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Free Upgrade From XP Home to XP Pro Lite
Novus writes "The Register reports that many of the features of Windows XP Pro, such as Remote Desktop and user management, can be enabled in Windows XP Home simply by changing two bytes in an installation data file. Another explanation can be found here."
(Yes, this is offtopic, and its not meant as a troll.)
/etc (WHY?!), and the modules it WILL load are in some wacky directory that includes the specific version of the kernel you're running. Fun stuff. ;)
/usr/local by default, and configs/startup scripts/etc for them go into /usr/local/etc/ and /usr/local/share/ with startups going into /usr/local/etc/rc.d/.sh. One of the nice things about this is that its VERY hard to accidentally 'klobber' the base system. Since its all in /usr, and NO packages go there without your explicit say-so.
You really should try FreeBSD. I'm sure you'll love it. I'll even go through pains to tackle each of your problems with linux (most of which are valid even if you're not technical enough to be verbose or 'technically correct'):
1) The ports tree takes care of this automagically. If you don't want to install from source, the built-in-by-default option is to do pkg_add -r, and it'll go and fetch EVERYTHING and install it. You don't do anything at all. The other option is to install portupgrade, which will install some nice port/package utilities with actual SENSIBLE names like portinstall, pkg_add, etc.. My biggest problem in linux is everyone hacks their own damned management system, and every freakin' tool to use it is some convoluted inside joke. yum? what the hell? apt-get? C'mon. How about pkg_install or package_install or packageinstall? There ya go. That's the beginning of the BSD mentality.
2) Most BSD's have both from-source and from-binary options for everything, and make it exceedingly clear how to use either. And they BOTH work well. (As well as any system maintaining 20k+ utilities, and their recursive dependancies)
3) This is actually probably more of a complaint as to how your "distro" sets up X by default.
4) Almost the same here, but it really helps to not completely bork your kernel to the point where everyone has to re-write drivers for it every couple years from almost scratch. Most BSD's support modular device drivers and loading them on the fly. Linux does too, but good luck finding it. For example, in Gentoo there's 10 directories/files for 'modules' in
5) I agree, this is more of an KDE/GNOME thing in general, but it seems to be the whole mentality of the GNU and Linux OSS. If you don't like something, just fork it and hope everyone follows suit. But if they don't.. Well, you get 3542342 slightly different versions that sortof work together. Kinda.
6) Absolutely. I think your mindset also affects how easily you can read one groups' manpages over another's though. I can read FreeBSD manpages easily and understand what they're saying, but GPL'd software/Linux ones? Ha. Just a general idea.. Although, FreeBSD DOES have a nice user-friendly handbook + multiple exceedingly active ML's/forums/etc for newbies to get information quickly and easily.
7) This is where I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY HATE LINUX!!! Linux is just the kernel, and EVERYTHING ELSE is addon software. Not so with BSD. The kernel + userland is the base software, and ports/packages are the addon software. This is a very important distinction, as the behavior of installing and configuring apps is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Most things in BSDland go into
8) I think most FreeBSD users, while zealotous, aren't crazed, rabid fanatics. Most of us subscribe to 'the right tool for the right job', which allows us to use anything, not just things that 'are compatible with license X' just because Mr. Bearded Crazyman said so. Most of us run heterogeneous network envronments. I personally use about 5 different OSes (including a linux box, ironically) where I work.
9) Same as #6, but there is ALOT of documentation on EVERYTHING. Why? Because EVERYTHING is thought-out and communally developed. Look into any of the developer ML's, and you'll see what I'm talking about. NOONE decides they're going to just patch som
1) That might be right in theory, but from a users point of view everything in windows installs with a double click, worst case scenario is that the user has to unzip a zip file, but even that works with a double click. Linux is far far away from such easy installation and no, apt-get doesn't count, since that doesn't work with third party software, but only with official Debian.
DLL Hell is for most part a developers problem, seldomly a user has to deal with it, Dependency Hell on the other side bites you with almost every piece of software under Linux.
2) Even so the distros are huge, they still often lack quite a few more or less important packages, especially when it comes to new stuff.
3) If you are lucky Alt-Tab works, if you are unlucky it doesn't, while it doesn't work in 100% of the cases in windows either, the chance of success is *far* greater.
4) Good if ATI card works for you, it however doesn't for lots of other people, 3D acceleration is still not something that 'just works' in Linux and probally wont be for a while.
7) There are graphical tools for many things, but most of them simply suck, instead of parsing the config file they just overwrite it with their own version and similar fun. While the Windows registry has a ton of problem, it at least provides a consistent way to store config values and avoids such a mess.
I still choose Linux over Windows any day, but there are quite a few things in Linux that don't really make it all that newbie friendly and Dependency Hell, unescapable fullscreen and such are really something every Linux user will bump into sooner or later and no, switching the distro won't help, since for each problem you solve with a distro change you get dozens of new ones. Linux biggest problem is that there is no perfect distro around, plenty of distros solve plenty of problems very well, but none solves all together.