivalents. The only programs that are up to or almost up to Windows's level of ease is Firefox (compared to IE, not AOL or MSN), Thunderbird, and, just barely, OpenOffice.org. Mainly this is because, again, everybody's used to Windows.
Most people don't know what drivers are, and they shouldn't have to, as Paul Graham has said before! They just expect to plug-and-play. They won't pay for Windows drivers on Linux, because the significance of drivers isn't apparent to them.
Finally, the reason more people write drivers for Windows is because more people use Windows. If more people use Linux, more drivers for Linux will soon follow. Drivers are not the cause, they are the effect.
Before you walk a mile in someone's shoes, you should insult them so you know how they are and what they're doing.
The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone
That's crazy. As the local seasoned computer user who has used linux a few times, I installed linux on a friend's new laptop last week. I have done basic installs of linux a few times before and there were instructions online for setting everything up on this laptop but it still took me about 8 hours to get the right versions of the drivers, ndiswrapper, and to get it all working. Linux may be getting a lot better, but as little as a week ago, I had to figure out that what was missing was my typing "dhpcd -t 10 -wlan0 0". So the author's assertion defenitly is a little bit of an exaggeration; maybe most people don't install windows themselves so maybe it doesn't matter, but that type of problem is a barrier to enyry for people using linux.
exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis
To all who have replied calling the parent a troll.... There is a situation that can happen where X will hang your keyboard because of some sort of interaction in the kernel and how X handles the keyboard. Anyways, what you get is called a "dead keyboard" which leaves you unable to even switch terminals to fix the problem. Now if by default you are booting into xdm/kdm/whatever it can be a real pain. However, booting without X you can go in and fix it....so the parent IS a troll, however its not too far off from the truth. Perhaps he didn't know how to change runlevels?
given the starting point of linux "when men were men and wrote their own device drivers", it's not suprising they have gotten better.
Windows with a much larger volume of users, many of whome are less technically inclined, supporting a dizzing array of devices generates a similar volume of problems as the far less numerous, far more savvy, and more limited linux community.
In other news women make 76 cents on the dollar as compared to men. Well sorta.
What you're describing may just be a problem with the Bt8x8 driver. I have a Bt8x8 card, and getting it to work well was a complete nightmare. I had to set gbuffers to 32 (i.e. allocate space for 32 frames in the kernel) to keep streamer from dropping frames constantly. And there was this weird artifact where a frame from about a second ago would suddenly get replayed. I never fixed that one. And video4linux will lock up the entire machine on some relatively common situations.
I finally gave up and bought a Canopus ADVC-300, which connects via FireWire, and doesn't rely on video4linux at all.
I was pretty disappointed with the experience. Still, in general, Microsoft is a lot crappier.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
My first brush with linux was 7 yrs back when I was attempting to install it on my pentium 2 PC. I had an AMD 188 MHz processor and 2.1 GB of hard disk space. I made 2 partitions out of it. 550 MB partition was dedicated to Linux. I successfully installed Linux after 2 days of hard work. But still I couldnt get the proper drivers for my Philips monitor. I had linux for about 4 months and then decided that it was a total waste of precious memory. That was my firt and last stint with Linux
fuvoo: watch something
Nice troll otherwise though.
Why is relating my honest 6+ year-long struggle with Linux a troll?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
This was posted on Groklaw on friday: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200502251 55855922
:P
it's not unique to linuxworld...i doubt they even wrote it
To each their own. I've run Fedora Core 1 on a work laptop. I then, just for giggles, moved to SuSE 9.2 to check that out. Everything seems to do well with the exception of some dodgey support for LEAP - Cisco needs to give their Linux client some attention. Having said that, my WinXP-only coworkers tend to have their problems with our WAPs too... so I'm not so concerned about losing productivity over the occasional hiccups.
I have to admit, though, that this hasn't always been the case. I've shopped distros against work-provided hardware before. Several years ago, it was quite the experience. I started with Debian, no dice. Tried Redhat - no luck. Eventually ended up with Mandrake which handled my Toshiba laptop well.
Like all OS installs, it helps to start out with hardware that has better support for your target OS (assuming you have control over that choice).
A few years ago, I purchased a discount laptop that came with WinCE. I needed a dual-boot environment so I was going to keep a Windows partition... but it wasn't going to be WinCE. I wasn't keen on buying a WinXP option from the vendor. But I did have a full license for Win2k that was languishing on my shelf. Unfortunately, the laptop manufacturer didn't support Win2K and getting all the drivers needed proved to be a challenge. Ironically, Mandrake took to the laptop with considerably less aggravation.
It also helps that there seems to be more standards for laptop hardware these days. I've had less and less problems installing Linux on laptops over the years.
Real way:
$ rm -rf
From my own experience, I can attest to two separate windows driver nightmare situations.
The first is more of an annoyance than a nightmare. The place where I work has been buying new dell machines of various models. A fresh installation from the Windows SP2 cd it comes with does not have any drivers for the intel based network, video, and a couple other misc devices. I think the sound chipset is something else, and it doesn't support that either.
Fortunately, dell packs a separate cd with drivers on it, and it refuses to run on non dell machines if you have the same hardware and are stuck in that situation. Plus, if you dig hard enough you can probably find drivers on the internet.
I'd like to point out that in this situation, the mega trio of Dell, Intel, and Microsoft cannot provide a system that installs an OS off the cd and has working video/sound/network. Pretty lame.
The second situation involves a coworker's recent purchase of a sony vaio that is rife with severe annoyances. For instance, if you uninstall norton internet security before it expires and nags you to death, your entire network subsystem eats shit and refuses to do anything. That was fun.
But more relevant to this topic, windows has practically no builtin driver support for it, and it doesn't even come with any drivers on cd! They expect you to make a 10 cd backup (or 2 dvd's and one cd) so that you can restore your system if necessary. If you ask sony support for drivers, they direct you to purchase a cd (set?) that may solve the issue for $12. Absolutely no option to download drivers.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think the sound won't even work properly unless you have some magic sony-blessed drm drivers.
In both of these cases, knoppix and gentoo boot fine and support all of the devices (except maybe the vaio's wireless.. I didn't try).
ps. don't buy sony laptops, they are crippled with drm services and shitware.
I tried Linux after reading all the hype here and elsewhere.
I got frustrated and went back to Windows. My frustration was due to several factors, but driver support was definitely one of them.
So, yes, it does happen. Blindly insisting that this doesn't happen is not helpful or "insighftful" (ahem mods).
100s of /. posts, and not one saying, heres a web site lists 800 devices, cf the # with linux and the # with MS drivers...
I can only assume that part of the core of the argument - that windows is better becuase it has drivers for stupid people like me (by the way what is a driver and why do i need them ...)
Lotta snide, sarcastic, know it all responses, but very little int eh way of documentatin on what % of new devices are ok with linux, as opposed to MS.
First, I have not had any device problems with Windows XP, or even Win2k for that matter. I install the driver and it works. As for Linux device management, well people it sucks. Unitil I can install all my hardware, that I want to use, without having to recompile my kernel or rely on an NDIS Hack, I cannot and will not in good conscious recommend Linux to anyone that is not computer savvy, nor will i recommend it for clients who rely on a 3rd Party support personnel. Its a pain in the ass because as it stands we have to jump through hoops to get things going.
I have exactly the reverse experience. I have a centrino laptop and it performs poorly where Linux says the signal is good and pulls downloads very quickly. In my bedroom opposite ends of the house with bricks walls and steel between Windows XP is extremely flakey with things cancelling out all the time. Linux just goes slowly but does not stop.
Kernel 2.6.10 from Ubuntu. I used to compile my own but now I just don't bother. I even have a pretty GUI to set up the wireless networking options.
If you want to wireless you need good quality cards. If you are buying cards without reading reviews you are doomed to failure. I have a dlink base that I just don't use it wont work, my linksys worked straight out of the box.
I think they're both at the point that people prefer them for a specific philosophy more than one being 'better' than another. I think if you really got down to it and pushed, each side would have to admit that the other side got some things right.
;)
The thing is that in a few years, the technology is going to be to the point that both systems can do everything that the other system can.
I manage 300 + Windows 2003 servers, and I don't have any crashing issues at all unless hardware actually fails. So the BSOD thing doesn't hold any water anymore because current Windows operating systems are fairly stable. The downside is you have to reboot for patches and stuff - which is something I think Linux should promote as a big upside that I don't see much. I care more about that than I do about the BSOD arguments for Windows 98.
I think at this point one of the only real things I see as a drawback for Linux is that in a lot of ways it isn't one operating system. When I do get an error on something, I can't usually put in 'Linux' and the error (like I can with Windows) - because each specific build is like its own operating system. The setup of SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, etc is different enough that they're almost different operating systems from a support standpoint.
I also think that Novell has realized that a big thing that Windows has going for it is you can go to one vendor and get a complete enterprise system that works, is supported, has a directory management system, email, etc. They're on their way to making that a reality.
In short - they both have benefits, but I think THE benefit that I see is that as long as they both provide competition, it benefits the end user. I think most of us don't WANT to see either Linux or Windows dominate, because it would slow advancement - or at least to have 2+ systems as serious contenders (can Apple get there?).
So many arguments you could make, but it is all relative. Maybe Einstein had something there
Ok. First I have to say that application compatibility is a major reason why many of my custoemrs are stuck on Windows. So you have a point. But you have overstated it.
We don't need every Windows Program to be compiled on OS X and Linux. What we need is a complete set of programs for every vertical market. We already have a reasonably complete set of productivity tools. Now, it is the vertical software market that needs help.
My business helps many businesses use Linux. In some cases, some businesses want to continue using Windows for some legacy apps, and in some cases they need to. Also, we offer an initial discount for a new vertically targetted open source solution. I.e. if you need it and there is nothing targetting your market, we will build it for you at a discount. We are already looking at creating an open source POS solution for bookstores compatible with Ingram and other major wholesalers, and are working on other vertical projects as well.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
> My first brush with linux was 7 yrs back.... ....I couldnt get the proper drivers for my Philips monitor...... ....I had linux for about 4 months and then decided that it was a total waste of precious memory.
>
>
>That was my firt and last stint with Linux.
The first time I used MS Acces it died on me, I went back to the trusty pen, paper and storage cabinets...
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
I'm having trouble with a DVD player (even google can't tell me if it will work or not), and a wireless network card.
So what's the trick, and where's some good links?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
hmmm. ok. I suppose you have a point. What could possibly have changed in 7 years?
That's about as fair as saying "my last stint with Windows was Windows ME which I had to reboot every other day if I was lucky."
