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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.
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
"Assertation" is a word used instead of "assertion" by someone who finds they've got a spare syllable lying around and nowhere to put it. It's a bit like "irregardless".
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.
I believe he is saying that Windows has driver problems as well, so Linux shouldn't be thought less of because of the occasional problem.
I geuss you forget the days of windows 95/98/ME?
"Assertation" is a word used instead of "assertion" by someone who finds they've got a spare syllable lying around and nowhere to put it.
Why cut corners? I'd have gone for asseverations.
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
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...
"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
...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
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.
>> 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 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've not had a single driver problem on Linux, and I have installed it on three off-the-shelf (i.e. hardware not checked for compatibility) computers, as well as run Knoppix on many computers at school, all without a single problem.
Linux is the operative system with better driver support out-of-the-box. Windows fully depends on 3d party companies. Guess what happens when your support finishes or the company bankrupts? I know a few people with scanners that don't work in XP - there's not support except for windows 9x systems. Windows XP SP2, for example, doesn't supports SATA, you need 3rd party drivers in a floppy (unless you integrate them) if you want to install XP in a SATA box. Linux and freebsd just work.
Guess what will happen with "Windows 64 bits?". Tons of unsupported devices will never work on windows 64, companies are not going to waste money on redoing drivers for a dead product (specially lots of crappy devices made by crappy companies). And you know, you can run 32 bits programs but you can't run 32 bits drivers in a 64 bits kernel. Which is why the Windows world is going to take forever (give them 10 years as minimum) to switch to the 64 bit world, many people are going to continue using 32-bits Windows for lots of years.
And it's only worse for the dual-core CPUs which are coming at the end of Q2. Dual Core means that people will run SMP kernels, and it also means your drivers need to be SMP safe - its VERY easy to hang your machine with a non-SMP-safe driver. And everyone is going to run dual core machines - even the ones who want to run 32 bits windows. So, wait a few months, I predict we'll spend a few years laughing at Windows users just because of those reasons - lots of blue screens because of non-SMP-safe drivers and unsupported devices in windows 64 bits. Meawhile, in the linux world, everything will work (we'll get a few non-smp-safe-driver bug reports, but we fix those quite fast)
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)
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.
It so happens that 3% of my customers are using Linux on the desktop and I expect that number to double in the next year. So far, I have had very few issues getting hardware to work on Linux. A few things still are a problem (wireless LAN cards, but there is ndiswrapper for that). Hopefully thanks to Theo, we will see more WLAN support on Linux (out of the box) in the months to come.
I am not saying that there aren't rough spots. Take for example, my parents' Olympus camera which appears to the computer as a USB MSC device. Sure it is easy to get this to work as a normal user if you know the system, but if not, then how do you expect the user to edit the fstab to make the drive user-mountable? If course this is a distribution issue, not a Linux issue and could be resolved by modifying the installer.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
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.
Windows XP SP2, for example, doesn't supports SATA, you need 3rd party drivers in a floppy (unless you integrate them) if you want to install XP in a SATA box.
....So, wait a few months, I predict we'll spend a few years laughing at Windows users just because of those reasons - lots of blue screens because of non-SMP-safe drivers and unsupported devices in windows 64 bits. Meawhile, in the linux world, everything will work (we'll get a few non-smp-safe-driver bug reports, but we fix those quite fast)
Nope, SATA is supported just fine in XP - no need for floppies with drivers on them. Do you mean RAID?
Guess what will happen with "Windows 64 bits?". Tons of unsupported devices will never work on windows 64, companies are not going to waste money on redoing drivers for a dead product (specially lots of crappy devices made by crappy companies)
It's called market forces. There's a large number of customers who want their scanner/printer/whatever to work with Windows64. The manufacturers will provide the drivers. Simple. It worked when we moved from 16 to 32 bit OSs and it'll work now.
And it's only worse for the dual-core CPUs which are coming at the end of Q2....
And what's the difference between dual core and dual processor? Dual processor machines have been working with XP since XP was released. Why would all these drivers that work just now magically stop working on dual core machines?
Do you actually know what you're talking about? Didn't think so.
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.
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.
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.
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
Because you're not being strictly complimentary to linux. Around here, that's a troll.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
btw. do *not* buy HP printers. Their drivers suck. Their XP driver for their Photosmart network printers is 50MB - for a network printer??? And it has spyware... calls home every couple of minutes.
Their OSX driver is a mess - the printer supports Rendezvous but refuses to autoconfigure, so it's a frustrating process of having a printer automatically recognized by the OS which then doesn't work unless you install another 50MB of crap and manually set it up.
Hypertreading is NOT SMP.
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.
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.
Duh.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I have a suggestion that might make this conversation more fruitful: If someones is going to use language like The linux core is more stable and more reliable than the windows core. Period., that someone should back it up with some real statistics. Otherwise he/she should maybe say something like In my experience Linux core has been more stable and reliable, that way he/she wouldn't be talking out of his/her ass.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I don't have a DVD player; I want one to watch movies on my laptop.
The wireless card is a USR 5410. It "sees" it as a TI based card, and it will even see my home network when I do an "iwconfig", but it will not connect.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Oh, and you'll want the drivers :-)
Wikileaks, no DNS
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.
...Slashdot's Biggest Troll
www.microsoft.com/athome/sec urity/children/kidtalk.mspx Was This Information Useful?
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
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
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.
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.
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
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!
I haven't had a BSOD for years. The last time was when I tried to run some software that wasn't Win2K compatible and then had to go buy an equivalent - about 4 years ago.
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.
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.
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.