Slashdot Mirror
Where Does Linux Go From Here?
With the success that Linux is currently enjoying Linux.com (also owned by SourceForge, Inc) asks the question, where do we go from here? With such a high level of success and greater corporate participation (on both the consumer and provider fronts) will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over? "Linux is surrounded by proprietary IT firms. Some of them view Linux as a profit maker, others as a threat to their profits. Both sides represent a challenge for Linux in holding to its ideals of freedom and openess. The first large IT firm to really grok Linux was IBM. It has a long and mutually beneficial association with Linux, Apache, and other FOSS projects. The company has learned the language and the mores of the FOSS world, and has made significant code contributions as part of those projects along the way."
Broadcom:
Proprietary driver manager pops up, asks you if you want to install the driver and d/l the firmware, auto installs it and network manager pops up to connect. Easier than in windoze.
ALSA/OSS:
These days the only time you'd ever need to mess with these settings is to
a) record something using either USB or built in mic's. Record something in windows without messing with a control panel.
b) use it with an app installed through wine, and even then not so often.
My Babylon
The Linux clipboard is a perfectly conventional clipboard although it has some minor differences at the nuts and bolts level. (Unlike Windows and Mac, it doesn't move any data until a Paste is requested). Clipboards are an application level entity not an OS thing. All the OS does is allow the destination to talk to the source and vice versa. Unix in general and Linux in particular allow non-text objects to be moved via the clipboard just as easily as they do text objects. But the applications need to support that. Some do. Some Don't. Same is true for Windows.
You, can, for example, use the clipboard to copy images from a web site viewed in Konqueror to Kword. You can't copy the same image from the same web site viewed in Firefox, but that's because Firefox doesn't support it, not because Linux doesn't.
The only clipboard thing that is actually different in Linux is that the text mode clipboard for tty consoles is a different clipboard than the GUI clipboard (so that it can work if the GUI is dead or not started). But if you run a console application in a terminal program under the GUI, it uses the GUI clipboard so you can move text to and from console applications if you need to.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Easy.
Lunix is a unix-like OS for the C-64. There's probably about 15 or 20 people worldwide who use it.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Klipper completely obliterates this problem. It's native to KDE (and installed by default in Kubuntu) but apparently will run happily in GNOME, or you can check out Glipper. Problem solved.