Seven years is a long bloody time. Seven years ago if you wanted to run NT, you had to basically consult MS's list of official drivers, and woe to you if you tried to go beyond that, or if you had combinations of hardware that didn't work well, even if all the individual components were on the harddrive list.
Oh, and seven years ago, anything other than NT was unstable at the best of times. All the customers I deal with that still run Win98 or WinME still have to reboot the computer at least once a week or things start going hoakey. So, in effect, you had device support, just not very good device support.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
people here saying software X has this particular idiosyncracy...
Not the point
The linux core is more stable and more reliable than the windows core. Period.
I can count on one had the number of times Linux has out and out just died (Kernel Panic) on me, and half were hardware issues.
Compare this to BSOD...
Once software support is equivelent(sp?) to windows the Linux OS will begin to become more mainstream.
my $0.02
The Answer
Because most of the time, with mainstream devices, I work out of the box.
That's because you're either working with fairly generic devices (i.e., disk drives, ethernet cards), or of the more "exotic" devices, you're specifically buying the ones you KNOW have proper driver support.
When you expand your scope of hardware to include things like multi-function printers, webcams, wireless ethernet cards, USB video digitizer boxes, etc. your chances of success are greatly reduced.
To put it another way: if you were to be handed some random piece of hardware from a Best Buy store, you still don't have the utmost confidence that it'll work "out of the box" because there's lots of hardware in retail stores that either doesn't have a Linux driver or at best requires a long, convoluted install process in order to get reduced functionality (i.e., your multi-function printer can now print, albeit at a lower resolution and the scanner functionality doesn't work).
By contrast, at least you know with Windows that that random piece of hardware should at least in theory work with Windows since there was obviously a Windows driver written for it.
Linux, in my opinion, still doesn't win this challenge.
Uhh, I didn't use Linux 7 years ago, so maybe things have changed (most likely with monitors, not Linux), but you don't need drivers for a monitor, only refresh rates.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
apple titanium (a few years old) powerbook with an ati card. everything 'cept the modem is good
Since when are spelling and intellect equivalent?
By the way, read up on the utility of ad hominem attacks. Of course, you're such an intelligent troll that you already know all that.
Posting anonymously so I don't get +1
My suggestion: try ubuntu (they have a live cd as well).
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
this cracks me up.
uname -a
Linux lappy64 2.6.9-gentoo-r14 #1 Tue Feb 22 16:47:43 EST 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"linksys"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Access Point: DE:AD:BE:EF:15:A1
Bit Rate=54Mb/s Tx-Power:25 dBm
RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:98/100 Signal level:-41 dBm Noise level:-256 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:122 Invalid misc:2443470 Missed beacon:0
All in the glory of 1280X800 accelerated nvidia goodness. (spare me the taint)
If this isn't a "new" "current" laptop, please send me one ( and 1 for the first commenter below).
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
It already works pretty well on the Acer Ferrari 3000 series. Most stuff "just works" (wifi, USB, firewire, card reader, dvd writer etc.) and JDS is a fairly tolerable desktop if you can put up with Sun's pointy-haired decision to replace a lot of the native GNOME applets with (inferior) ones written in Java.
I think they are working on refining power management now.
Stick Men
My darned keyboard is getting worn out. I meant Solaris 10.
Stick Men
My first brush with Linux was about 7yrs back too. But unlike you, I didn't have a PII that transformed in to a 188Mhz AMD. My first system was an old Intel 486DX2-66 that was purchased cheap to introduce myself to Linux. It became the gateway to my fledling network - performing admirably.
A couple months later, I decided I wanted to try this out as a desktop. My desktop system was based on an AMD K62-333. It had a 12g HD with a partitioning table that supported Win98 and Debian Linux. It took me the day to set up, to include support for my Matrox G100 / Monster II setup and ADI monitor. Over the years, my Windows partition slowly shrunk as I sliced off more and more space to grow my Linux parition. Until, one day, I realized that I hadn't booted in to Windows for over a year. The Windows partition got deleted and has yet to reappear on my home workstation over the following years.
That's not to say I don't still use Windows; my job requires it. I have it on a dual-boot work laptop. Though I may end up running VMWare to access it.
Because you're not being strictly complimentary to linux. Around here, that's a troll.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
The first thing I did on my Acer T240 was run Knoppix 3.7 ('expert26' or 'Knoppix26' at the boot prompt) to see what worked and what didn't. I checked out 'modconf' to see what modules were installed for the Orinoco wifi card and did the same for ACPI and a few other things. I also checked some config files in /etc; fstab and such.
Everything worked fine so I proceeded to scrape Windows off the HD and did a net install of Debian-Sarge with the 2.6 kernel. Other than a few keyboard buttons not working, I have had no problems.
The computer:
Acer Travelmate 240
Intel Celeron 2.4GHz processor (pentium3 equiv probably as per benchmarking with various compile FLAGS with boinc_public)
512MB ram, RealTec nic, Orinoco PrismII wireless, 40GB HD, DVD +RW, Firewire, IFR, 2 x PCMCIA slots and a floppy drive.
So, basically ALL the benefits of having a laptop. Go linux! It's DEFINITELY ready for the mainstream.
It's becoming clear that the linux-at-any-cost zealots aren't even paying attention to what's really going on.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
If Microsoft made an official version of Microsoft Linux, that would kill it. Especially if they introduce IE into it and tightly integrate it into the OS.
I never read the original article however the response was a work of art in it's own right and very genuinely funny. This response was a highlight of my weekend and can be treated as a standalone piece of real geek humour.
And, yet, that's the type of rationale used by linux fanboys on a daily basis around this place. What happens? +5, insightful.
So, your comment seems to work pretty well in both directions; would you have written it to one of the cretins that use this same idiotic rationalization for abandoning Microsoft products seven years ago? Hmm...
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I'm surprised that one would have a six year struggle with Linux and not find a distro that fit their needs. Likewise, six years is a long time to be unable to learn how the operating system works.
I'm not attacking you as a person but how much of an investment did you make into Linux? There was a time for me, as a user, that learning Windows required an investment of time. It was frustrating but I did it because I had to. When I migrated to Linux, it was frustrating but I did it because I wanted to. Has this been 6 years of true investment or 6 years of dabbling? There's a strong difference there.
Regardless, I hope you eventually find a distro that you like. Linux is an exciting operating system that with sufficient investment, can turn into the most mallable OS I've ever encountered.
Apple has developed x86 versions of all their OS's since System 7. They just never release them. If they did release OSX for x86, Redmond would explode in frustration.
He must have known how to change run levels if he managed to get a distro that boots to a command line by default to boot into X
http://www.mslinux.org/
:)
obligatory
The greatest part about your post is that you mentioned ATI cards. Have you ever tried to install an ATI card under linux? Sure, your normal drivers work and you don't notice a problem, but we're not talking about 3d acceleration. It took me 1 solid month of work to compile the ATI drivers in the kernel of Slackware 9. Not only was the ATI how-to installation guide wrong, but every other generic how-to on how to do it was wrong, and each specific fix for the installation guide offered worked only on very specific kernel numbers.
I manage to install the card on Slackware, and you expect those troubles from Slackware, but it got me thinking about how much of my time I want to spend updating hardware and programs (each kernel compilation requries reinstalling the ATI drivers, so I really wanted to find a distro that had hardware acceleration working out of the box*). So I deicded to try some new flavors, particularly Debian. To save typing, let me tell you I never got this working, as the only guide I found to install them with hardware acceleration required learning how to use the package manager, which does not qualify as "good driver support." By this time I'm angry and immediately try another distro. I choose SUSE and am wonderfully suprised by all the wonderful features (compiling the kernel on the FIRST INSTALL to match the CPU? Yast? Genius!) So, to shorten the story, I fall in love with SUSE and decide to stick with it, even if I can't get the ATI card to work. It took a month, but I managed to enable hardware acceleration, a process that took a specific fix buried in some obscure forum along with an extremely specific patch for the drivers based on the kernel version. I was done and proud (this was not by any means easy - I am a talented comp sci/math person who is soon to enter grad school and I still think it is the hardest thing I've ever done on a computer).
Then I started ut2004. NO FRAME RATE! Not only did the drivers not install, they sucked! I got 60 frames a second in 800 X 600 on a wildly overclocked p4 playing ut2004 on lowest settings. In Windows, I can get 70-80 fps easy in this resolution with heavy eyecandy. I was furious. (If you are honestly thinking I left on V-Sync, you need to change your stereotypes of people who have trouble getting technology working, because as I mentioned, and no slashdot zealot will believe, I know a good deal about computers).
This was the last time I used linux, and I now refuse to touch it on my only computer until I have a spare computer to work on while I perform linux hardware maintenance. You're probably thinking that one part that doesn't work is a stupid reason to not use an OS. But as I was messing with SUSE, upgrading from kernel 2.4.something to 2.6.something also broke my optical drives and hard drives. I forget the specifics, but the optical drives used another protocol or something in the older kernel, I had to search out the newer program for controlling the drives and install it. Also, from kernel 2.4.* to 2.6.*, they changed the SATA emulation. 2.6 emulated SATA through SCSI, while 2.4 used another method. Of course, if you didn't enable SCSI HD emulation in the kernel, you can't find the / partition. It took me a day to figure out why I couldn't mount the root partition, and all I needed to avoid this problem was a simple hardware check, or even just a check of my old kernel settings that - get this - some sort of menu in the kernel compilation screen with a fair warning about the change, so I don't have to dig it out of subadequate guides on migrating or the mess that is a changelog. It's sad because I love KDE and had some really good times with SUSE and Slackware in the past 2 years, but I can't go back. I don't have time to make sure it all works. I would have bought a NVIDIA card had I known, but it's too late now and almost unfathomable that a company like ATI doesn't have good linux driver support (although this is their fault, it's still a problem with Linux drivers). I'm now in the process o
The greatest part about your post is that you mentioned ATI cards. Have you ever tried to install an ATI card under linux? Sure, your normal drivers work and you don't notice a problem, but we're not talking about 3d acceleration. It took me 1 solid month of work to compile the ATI drivers in the kernel of Slackware 9. Not only was the ATI how-to installation guide wrong, but every other generic how-to on how to do it was wrong, and each specific fix for the installation guide offered worked only on very specific kernel numbers.
