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The Next Leap for Linux
Nrbelex writes "The New York Times is taking a look at the state of Linux. "Linux has always had a reputation of being difficult to install and daunting to use. Most of the popular Windows and Macintosh programs cannot be used on it, and hand-holding — not that you get that much of it with Windows — is rare. But those reasons for rejecting Linux are disappearing." The article discusses major PC makers' newest offers and compares them to their Windows counterparts."
Difficult to install? That's only for Linux from Scratch. All other distros are easier than Windows to install. Have you tried to install Windows XP on a new machine? It's a pain in the ass... remember to have a floppy drive before trying it.
I've found this lovely project. It's called Wine-Doors, and it's a Package Manager for Windows programs under Linux. Like Apt-Get.
Seems to work pretty well, too.
http://www.wine-doors.org/wordpress/?page_id=5
Automatix IS NOT recommended for Ubuntu! It tends to screw things up preventing correct updates to the next version.
Codecs are now installed automagically whenever you attempt to open a media file for which you do not have the correct CODEC.
Automatix IS NOT recommended.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
You can actually do remote assistance invitations on Windows, or install VNC on her computer.. I'm no lover of Microsoft, but that's kind of a poor reason to choose Linux over Windows?
which is totally what she said
Because 8.04 will be a LTS release (Long Term Support), and it is expected that the Ubuntu developers will be conservative with the feature set they allow into 8.04. As such, if you have a feature that is somewhat experimental, you need to push it now (to get it tested and polished before 8.04), or wait until 8.10. At least, that's the theory. In practice, I am fairly certain quite a few experimental features will find their ways into 8.04 anyway.
Managing releases at fixed date and coordinating with upstream project release is probably the toughest challenge Ubuntu is facing. But on the other hand, this is exactly what gave it the edge in the distro war. So far, the execution have been pretty good and Ubuntu reap the benefits.
:wq
Also, if you think troubleshooting Windows is easy, you probably haven't done it much. Try installing WordPerfect Suite, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Crystal Reports, PowerTerm Pro, Lotus Notes, and PagePlus on 10 PCs. Crash half of them by cutting power. Then, troubleshoot the DLL hell and disk corruption that results.
Troubleshooting Windows may be easier for you than troubleshooting Linux. That's not an objective measurement. I'd say both have their strengths and weaknesses in troubleshooting. One of Linux's biggest strengths is that so many production server machines so rarely need troubleshooting in the first place. I've never had a Windows server run for three months without downtime, let alone a year or two.
Desktops of both kinds are more likely to need troubleshooting than servers, because you have more finger-poking happening. A well-administered Linux desktop is safe from lots of this, while most Windows desktops still have to be run as administrator to get real work done. Microsoft is making progress on the limited account front, though. On Linux at least you can remove and reinstall a particular package without trashing the libraries in use by other programs, and without rebooting to release any libraries still in use by other programs. Microsoft's registry is probably a really good idea for the OS, but making it a central
repository for every application is a mess.
You appear to be confused about the term encryption. The stream of data that makes up your VNC connection is not encrypted. A man in the middle could watch your entire VNC session, or even inject mouse & keyboard events or take over control of the remote machine. O.K: it's unlikely. But it isn't much more secure than a Telnet session.
The poster below has the right idea: tunnel the VNC session over SSH (which adds the needed encryption) and then only allow the VNC server to accept connections from the local IP address (I.e. from the SSH server on the same machine).