I manage to install the card on Slackware, and you expect those troubles from Slackware, but it got me thinking about how much of my time I want to spend updating hardware and programs (each kernel compilation requries reinstalling the ATI drivers, so I really wanted to find a distro that had hardware acceleration working out of the box*). So I deicded to try some new flavors, particularly Debian. To save typing, let me tell you I never got this working, as the only guide I found to install them with hardware acceleration required learning how to use the package manager, which does not qualify as "good driver support." By this time I'm angry and immediately try another distro. I choose SUSE and am wonderfully suprised by all the wonderful features (compiling the kernel on the FIRST INSTALL to match the CPU? Yast? Genius!) So, to shorten the story, I fall in love with SUSE and decide to stick with it, even if I can't get the ATI card to work. It took a month, but I managed to enable hardware acceleration, a process that took a specific fix buried in some obscure forum along with an extremely specific patch for the drivers based on the kernel version. I was done and proud (this was not by any means easy - I am a talented comp sci/math person who is soon to enter grad school and I still think it is the hardest thing I've ever done on a computer).
Then I started ut2004. NO FRAME RATE! Not only did the drivers not install, they sucked! I got 60 frames a second in 800 X 600 on a wildly overclocked p4 playing ut2004 on lowest settings. In Windows, I can get 70-80 fps easy in this resolution with heavy eyecandy. I was furious. (If you are honestly thinking I left on V-Sync, you need to change your stereotypes of people who have trouble getting technology working, because as I mentioned, and no slashdot zealot will believe, I know a good deal about computers).
This was the last time I used linux, and I now refuse to touch it on my only computer until I have a spare computer to work on while I perform linux hardware maintenance. You're probably thinking that one part that doesn't work is a stupid reason to not use an OS. But as I was messing with SUSE, upgrading from kernel 2.4.something to 2.6.something also broke my optical drives and hard drives. I forget the specifics, but the optical drives used another protocol or something in the older kernel, I had to search out the newer program for controlling the drives and install it. Also, from kernel 2.4.* to 2.6.*, they changed the SATA emulation. 2.6 emulated SATA through SCSI, while 2.4 used another method. Of course, if you didn't enable SCSI HD emulation in the kernel, you can't find the / partition. It took me a day to figure out why I couldn't mount the root partition, and all I needed to avoid this problem was a simple hardware check, a check of my old kernel settings or - get this - some sort of menu in the kernel compilation screen with a fair warning about the change, so I don't have to dig it out of subadequate guides on migrating or the mess that is a changelog. It's sad because I love KDE and had some really good times with SUSE and Slackware in the past 2 years, but I can't go back. I don't have time to make sure it all works. I would have bought a NVIDIA card had I known, but it's too late now and almost unfathomable that a company like ATI doesn't have good linux driver support (although this is their fault, it's still a problem with Linux drivers). I'm now in the process of building a computer with rebate parts solel
My experience is that with homemade computers getting stuff to work on either Windows or Linux is very easy (just buy stuff that has support). But i have spent entirely too much time navigating dell.com and gateway.com trying to find windows drivers. Linux has nice utilities like lspci to find what hardware you have, more often than not if Windows can't find a driver for a device you have to crack the case open to see what it is, device manager often just gives useless info like unsupported network device.
I also like how linux supports chipsets rather than brands.
Now linux on laptops is another story, mostly because ACPI doesn't work all the well in my experience.
HP Compaq Business Notebook nx5000
Duh.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
Drivers are only an issue for the desktop market, where GNU/Linux can't be killed - because it's been stillborn. There isn't any Linux market to kill. Support for high volume, low quality hardware is less important for the server and embedded market, which are the only ones with a significant Linux presence.
None the less, 7 years is quite some time for improvement.
You seemed to have missed the entire point. NT was a far more stable OS than Win95 and its descendants. Certainly if one wanted to stay in the Windows world, it was what you used for servers (Linux servers were being used very successfully seven years ago I might add), and yet even NT 4 had a limited number of drivers. You couldn't run down to El-shitto Computer Mart and pick up the Ultra-Cheapo-Wheapo Video Card and have any faith that it could go beyond 640x480 in 16 colors.
I was around then, my friend, working with NT 3.51 and NT 4 servers. No sane human being would have even tried to run any kind of server on a 95 or 98 box, so you had to watch what you bought. Cutting edge hardware was a complete no-no on NT machines. Of course, all the Win9x users buying this kind of stuff would have drivers, but they also had BSODs and other flakiness to deal with.
So was NT an inferior product because it wouldn't the $15 El-crappo NIC card when it came out, but rather you had to spend some money to go out and get an Intel or 3com card? Is this what you're saying? Hell, I still can't get one of my SCSI scanners to work right even with XP, and I have an old parallel part IOMEGA tape drive which is still supported in Linux, and has been for over seven years, but never would and never will run on anything beyond Windows 98.
As to abandoning MS seven years ago, Linux servers even then could stand up to whatever MS was pushing, with cheaper licensing costs (as in free). What did MS have seven years ago that was so fucking fantastic? Win9x was unstable and NT 4 had a relatively limited number of drivers.
What was your point, other than to use the word "fanboy"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
-- my sound doesn't work == volume turned down
-- my CD doesn't play == cable not connected to player
these are simple common mistakes they are made over and over again.. and easily solved with a little research,
Some distro's are better than others at "pre-solving" common mistakes like these. Some set the volume for you during install.. others like Mandrake give you a choice of reveiwing the hardware before finalizing the install (helpful when you have onboard hardware conflicting with add in cards)
I've done quite a bit of distro switching, perhaps too much to still be considered sane, and I keep heading back to the Debian based distros (currently I am Mepis - Zen dual booting) It's probably my lack of networking setup knowledege.. but they seem to always work with my DSL without doing a thing. (not that others haven't either just that is ALWAYS works with Debian based)
I remember the day (should take out my dentures for this).. when I spent days trying to get my modem to work in Linux.. what was it .. pppsetup.. and setserial or something (I forget).. now I don't use the modem, but it is always configured automagily for me now.
Dual booting is a good start (or live CD's if your chicken) but heck why not use Linux as it is bcoming now ? sheesh you might be surprised.
regards
dbcad7
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I'm surprised that one would have a six year struggle with Linux and not find a distro that fit their needs
I've tried SuSE, Redhat, and Debian and have had nothing but grief except for a somewhat agreeable platform to do my C programming assignments with in college. I guess the problem is that I'm more of a consumer than a producer. I tend to play games, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web etc 90% of the time w/ my pc...I don't run a webserver or an ftp site or a central databse etc.
I guess that's why Linux is still an engineers-only kind of OS after so many years. It's more of an engine than a car, most people just want to get from A to B.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
So, basically ALL the benefits of having a laptop. Go linux! It's DEFINITELY ready for the mainstream
I am typing this from a laptop, and it runs Linux (Oh No!). Has APCI, CPU Throttling, Suspend, Wireless networking, etcetera.
How did I do it? Days of patches? No, popped in Mandrake 10.1 Community, generic install, everything ran perfectly, I don't think that you need to be a zealot to install linux on a laptop, Linux has come a long way in the last few years.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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It is time to port your Unix or Linux application over to Windows?
Tune in to Interoperability Month and win a Portable Media Center.
" How hard would it be to chuck a Knoppix disk in your CD drive and boot from it?"
Very. As of two days ago, it unmounted its own CD drive. Embarrassing, and I don't want to learn how to fix it -- it won't boot anymore. Embarrassing and weird.
Having installed a few Windows XP installations from scratch recently (off-the-shelf Windows on bare hardware), I can say from first hand experience that drivers on Windows are a big problem, more so than on Linux.
Linux comes with many more drivers out of the box and most reasonable hardware just works. On Windows, you usually have to go hunting on the web for the right drivers (included CDs are usually out of date with respect to Windows), and then it's still a game of chance whether they are actually going to work.
I have yet to find a Live-cd which supports my Intel 2200BG Wireless lan-card out of the box.
While this may be Intel's fault, it's a big obstacle. Live cd's are great for people who are considering running Linux on their laptop, and a lot of laptops are shipped with the 2200BG card (all new Centrino machines as far as I know?). But it's just no fun when you have to use a patch cable for internet connectivity.
You can get a basic install working on a modern laptop, but getting all the things windows users take for granted can take work. Lots of work, including installing kernel patches and patches to those patches. You also frequently have to sacrifice goats to get certain features working.
I hate to sound like a fanboy, but try Ubuntu. Admittedly, I am running Hoary (the next version, not yet released), but even Warty is pretty nice. I have it running on a Thinkpad T30, and stuff... just... works! I have not touched any kernel configuration or done much of anything, really. The only thing I've had to do which was even remotely fiddly was messing around with my built-in Cisco Aironet card to get WEP working. Beyond that, ACPI works, suspend to RAM/disk works, CPU scaling works, etc. etc.
I had been running Debian testing/unstable on this laptop, but one day decided to try Ubuntu. I haven't looked back.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Could it be with a DVORAK keyboard?
I've never had linux work perfectly out of the box, but it's funny to look at the things that don't work. Differences between different distros (or versions of the same distro) on the same machine are fun:
-Console/X video switching. This hasn't worked right on any distro I tried on my machines since 1999.
- sometimes it takes 4 seconds to switch
- sometimes once you go into X, if you switch to anything else the picture will be irreversably garbled
- sometimes when you go X->console->X, the top 10 rows of pixels are garbled
- sometimes 1400x1050 isn't an achievable resolution (though it's supported)
-IDE driver sometimes just starts priting an error message indefinately, locking access to any IDE device
-PCMCIA/DHCP/Sound/whatever daemon freezing on startup/shutdown. Is it really that hard to background it after a certain amount of time?
-multiple mice in X. This sure was fun until recently.
- kernel thinks the bus speed is 0MHz, and decdides that means it shouldn't run anymore.
- I kid you not: Screen in X shifted up ~200 pixels. I mean wrapped around, so the "bottom" (taskbar) is 200 pixels up, and below it is the "top" of the screen. The mouse is in the correct spot, though. You have to navigate by looking at the icons highlight...
These fuckups are pretty dependable, i.e. not a fucked up install. Each one is unique to a single version of a single distro. The next version has different ones.
Ahh Linux, how amusing you are...
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
If it booted once upon a time, but won't boot now. Then either your CD or hardware is screwy. Knoppix is a live CD.
I have an IBM T40 and I can't get certain things working without sweat and blood. Wireless has been a bane on this machine (under Fedora Core 3) and USB only works so long as I'm not attaching storage devices.
Other users of this system note that APC doesn't work worth a damn and I have to agree. Can all these things be fixed. Yes, more or less, with a lot of work almost all the issues can be eradicated. But it's not as simple as just plugging things in and watching them work.
The only reason I'm still stuck on it is I have to perform network audits with this laptop and the XP SP2 "improvement" of limiting the unanswered connections proves to debilitating for auditing. I'm considering Win2k at the moment.
http://www.sys-con.com/author/?id=5625
Bio
A. Linux Kernel is a pseudonym; it is not known at this writing precisely for whom, and LinuxWorld certainly cannot confirm any rumors that it may come from the pen of one L. Torvalds. We simply do not know one way or the other.
You may already be doing this, but you do know about Norton Ghost, right? (Yeah, you could probably do the same with dd, I'm just not sure how). Then you'd just have to re-do the couple of weeks of kink ironing (/me surpresses a snicker) when you got new models, and could install Linux on new laptops whenever necessary.
I bought a laptop from Emperor Linux last December, with Linux pre-installed. They ship to the UK. I bought power cables separately, and could have bought a UK keyboard from IBM, but didn't bother. I'm very happy with it. Suspend to RAM works most of the time, accelerated graphics I'm still working on when I feel like it, but drivers allegedly exist, DVD playing worked find when I installed mplayer. Emperor sent instructions but no software. ACPI is fine, wireless is fine, bluetooth allegedly works, but I have no other bluetooth device to try it with, power-saving works. I haven't played with the buttons much, but the speaker volume & mute buttons work.
It wasn't cheap, but I did buy absolutely top-of-the-range (good year for grants).
Steve
Some people claim that Linux sucks.
Some people claim that Linux is great.
But I don't see much in the way of SPECIFICS.
Here are some. I can boot Knoppix 3.6 on the following laptops and have EVERYTHING work without additional tweeking.
IBM T23
IBM T40
Anyone who claims that Linux has problems on laptops needs to post
WHAT problems
WHICH laptops
WHICH distribution
I've provided two complete examples. I doubt the Linux-haters will be able to provide any themselves.
Don't get me started! Has anyone tried to find a windows driver for a device no longer supported by the manufacturer, lately!?! The google results are flooded with sites that claim to have what you want, but you're gonna have to pay them first to find out for sure! Try finding a free WinModem or Conexant driver the next time you have a few hours to kill! I remember 'cutting my teeth' on Slackware when I had to (gasp!) compile the driver/module for my 3c905b nic from source... it took me a whole 15 minutes to do it wrong twice and then finally do it right (and I actually managed to learn a thing or two about my comp and OS in the process).
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect
...from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project ...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows. ..
When people say that Linux is fine, they aren't saying that it's perfect, they are saying that it works well enough.
At this point, both Windows and Linux have comparable levels of annoyances for desktop users, but the fact that Linux is open source and all that entails (lower risks, faster turnarounds, lower purchase cost and lower TCO) tips the balance for many users.
See, the nice thing is that Linux does both: you can choose to run it as a Windows look/work-alike, or you can choose to run a nifty next generation environment on it. And that's the real strength of Linux: it gives you choices and ability to determine where you want to go today and tomorrow. With Windows, it's whatever Microsoft tells you is good for you.
how long ago would you say the "driver problem" went away? i ask, because not more than 6 months ago we had a group buy a few Dell machines with SATA, hoping to install RHEL on them. As of a month ago, we still didn't have a fix for them, or at least one that worked. stuff like this makes me cringe, because really - SATA shouldn't have been that difficult to support. then again, knowing what i know about the people who handle linux for our org - they could have been massively incompetent. i really want to get my feet wet again, i tried out linux for a year back in '99 and hated it, but mostly because i couldn't get device drivers for my cable-tv card and the install process was overly difficult. SO...do SATA drivers presently exist? i know other devices get drivers pretty much immediately after release if not coinciding with their release, but i was shocked by the lack of SATA support, especially since it had been out for almost a year.
"and making them extra buttons do things."/><br />That's easy! It's just a simple edit of your XF86Config. Seriously, just add 1 line per button and your there. After that you can assign the buttons to do whatever the hell you like via your window manager.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Your right, I point out what a doofus he is all the time. Sometimes I think when he is right it was by accident. Quite a few bricks short of a full load.
Oh, and you'll want the drivers :-)
Wikileaks, no DNS
Linux is not for people who only surf the web, read e-mail, word-process, etc. Unles of course they feel like using Linux, and possibly messing around to get things 100%. Windows users use Windows because it "Just Works". Most people DO NOT build their own systems, they buy pre-manufactured ones. That is how Dell, MPC, et. al. stay in business. Most of these people will NEVER upgrade their OS, they'll use it until a couple years down the road when they feel they need something better, and then they'll just go on to buy another computer. Linux is not for these people. Linux was not made for these people. Linux was not to take down Windows. Linux was made for people with a deep interest in computers. Linux was made as a free alternative to Unix, which you will not find on any desktop outside of an academic or business related application. Linux could be a viable desktop operating system, but only packaged in the way Zaurus does their palmtops. Linux could work for a desktop for people that never upgrade their system, or change things. Because it would "just work" right from the manufacturer. Rant complete, you know it's all true.
This whole discussion is convincing me I should go burn a LiveCD and try running Linux on my pathetic old Dell Inspiron 3800.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
I did my first laptop install two months ago, Suse 9.2 on a Compaq r3000, and I only had the wireless problem. The only problem there was I had never done it before.
My ATI mobility 9000 igp 3d grphics work great, I really can't relate to anything that he wrote in the article.
Please click on his ads so he won't be so desperate for clicks!
Now I know why I dropped my pc mag subcription.
01101101 01111001 00100000 01110011 01101001 01100111
That's why you should just get an iBook or PowerMac instead. Laptops as a whole are proprietary, using a lot of chips for modems, NICs, etc. that are never thoroughly documented (Broadcom et al). Why not get a laptop that has an OS written for it that will actually be able to: 1) play DVD movies 2) use 802.11 and Bluetooth without pulling your hair and teeth out 3) use the NIC and modem without driver issues 4) handle power managment 5) have accelerated 3D chipsets onboard
Did I miss anything?
si vis pacem, para bellum..."if you wish peace, prepare for war"
Spare me the tired cliches. What people want is what they see everyone else doing. Whatever the media tells them is hip and cool. And right now, that's Linux, not Windows. Try finding a Windows user that isn't aware of Linux as an OS alternative today, compared to just one year ago.
If you must use an automotive analogy, try comparing a manual transmission to an automatic. Not only is an manual transmission (Linux) more efficient and provide more control, once you get used to it, it's no more difficult to use than an automatic. So much so, that women are no longer intimidated by manual transissions, and frequently request them on new vehicles.
Let me see. I cant't get my PcTel winmodem to work with Mandrake 10.0, under kernel 2.6.3. Some people report sucess, but none seem to have the exact version of the hardware I do. I could try another distro or even a MDK upgrade, but I hven't got the time or bandwith.
On my sister's machine, OTOH, I can't get an ALS4000 sound card to work since I reinstalled XP. Funny it is that I managed to install the drivers once and followed exactly the same procedure now, and alas, nothing.
As a result, I'm not using my Linux box when I have to be online (pretty much always). And I'm using the onboard sound card on my sister's box, which sucks.
My sister won't give up on Windows, just because the soundcard works fine with Linux. And I won't give up Mandrake just because the modem won't work. A driver will come up eventually, or maybe I'll have the money to buy another one. People don't throw away they favourite OS just because a driver don't work.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
In 6 years I'd hope you would have been able to get a working linux system?
I guess it's good you're using XP - go bother Microsoft.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Whatever the media tells them is hip and cool. And right now, that's Linux
Wow, how many times can you be wrong in just 14 words? Gotta be a record or something.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I'm having a pretty good time with my Linux laptop. It's an Asus M2400Ne running Gentoo. Of the things you listed, 3d graphics, DVD playing, ACPI, wireless, power management, and extra buttons work, and suspend doesn't. (I don't have Bluetooth.)
ACPI has been both a blessing and a curse. Aside from the fact that Microsoft got there first and created a non-standard for Bluetooth (their compiler makes horribly erroneous code), it has standardized one of the things that could have been the undoing of Linux on laptops--if all those features were implemented in vendor-specific proprietary systems, there's little chance driver writers could have kept up.
SpeedStep, in particular, works wonderfully, and gives me almost 5 hours of battery life with light use.
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
It's kinda funny, but my old TV card works on Linux, but not on Windows (XP) (since the company never bothered to release a driver beyond Win98).
So much for Windows being more compatible? I'm sure there are stories both ways---but if someone carefuly picks the hardware they buy, there are no driver issues.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
...Slashdot's Biggest Troll
www.microsoft.com/athome/sec urity/children/kidtalk.mspx Was This Information Useful?
It just worked !! Bam I was using the sofa as a mousemat.
It worked, just !! Bam, I had to surf off to somwehere to find the following for my xorg-conf file (to get the scroll wheel to work):
I'd give a 7/10. Lots of stuff works, but you still need to get your hands dirty.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
God! I'm not gonna say it was easy at first, but after I took it seriously it hardly took me a year to get rid of MS products. Mandrake was my saviour and Debian the messiah I follow. :)
My laptops:
Compaq Presario 12XL403A - Installed Mandrake 9 and everything worked except the (win)modem. Downloaded the (closed) driver and got it running straight away.
Toshiba SA50-522 - Debian with kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Everything worked out of the box (after installing drivers for both the modem and the WiFi card) except touchpad scrolling. Applied ALPS patch to kernel 2.6 and runs smoothly. ACPI, cpu throttling, wireless card, touchpad, dvd... everything.
Ok then, if this is not a problem, why is there no drivers for these two devices. They work on Windows 95/98/2000/XP? Please someone point me to the drivers. If there packages for FC3, even better.
Hey and you know, MS has one installation method, how about Linux?
That said driver issues will never be the death of Linux.
In fact, it is one area where Linux kicks MS around the tree. MS needs the HW provider to provide a working driver--not only their software but their entire business and legal model. For DRM reasons, MS would *love* to provide either a sound card or a video card but they are simply not capable of doing so competitively. In Linux, the vast majority of the drivers are OSS and supported by the software developers. The fact that such a wide range of hardware works is both a testament to the commodity nature of modern systems and the determination and talent of the various developers. There is nothing preventing the hardware companies from approaching Linux the same way they approach Windows. Adapting the work that they were forced to do on MS's behalf and adapting it to work on "everything else" is relatively cheap and could have a good payoff if, for some reason the OSS driver was not up to the task. nVidia is a good example of a company that has taken this approach. MS ends up getting bitten when the HW supplier finds they don't need to develop a Windows driver at all (perhaps the device only makes sense in a server or embedded context or, like 64 bit computing, there is a political game involved). They can't do it and the mfr won't so who is going to do it? Any developer is going to have to think pretty hard about this: if everything goes perfectly, MS or the mfr will pay them a pittance for their work but it is equally likely that they'll get sued by one or the other. Even if the software works, the weekly releases, lack of documentation and broken APIs make ongoing support a task worthy of Sysiphus.
The other side effect of the drivers coming from the OS supplier instead of the HW vendor affects the installation. One of the reasons it is possible to complete a Mandrake (for example) installation in 1/10th the time the same Windows install would take is the simple fact that all of the software, drivers and patches are handled by the same source. Instead of 10 CDs and 6 websites, you get to deal with 3 CDs and 1 website. Instead of having to make do with a half-assed placeholder until you get around to installing the mfrs disks, the Linux installer has the real driver right there on the CD. Patching is the same. Instead of navigating dozens of obscure websites in hopes of finding the latest driver or praying that the hw vendor hasn't offended Bill this week, the user can simply run the standard update and get the patches for ALL of there drivers. As a bonus, they don't have to worry about finding the correct CD to match the sticker on their case (from a pile of otherwise identical disks) and they can be less worried about the update disabling or breaking their system.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/samba/remotehost/remoteshare/hda.iso.
:-/
Just did this recently using KNOPPIX 3.7 to give my Windows Laptop a new hard drive without having to reinstall about 30 applications. Took an hour to copy a 6.5 GB partition to my server, about 2 hours to change the hard drive (had to go buy some precision screw drivers at Home Depot) and another hour and a half to copy the image to the new disk and use QTparted to resize the NTFS partitions.
All in all, it was a remarkably boring exercise, yet really liberating. The fact that all this stuff comes with KNOPPIX is great. I'd have to buy Ghost, and PartitionMagic to get this to work otherwise.
Back in '94, he was complaining about Novell and Ray Norda. In particular, he stated that Ray was a fool to quit Novell and start a new company; Caldera. Said that he had had to quit working on this new company and return to Novell and work on Unix. Now, we all know that Caldera is the hated SCO. But what tends to be forgotten is that Ray made over a billion on Caldera and several sister companies under canopy. While I do not see eye to eye with Norda on Canopy/scox, I do think that Dvorak seems to have no clue about anything esp. when it comes to Linux.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and nothing to do with Linux or FOSS?
I've tried SuSE 9.2 on my Dell Latitudes, and it always hangs at PCMCIA detection. I could probably get it to work with ACPI=off, but that seems kinda pointless to me when KNOPPIX 3.7 works out of the box.
For accelerated graphics, try the XiG server. It's not free, but it works damn well and they support a lot of chipsets.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Can't say I know the Fedora distro (since rh9, switched) SuSE 9.2 will pick up all the hardware on a t40p -- typing this reply on one right now. Picked up the wireless and video card as part of the install. The only 'setting' change was using the GUI to tell it to go 1400x1050 over the default pick.
d ownloads/ftp/live_eval_int.html The FTP install is free, and media
Try the 9.2 live eval, and see how it does. http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Because Linux requires at least a 2 digit IQ to install and run...which is too tough for a lot of industry writers
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I've been using Linux almost exclusively for about 8 years now, and have set up quite a few boxes with Slackware and Gnome for friends and relations.
Slackware does nothing to pre-configure devices, but my feeling is that its strength is that it doesn't get in the way while you do it manually, and that's good enough for me, since I'm fairly experienced at it by now. Windows is not always as easy to set up as claimed; I have come across a great many difficult deliveries, and problems, once encountered, tend to be intractable, since there is no interface to fix them, and indeed very often no useful error message.
On the linux boxes I set up, pretty much universal feedback is that the interface is much more attractive than Windows. In particular, font rendering is now far superior to Redmond's offering, and lots of those friends find themselves getting irritated when placed in a situation where there is no alternative to Windows.
There's really no need to defend anything against Dvorak's claims. The guy is an attention whore; if you really want to cut him down just make a comparison between things he has predicted and things that have happened (particularly involving apple).
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
VMware - You won't regret it. Best $190 I ever spent on computer software.
"I guess the problem is that I'm more of a consumer than a producer. I tend to play games, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web etc 90% of the time w/ my pc..."
Sounds exactly like me. I have been linux exclusively for about 5 years now. Wanna try again ?
Granted there are not a lot of games available, but freeciv and the ID games satisfy me just fine. Other than that I have not seen a webpage in well over 3 years that doesnt work, I have a 33G repository/backup of my mp3s that all work just fine, and I watch a good amount of DVD's. All of this works fairly straight forward with a default fedora install (you have to install mp3 support).
Perhaps the problem is that you like most windows users just dont see a point in switching. I mean you already spent so much time getting windows just the way you like it and learning all of its ins and outs, why do it all again ? I cant say I disagree, just dont spout crap about linux not working when it works just fine.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Dvork had a point, but he vastly overstated it. But consider the case of binary drivers like ATI/NVIDA, and the ndiswrapper and captiventfs drivers mentioned in the article. How many of us can use an open source ATI or NVIDIA driver for 3d graphics? How many wireless cards work without ndiswrapper? And of course the open source ntfs is still read only to my knowledge.
The open source equivilents of thse projects are not dead, but they are moving significantly slower than other projects that have no binary equivilent. Users are not forced to write their own drivers to get hardware compatiblity and people live with the non-free alternatives.
What Dvorak is suggesting is that if such binary driver equivilents existed for other forms of Linux drivers, development on open source equivilents would slow down. Well, he said it would die which is of course not true, but still his trollery had a hint of truth to it. Esoteric hardware would likely never have native drivers written for it, just as most wireless-G cards do not today.
It would most certainly hurt Linux for this to happen, but at the same time it would help in other ways. Increased support for esoteric hardware would have a lot of benefits for Linux too, and people could still write native drivers for more common hardware. It is hard to say if there would be a net benefit or not under what Dvorak proposes. Either way it's utter bullshit because Microsoft would never do this. Oh well.
501 Not Implemented
You don't mean to imply that the only reason Apple hasn't released an x86 version of OS X is fear that Redmond might explode, do you? Also, what are your sources for Apple porting their OS to x86 since System 7? They never even successfully ported System 7; that failed with project Star Trek.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Often times I wonder if the people, who can't install Debian or Slackware, can actually pass a reading comprehension test, cause thats all it takes.
/really/ need flashy graphics and multimedia intro just to expand and copy 650MB worth of compressed data onto your disk?
Does one
This post is really meant for the GP.
I have Suse 9.2 running on my ThinkPad T41 and it runs like a dream. No problems with my wireless card or any other drivers, etc. I am running Linux dual-boot with XP. Guess which OS crashes more often? (Hint: not Linux)
No, Linux is more like European higher education. You don't get in based on hand-outs, parental connections or a fat wallet - all you need is proof of your intelligence by way of examination, and if you get in... it's free.
Same with Linux. It's free, assuming you can grok it. As a CS major its' hardly a self-compliment to state that you can barely figure your way around it.(You mean you still can't listen to music, watch videos, browse the web, have a decent desktop?) There is really no excuse for it with the copious amount of documentation and support, especially for someone whose familiarity with computers extends past 'surfing the Internet Explorer.'
You are likely to reply back, smearing this as "elitism" or some related non-sense. Alas, you would have misunderstood.
With Linux, I've had 1 irrecoverable crash when FreeCiv somehow just totally hosed my system - keyboard was NR. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing except for hardware failures and acts of nature (After 45 minutes, the Uninterruptable Power Supply wasn't).
That's the sum of the problems I've experienced with dealing with Mandrake Linux, starting at 8.2 on my desktop and then expanding to a gateway server and a E-Mail/Web computer for the parents. Other than two driver problems (Nvidia's OpenGL drivers and an ancient ISA sound card), everything worked perfectly the first time.
Dealing with the Windows 98 install I keep on my hdd for games, let's not go there. Having used Win2K on my dad's workstation, it's light-years better than 98. It seems as if task manager can actually kill offending tasks this time. The random delays in mouse response (click, window doesn't immediately get focus) are still there and make me crazy, but it's pretty good over all. I haven't used XP enough to be able to say what I think about it.
To me, long-time geek, linux is already on the desktop and in the server room. And in my experience, unless you have some critical application like Autocad that forces you to be beholden to Windows, even the computer illiterate can happily use Linux on the desktop after a geek sets it up.
A) Monitors don't have drivers. Period.
B) AMD never made PIIs. PIIs never clocked at 188Mhz.
C) That was more than half-a-decade ago!
That is exactly what I do with my linux only laptop. I had win modem which is not working with mandrake however I feel I am cheated for having such laousy part in the first place. I would not mind pay extra 50 bucks for regular fax modem. Luckily I use broadband and I just need a ethernet port. For playing games occasionally I try many free games bundled with my system for halo like games I will rather choose sony. At least they are not as slopy as Microsoft. My non-techie wife she finds her way into linux without any hardship or training. Anyway it is a freeworld some ppl just loves using pirated systems (anti-virus or system tools) and would take risk spyware/MalwareX ... they just cant wait to be jombie ...
You can get Powerbooks and iBooks with Yellow Dog Linux (Fedora Core 2 based) pre-installed from TerraSoft Solutions.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com
They ship and provide support internationally.
All of the things you mentioned work. Sometimes a few things don't work on some newly released models and it takes them a while to get those things working in a later release of YDL. For example, there were some problems with power management with the 17" Powerbook when it was just released. However, TerraSoft will tell you in advance of those exceptions.
Depending on who you read, Star Trek ran pretty well on a very limited selection of hardware. After that Apple made a big todo about Mac OS X being cross platform and all of the Rhapsody developer builds shipped for Intel and PPC. That plan was dropped. To this day you can still download Darwin for Intel or PPC.
Yeah, but I want to talk on my cellphone, eat a sandwich, and drive my computer at the same time...wait...what am I trying to say here?
Nope, I think you're largely correct.
but navigating a UNIX shell is about as tedious and boring as anything I can imagine. Some people find genuine joy in the process, I'd rather go to the dentist. So it's not all smarts, it's also what people find enjoyable that keeps them doing something...I'd rather be working with applications than for them.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Only thing I miss that I dont need to use winmodem with my broadband connections .. and well I will buy HP multifunctions if I need them besides browsing internet .. I am just a happy casual linux laptop user who gets the update twice a year over internet for free .. And pray for the soul that gives me a chance to enjoy life ...
I agree with you there; the simple fact is that people do not like change. I would suggest, if you are one of these people, to read "who moved my cheese" (not kidding)
Linux has the potential to be a much better OS than Windows; Windows is designed to sell more if anything. but Linux being free, is not considering the amount of sales but the product itself. the reason it is harder to use at first is partly because it is Open Source; it is designed so that people change it and make it better.
people who like change will like Open Source products
I suggested Linux to a moderately tech-savy friend this weekend and he brought his desktop and laptop over for a linux install. I was a little worried when I found out that they were both craptastic eMachines units but Ubuntu installed in minutes on both with zero issues. It was absolutely painless even with the ATI powered widescreen on the laptop. I have to admit I was stunned. It's just more evidence that most of the Linux myths (no games, no drivers, etc) are just that. My box is running SUSE 9.2 and I've thrown lots of new hardware at it (DVD burner, HP printer/scanner/copier, external USB devices, wireless keyboard and mouse) and I've had zero issues with those as well.
"and if you get in... it's free."
Free? Then explain to me why my bank is demanding more than 10,000 Euros from me. This is where European education truly SUCKS! EU citizens get a free ride while everyone else gets beat financially until they bleed out of their eye sockets to cough up so much money out of pocket up front with ZERO financial aid. And then the state's soooo immigrant friendly laws choke away your potential to earn money by forbidding you from working more than a paltry 20 hours per week and not allowing you to hold the same job for more than one school year by kicking you out of the country until the next.
dd if=/dev/hda | gzip | ssh user@remotehost dd of=~/`hostname`-`date +%F`.image.gz
T,FTFY
ok..you've either got to be a troll or incompentent. I downloaded a ISO of MEPHIS (it's based on Debian - it's a live cd with option to install) I had a fully working Linux system (including my FX5200 vid card, SB Audigy and my TV card) in about 30 mins.
I agree that a lot of drivers under windows can be flaky as well. However, let us distinguish between "availability" vs "quality" of drivers. I think dvorak was referring to the former. We all agree that just because drivers are available doesnt mean that they are of good quality, and it is true for drivers under any OS.
However, what MS does well here, is by using the WHDL quality control for 3rd party drivers, they ensure (for the most part) that drivers are of good quality. The tools like driver verifier help driver writers in this area. Linux lacks this, and that is why the driver quality & quantity is not up to the par with windows.
This is how to get ATI drivers working in Debian Sarge:
/etc/modules
1. Download and untar the kernel source
2. Download the ATI RPM here
3. Use alien to convert the RPM to a DEB
4. Tell dpkg to overwrite the Mesa OpenGL library
5. Run their make.sh and make_install.sh
6. modprobe fglrx
7. Stop X
8. Run fglrxconfig and use the existing XFreeConfig to answer the questions
9. Start X
10. Woohoo! 8000fps in glxgears! Doom3 is a bit slower than in Windows. Oh well.
11. Add "fglrx" to
12. Reboot? Only if you want to.
The point of my thread was I haven't tried to install Linux in about 2 years because of the past frustration.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
You miss the point. Installing Debian is nothing. Getting your sound to work and getting the desktop to display at the right resolution is a bitch. Getting a laptop to work correctly is hard.
I can't comment on Slackware, but I gave up on plain Debian after a week of frustration. I could install it, but I couldn't use it how I wanted.
Thanks God Ubuntu came....(and Mepis, Xandros, Knoppix, take your pick)
Open Source Sushi
Two years back I installed three different Linux distribution (Mandrake, Redhat and SuSE) on a dell inspiron 8000 with out any problems. In fact the amount of time it took to install and fiddle with the three distributions (finally settled on SuSe KDE, 1st and 4th install) was less than the amount of time it takes to install and properly configure one windows installation (including many reboots to install the proper hardware drivers, tweak the services, tweak the registry and do a few windows updates).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Does one /really/ need flashy graphics and multimedia intro just to expand and copy 650MB worth of compressed data onto your disk?
If people are to believe they can, yes. My dads reaction to most stuff I teach him is "It wasn't so hard as I thought". If you drop them into something that seems to be hardcore geek text mode territory, they will panic. Btw, the Debian installer (testing) asks some lame questions, like whether or not I'd like to stop PCMCIA cards to do something-something. Well this fucking PC doesn't have PCMCIA, so why bug me about it? Just ask the first fucking time you need it.
Anyway, that's really not what this is about. On Windows, very little work out of the box, pop in a CD, almost all stuff works. Linux, most stuff work out of the box, and if not you're screwed unless you do major hacks (from a laypersons POV at least).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Which is really no point at all unless you've tried to install/use Linux recently.
"""So, basically ALL the benefits of having a laptop. Go linux! It's DEFINITELY ready for the mainstream."""
:)
Oh yeah, I forgot to add that putting Linux on also takes away the other great benefit of having a laptop since Linux weighs about 4kg more than Windows
"That's why you should just get an iBook or PowerMac"
And then you've just ridden up an OS blind alley (proprietary MAC OSX) on a blind horse (proprietary closed Mac hardware). May as well just stick with Windows. I hear all those features work just as well on Windows laptops.
The worst offenders are (in no order of importance or difficulty): suspend (to disk or ram), accelerated 3d graphics, DVD playing, battery life monitoring (and general ACPI stuff), wireless networking, bluetooth, power-saving features (like CPU throttling) and making them extra buttons do things.
./nvidia-installer. Done. Usually outperforms Windows. Can't comment on the ATI method.
Sorry, but most of that is pretty misleading.
suspend (to disk or ram): OK, this is pretty unpolished still. Seems to work well for me though.
accelerated 3d graphics: tar -zxvf,
DVD playing: Works better than Windows. apt-get install xine; pop in a DVD, and press the 'DVD' button.
battery life monitoring (and general ACPI stuff): Works out of the box with any distribution worth its weight in CD-Rs. If you roll your own kernels, just remember to compile it in. Then run gkrellm, the KDE or GNOME battery applets, or whatever you like.
wireless networking: Can be tricky, but usually works beautifully. Depends on the chipset. Still, room for improvement here.
bluetooth: Never used it.
power-saving features (like CPU throttling): apt-get install cpufreqd. Done. Works better than Windows.
making them extra buttons do things: apt-get install acpid. Done. Is actually configurable (you could set the power button to load Firefox and play a song if you wanted to).
Sorry mate, but that was a bit FUDdy.
Drivers under Linux suck (compared to windows). Sure they are great... if you know how to manually tweak module settings. And I do... but I don't care to. I just want to do the basics... you know, like BOOTING and such.
People here are talking about the random old piece of hardware not supported, but I'm having trouble with my standard DELL Inspiron 9100/XPS laptop. So much so that both the latest 3.7 Knoppix and MandrakeMove did not want to even boot up on this! Even Windows worked without any funky drivers!
I still use Linux, mostly because of the price, but I have to test most configurations thoroughly before I can decide to use it. (Factor this into TCO?) When I hit on a stable combo, I just hope the MOBO does not stop being manufactured for a while at least.
When Linux runs, I have to admit... it runs well. Still beats windows for server applications hands down. (I've had windows servers crash on me because I right-clicked on the desktop.... but this was because no drivers were installed on it... something I soon and easily fixed.)
Also when I used to run Debian and upgraded to 'untested' I had some serious problems. I needed to do this because of certain USB support and proper Serial-ATA drivers. (I needed the 2.6 kernel) My machine sorta worked. (Well Quake 3 worked the best ever!) But most things were a pain... my removable 250 Gb external FAT32 USB/firewire drive was a real pain.
For now, I am still only running Linux on my old AMD K6, Windows XP on my DELL Inspiron and TV media machine (3GHz P4) and OS X on my Mac (Just Love Apple/OSX's user experience... sucks with game availability though). Perhaps Apple (Amiga/C64/etc) had the right idea about locking down the hardware a bit... the variety of chipsets are the greatest cause of frustration for PC (and Linux in particular) users!
Well I'm not surprised you failed, seeing as there isn't really any such thing as a monitor driver under Linux at all.
;).
All you have to do is find out the screen's legal frequency ranges, and pop them in your XFree (or Xorg) config as HorizSync and VertRefresh. If that makes you bare your teeth, then there are several GUI wrappers that will do this for you and have configs for literally hundreds of monitors (more than Windows has in its pesky database I'm sure
If you do it that way, then the fact that it's two lines of config instead of a driver doesn't even matter.
And there's no irritating initial setting up of refresh rates in each resolution, because XFree is incredibly intelligent and can (gasp) actually calculate the refresh rates from those frequency ranges above. Hot damn.
i'm glad to see that your comment got modded up, but it think insightful would have been more appropriate than funny.
And a friend of mine with a slightly older Compaq laptop (PII 233, 96MB RAM) running W2K needed a new ethernet PCMCIA card. I had four(!) old cards to offer and neither of them worked out of the box. All were definitly older than W2K. And all can be plugged into any of the current linux distros and will work right out of the box.
For the brand new stuff you will be better off with windows. But why should one buy a new computer that is perfectly well suitable for occasionally writing a letter just because windows or vendors don't support it any more?
Your argument hits back on yourself unless all your friends throw away all their equipment every three years...
One month ago, I rebuilt two PCs for my sister and her kids on Windows 2000. I showed them how to update and run virus checkers, spyware checkers, defrag and cleaning utilities. Each time they run one of these tools, they call me on the phone first and I talk them through what to do.
However, one month later, both PCs are totally screwed - mainly because the kids play a lot of online games and sit in chatrooms. Both PCs are infested with "XXX Popups" and now cannot connect to the Internet.
Sure, I run Windows 2000 at home and it runs smoothly without any real problems, provided I take the time to check the PCs on a regular basis. However, the time I spend on Windows 2000 maintenance is probably more than what I spend on my Linux PCs, after I've done all the security updates, scans, etc.
The fact is that clever Microsoft marketing has convinced Joe Average that Windows is quick and easy to maintain when the reality is that most of the Joe Averages have to rely on friends, relatives, the local PC store and re-installation CDs to keep their PCs working.
Let's be under no illusion - using Linux requires a degree of PC knowledge and a steep learning curve but Windows is no different by the time you have to start running virus checkers, spyware checkers and applying virtually constant updates.
If Windows does kill Linux, then it will be as the result of clever Microsoft marketing, not because of drivers.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well...
It is damn easy to boot, but Knoppix refuses to recognise my graphics card and will only display in 640x480x16, which is like going back to Windows 3.1. And my card is not some old obsolete card or a ultra-modern gaming monster. It is a pretty standard ATI mid-range model. [At work and so can not remember specs]
I have tried the boot hack of setting the screen to 1024x768, but it still refuses and displays in 640x480x16.
Another thing I found annoying about Knoppix is that for some reason on my machine the cd-rom continues to spin at "warp-speed" during use. My cd-rom drive is damn noisy, it sounds like a freight train, and so I doubt my neighbours are happy when I use Knoppix.
I am not a big fan of Windows, but Linux, most distros, is still a lot more complicated to the "joe-schmo" average user than windows or mac os x.
I have three machines at the moment with "permanent" OS's. I have a Mac OS X laptop, a Wintel box and an openBSD webserver.
Of all of the OS's I have seen IMHO Mac OS X is the simplest for the average user to install and get up and running, and also connecting peripherals "out-of-the-box".
[OF course this is probably because of the apple approved hardware licensing doctorine]
watashi wa bengoshi dewa arimasen!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
apt-get install alsa_utils -y
alsa_setup
Works a charm...
I did it Saturday evening on my laptop.
This certainly shows a difference between the New World and the Old World.
It seems that here in Europe almost everybody uses manual transmissions, while in the USA almost everybody uses automatic transmissions.
I have never heard any woman who knows how to drive, complain about manual transmissions.
Let me dawn some clue upon you. HT is seen from the outside as two CPUs. They just share the ALU and cache of one CPU, but that's internal details.
You almost have the answer there when you say "The fact that it needs a SMP kernel", but you miss it. Have you even thought about _why_ is that so? Nah, you just rushed to karma-whore with the ever fashionable "Windows is doomed" drivel.
Let me enlighten you: because from the software side it acts in every single aspect _exactly_ like a SMP system. _That_ is why you need a SMP kernel.
And, yes, if any driver were to fail because they're not SMP ready, they would have _already_ failed on every single HT P4 system. Yes, because of "The fact that it needs a SMP kernel". And SMP drivers at that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't think that anyone would disagree that if you're prepared to go to some effort and are slightly knowledgeable then you can get Linux running on almost anything, with nearly any hardware.
However, from the persepctive of a newcomer there is a very long way to go.
I recently installed Linux (SuSE 9.2) on my laptop - not for the first time.
Despite doing some advance research there are still a few important things which don't work properly: trackpad/pointer combination and wireless PC card in particular. I can and will fix them, but the typical domestic user is not going to want anything to do with these sorts of problems.
Anybody who reckons Linux is ready for the non-enthusiast home-user is sadly mistaken.
I think he's incompetent.
To GP post, if you find unix shell "tedious or boring", then I'd suggest you switch to a 'fun' major such as Economics, Management, or Psychology.
It took me about two hours to get Debian working properly on my brand-X el-cheapo laptop... counting from when I walked out of the store with it.
Yes they do, but don't get turned off if the live cd doesn't work for you. The live cd is not really ubuntu, it's basicly morphix with an ubuntu theme.
Try the real version instead. It's is a very nice distro and it would be a shame if the live cd ruined your ubuntu experience.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
over 10 years ago you had to completely manually setup mouse screen and everything else.
Today some Distros are almost completely auto on detected hardware.
Note it is only time before it is all Distros.
Years equal lower IQ required so 2 digit IQ is on the cards anyone want to bet a year.
"""Failed to connect to ServletExec.
Group = default
Address = 127.0.0.1:9999
The error number is -1"""
Seems more like a criticism of java servlets to me.
Sure, if I get slung onto some random old machine
Or a brand new machine, with Centrino..
Project:
Find a Linux desktop distro which can be installed on a low end PC and function as a credible replacement for Win95/98 which previously ran on that hardware. The OS has to be semi-easy to install, relatively bug free, it has to support a modicum of normal desktop apps that the typical student or home user would use or be able to use, and it has to be relatively straightforward to maintain from the perspective of installing printers and other common devices as well as installing patches or updates. It has to boot in a reasonable amount of time and it has to recover from a 'pull the plug' shutdown with few if any messages or user intervention. No Windows OS software or partitions are preserved.
Hardware
An IBM PC750 model 6887 (mod 80H engineering model never marketed). 112MB RAM. 2 IDE drives: 6GB and 4GB. The BIOS limits a single drive to 6GB. A 40x12x16 CDRW. AMDK6-2 400 drop in replacement CPU. D-Link, 10/100Ethernet NIC, Realtek 8129 family. AWE64 ISA sound card. I acknowledge that this is an ancient machine that is neither supported nor can be affordably upgraded. It is theoretically possible to upgrade RAM to 144MB but very expensive. Video is embedded S3VG64+.
RH based:
All the RH based distros are very similar look and feel and toolset. They are require significant hardware to run well. They all boot with a failure to start the sound server. If you have the hardware to run them they are probably a good choice for a desktop. General hardware minimum recommendations are at least 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. Practical minimums are at least twice that: 256MB RAM and 700 -1200Mhz CPU minimum and at least 3-4GB diskspace. Some distros check the disk and made the volume a hard requirement.. Generally, from a pure usage perspective there is little to distinguish them from one another. Some had a much easier time installing printers in CUPS for example but I did not install anything significant to see whether one had more success than another. Sound server generally failed on boot. Video cards were generally detected as S3VG64 generic and not '+'; changing resolution was hit or miss. I did not try to install or run Wine. While they install well and have an elegant look and feel they are basically unusable with this hardware.
ELX - Automatic partition, very clean. This may be an orphan product however good it is.
Cobind - Very similar, manual partition, low numbered release (0.1)
SOT/LBA - Very similar, manual partition
Lorma - Very similar, manual partition. Developed at and for Lorma College. Multiple versions for i386 and 686 but the differences are not obvious on an AMDK6
OpenNA - Installs but does not run on AMDK6
Live CDs:
Most are Knoppix/Debian based distros and with the exception of Knoppix strangely, require user intervention for installation to input manual frame buffer params. These lightweight distros all have more or less the same applications. Individual variations are minor and focus on hardware support or multimedia. There is Knoppix and there is everything else. Knoppix runs very well is very complete, in fact it's a little bloated and runs fairly slow. These distros are all pretty much the same in terms of which apps they have and they run. Feather and DSL really are stripped down, many of their apps are text based in a Window or use Dilo instead of Firefox or Konquerer. Some do not install or run at all. The only unusual one is Puppy which looks almost identical to Win98. Puppy also has a very complicated mode to install on to the harddrive - I'm not sure if it's possible. Video was detected adequately. Most are not numbered version 1.0 or higher
Peanut - Does not install, does not run on AMDK6
Feather - Good script for to hard drive. Runs either on CD or harddrive equally well. With a little more RAM you can dump the entire OS into a RAMdisk. Primitive GUI, printer installation is difficult.
DSL - Very simple, fast installation. Primitive gui. Printer installation is difficult.
Sl
Ummm. Well. No. OS X is built on NetBSD. A *nix OS. Hardly a blind ally. And if you bothered to use a OS X based computer, you would realize that it is caters to both people who love the command line but is also by far the absolute best platform for the average human being who wants to use a computer.
I think it is grossly unfair to also still claim that Mac hardware is proprietary and closed. With and architecture which includes AGP, PCI, IDE, SATA, Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g, USB, and FireWire support it pretty much specs out just like the x86 boxes out there. The only difference is the PowerPC CPU. I can buy standard memory modules and use them in either machine type. I can take almost any USB device and plug it into the Mac.
The problem is that your opinion is based on old information. That is fine, but don't start sharing it like it is fact. It would be no more fair than to continue the "Windows is unstable" message because the last time you used it was when Windows 95 or 98 was released. The world has continued to develop. You might want to update your knowledge about it.
This is all coming to you from the Windows, Linux, OS X, and Netware using guy.
Crawl out from under your rock, sir. It's 2005!
JoloK
Actually, that's not necessarily true anymore. Many cars now have automatic or CVT transmissions that get better mileage than manual transmission cars. The times they are a changin...
Self awareness - try it!
So at first it looks like a nice open road - mm NetBSD freedom - but then woah! whats all this on top of it? Heck, I'm down a blind alley with all this GUI stuff. And the device drivers. Can I get the source code to that? Can I copy it? Can I fix bugs in it? Can I port it to my RandomCPU x996 processor? Can I even look at it without violating some license agreement?
And if the hardware and architecture was open, there would be Mac clones. There used to be - but I think Steve wasn't happy.
Your opinion on my opinion was based on no information. The basing of OS X on NetBSD was probably done for pragmatic reasons and not out of any moral or philosophical ones relating to openness. If Apple could have got a cheap license to use some other Unix they probably would have.
As a CS major its' hardly a self-compliment to state that you can barely figure your way around it
Well, to be fair if you want to watch videos you have to have libdvdcss which is missing from some distros (e.g. Mandrake community), not that its hard to get or anything, but you just have to know that's the piece you're missing.
Sometimes a little knowledge (or rather ambition) is a dangerous thing. Oracle's installers used to be notorious for this: they would ask you innocent sounding questions and if you answered anything but take the default, pretty soon you'd be up to your eyeballs in consequences. I think there are multiple distros out there that are pretty close to meeting the proverbial granny test, but in some ways taking a person who is well adapted to one but only one way of doing this is tougher.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If anyone knows a UK supplier of laptops with Linux pre-installed that do all the above things out of the box, let me know, I might want a dozen in October.
http://www.apple.com/uk/
Erm... what you mean "It's not Linux there..."??
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Is a system with a bare hard drive and a set of XP and Office and EZ-CD and printer driver and scanner driver and and and CD's ready for the average user? That's the real comparison, and I don't think Windows is ready here, either. If the hardware is compatable, a Mandrake install is easier than a Windows install, because when you are done, you have a working system with useful stuff on it. If the system builder spends the same time on Linux compatability as they would for XP driver compatability (and making substitutions as necessary) the end result is likely to be similar. There are driver problems with either--Mandrake didn't like the Compaq soundcard on my box, but I've had problems with Windows not having a driver for the version/hardware combination I'm using, too.
I don't know how relevant this is but wifi on Linux is somewhat hard for a newbie to configure by him/herself. On the other hand, on XP it's pretty unreliable. At the same time, it's bloody annoying that though Linux put out a 64bit OS first I can't use wifi with it because there aren't any drivers to use with Ndiswrapper! Aaargh! When will there be drivers? Ultimately, I reckon most people would switch to Linux if it supported more games.
Curious Yellow - getting all Grammar Nazi on the asses of punk bitches since he learnt to spell.
Oh come on guys, this isn't going to be a distro war thread right?
With all current distro's it's doable to get everything working. You do, however, need to read the right stuff. So it's probably more about knowing where to get your info than about being literate.
Those of us who farted around with it back in 94-95 who didn't have a BS in CS mostly gave up and gave it another test drive in 1998-1999 and found it to be much better. By 2001 it was already a relative breeze, nowadays it is nearly trivial by comparison. nearly all the major distro's have a nice installer which only deals with terminology you probably already know.
And if all else fails just grab a livecd for the love of Linus...
there may be snakes in garden but thank god there's a Python...
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
A system builder can certainly manage to install Linux. They can tailor the configuration to the drivers that are available, just as they'd do with a Windows box.
But someone at home with an existing PC - running Win98, perhaps, and keen for something a bit better, or just to see what all the fuss was about - would probably still struggle to get Linux working seamlessly.
Drivers are a major issue. Certainly Windows doesn't always do a perfect job here, but I think it is better at telling you what you need.
(By contrast, when I try to confgure my wireless card under Linux it just doesn't work. If I look in the error log I can see some messages relating to it, but there's nothing which says "go and get such-and-such a driver".)
I installed Mandrake on an old laptop. Only thing that doesn't Just Work is hibernation mode, which is too bad, but I never used it anyway.
And, it should be pointed out, 80% of America drives automatic cars. Do the math.
~cHris, linux user for longer than I care to remember.
in reply to this whole line, not just parent: Come on people. I loved the idea of Linux since the first time I heard about it. It was a bitch to install, there was a huge learning curve, and it took me about 5 distro's and atleast a dozen installs to find the one that was right for me. It took me a couple years to switch over because it wasn't always worth the time to try to get it set up. You people are not helping by ridiculing someone who is relating his experience, which is one that we ALL went through when switching to Linux.
It is not worth everyone's time to go through multiple installs of multiple distrobutions. For example, I convinced a friend of mine to install Linux on a laptop that he uses for web authoring and basic photo editing. After about 8 hours of trying to get his digital camera to be recognized, he looked at me in the eye and said "It's not worth it." Even with my help, and help from an active forum, it was not worth the time and effort to switch. You can throw the "try another distro" argument, at him but he was in no mood and had no time for that as there was work to be done. ( a little gentle prodding and a well-timed update got him up and running a week later )
We all know that things have improved as far as installs go. It is only going to get better, but don't get bent out of shape because somebody has had a bad experience with Linux. You all forget that while others may be interested in Linux, they don't love it like many of us do. For me, installing Linux is a labor of love. For someone who doesn't love Linux, a few failed attempts at a smooth/functioning install is enough to say it is not for them, atleast not for now.
I got 3 seperate linux distros to run flawlessly on a random laptop (toshiba 1800-s274) in three days (fedora core 3, linare, and yoper). There was no configuration, there was no confusion. It was all plug and play of the easiest sort. And I had ten times the trouble getting windows XP loaded on hte same computer. My real world experience puts me with linux on this one. For easer of install you can't beat it. for proof, go put a windows cd in a mac and wait.
I passed the entrance exam but then decided the Powerbook Polytechnic was preferable.
I've sat down and played with linux but I will tell you this, it isn't a reading comprehension test that gets you ready for a debian install. I compare it to chinese water torture or needles in my eyes after hours of staring at a computer screen getting it all to work.
Installing Debian is easy... well, let me take that back, I think its the stage 3 install that only takes a few days to muck through if you are an experienced Linux user. It might take me a week to get the system working. Now this is where I step back and look and say, "the functionality of Debian isn't worth a week of my time learning to get it up and running". Maybe you should look at it from that angle. Redhat I can get up and running in about 3 hours(most of which I don't have to be infront of the computer).
seems like a pretty terrible trade off to me, and this isn't even when I'm comparing it to the mecca of debian installs(isn't a stage one install where you get all the benefits??)
Oh it's morphed into NetBSD now has it? I could have sworn just yesterday I saw someone equally as clueless claim it was based on FreeBSD. Oh, wait, it's based on Mach! But a really old Mach..and it isn't really Mach any more.
Get over it. MacOS X isn't Open Source. Darwin may be Open Source, but what use is Darwin to anybody? It barely works on Mac hardware, let alone generic x86 PCs.
My point is that the user on Win98 probably didn't install that himself either. If the user wants to install 98 from scratch on current hardware, he's reasonably likely to find hardware with no driver available. Likewise if he's installing 2000 or XP on 1998 hardware. When you install Windows on hardware entirely from it's era, you are by default selecting for some compatability, but if you mix and match Windows year and hardware year you aren't much better off than installing Linux on non-selected hardware.
For me the thing that makes Windows a bit easier is about 8 extra years of experience with it.
If you suck at changing gears manualy that is.
It's a matter of time and the average laptop having proprietary hardware. Sure, linux will run on most, if not all, laptops given enough time to 'play around with it,' but Joe Average who's sick of Windows doesn't care about ALSA or X.org vs XFree, he just wants his laptop to work with linux. Unfortunatly it doesn't come much more propriatery than some of the laptops out there, so the hardware support is sometimes flaky. I think most people know this, but the GP doesn't want to mess around with a even a single config file just to play MP3s. Not that I wouldn't mind doing that, but it does take more time than most people are willing to commit.
That said, there are many distros that work out of the box on laptops, particularly laptpos that aren't bleeding edge or are commonly used.
Damn this internet - you say stupid things in the heat of the argument, and then the stupid things probably end up outliving you...
I have no trouble with Mandrake out of the box on my old Dell laptop - maybe it's because it's old, but suspend to disk, battery monitoring and all the extra buttons work fine with no tweaking. And my PCMCIA network card has no problems (but maybe you're interested in an internal wireless setup)
Fortunately, navigating a Unix shell is entirely optional.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What? How can you say I'm being FUDdy when half your points are either "unpolished", 'works with nVidia but I dunno about anything else', 'can be tricky', and 'never used it'.
And DVD playing can stutter woefully if you dont get 2d acceleration working.
And I forgot to mention getting external VGA to work. To get this going on a RECENT Dell required a kernel patch, me finding a bug in and fixing said patch, then having to get some new BIOS table lookup thing and bung that into the kernel patch, and then get some user-mode thing (there was a choice of two for this model of Dell - one didnt work, one did) so that I could setup a command 'external on' to make it work.
Windows box? Press Fn-F6 (or wherever the little blue logo is).
If Linux (and other Unix) on laptops worked well with all the features then we wouldn't need the 3000 install reports on tuxmobil.org.
And if you think you can supply us with laptops with all that stuff I asked for working, put your money where your mouth is and name us a price. Lets say, working on a Dell Inspiron 5160... Or something of similar spec...
> The worst offenders are (in no order of importance
> or difficulty): suspend (to disk or ram),
Never tried it and don't really want it.
> accelerated 3d graphics,
I just installed Debian.
> DVD playing,
I just installed Debian, and added the extra decss lib.
> battery life monitoring (and general ACPI stuff),
I just installed Debian, and added an extra acpi applet for Windowmaker.
> wireless networking,
This is a narly hardware support issue.
> bluetooth, power-saving features (like CPU
> throttling) and making them extra buttons do
This is also more difficult than it should be.
However, that's all from the point of view of a
Debian user and Debian isn't exactly the most
shiny & happy Linux distribution.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
basicly->basically
Anyways, is the hoary cd also Morphix?
At any rate, I have noticed a difference in quality.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Actually, no. They get better mileage regardless of your manual gear changing ability.
Self awareness - try it!
On some, even most machines, perhaps. Do not for a moment imagine that ANY linux distro is infallible. Now, I haven't attempted to install debian, but from what I hear, it is definately more difficult to set up than others. .conf files to mess with.
If every distro did exactly what was expected according to the documentation, there would be no problems in setting up your soundcard and such. It's the unfortunate truth, however, that some distros misbehave more often than others. Why is this? Difficult to say, but with a GUI tool that does everything for you, it's less likely to screw up. And if it does, you have exactly the same
In addition, there is the simple problem that not everyone knows what program installs stuff, or even how to fire up the terminal when starting linux. This is part of the learning process, but that does not mean the learning process is mostly done before the OS is installed. Certainly when I first booted linux up, I had no idea of this stuff, and the fact that I had a friendly set of tools was a big help. Once everything was working(ish) I could learn how to dive deeper.
im in ur
I can't see the point in mirroring tuxmobil.org on slashdot :)
Perhaps you could share your T40 experiences on there - no current entry for Knoppix on that model. Plenty of people with problems with other distros though on T40 machines.
Baz
No, it's just a "laptop problem".
A laptop LOCKS you into a certain set of hardware and if some random OS doesn't support ALL of that hardware then you're going to have a problem. This is just like trying to install something not-MacOS onto any Macintosh.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That is the problem with plain Debian for desktop use. With Ubuntu, I do have a guide....and a large forum.
Open Source Sushi
his article read pagecounts go up, as his editors think more people read his column than others in InfoWorld, and he gets more money on contract renewal.
So, it's not that he's a Troll, it's that he uses the FlameWar to feed his purse.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Darwin is a far cry from OS X, mind you.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I remember playing around with Slackware around 94 and thinking how great it was. I could barely get anything to work at first. But the first time I managed to get something to work felt like it was worth all the trouble. I used to have a keep alive program running, and telnet into my box and place text based card games from school. But then, I was 15-16 when I was doing this, and seemed to have all the time in the world.
I stopped using Linux regulary about 97 because I just didn't have the time and everything I did seemed to involve Windows only software. I recently have gotten back into it, and was amazed the first time I installed Fedora and it found every piece of hardware in the machine. And it wasn't even old hardware. The advancements I've seen since I had last used Linux was amazing.
rm -rf
For me, installing Slackware was easy. But trying to set up X was the frustrating part, so I just went to FC 3. If I had a more-supported video card, I am sure the issues wouldn't have been as big.
Scott Simontis
As long as you change it to alsa-utils and alsaconf, I agree.
Thanks for the correction.
Anyways, is the hoary cd also Morphix?Yes, AFAIK it is.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
However, you tried to change the whole point. You went from using the term "proprietary hardware" to mandating open source behind all the software inside. I will give you that you cannot build a clone Mac, but you cannot build a clone PC either under your definition. There is no open source BIOS (that really works). You usually purchase a proprietary one when you buy the motherboard.
Yeah, it's great the way I can just log on to any Windows machine, and install devices software by letting it Plug and Play, or Autorun. If that doesn't work, I can find the install.exe. Actually, it could be setup.bat. But, now I can't remember which version of Windows this poorly marked floppy/CD is for. I'll try NT2000, that should work.
OK,OK, now I just have to look in the manual for the heading "Windows Protection Fault"...
I mean, come on! I use Windows everyday, and rarely use Linux, but just because Linux has a long way to go does not mean that Windows should be the model to follow.