Slashdot Mirror
Did the Netbook Improve Windows 7's Performance?
Arnie87 writes "One Microsoft Way has an interesting article suggesting that the reason Microsoft is focusing so much on speed with Windows 7 is the whopping sales of netbooks. The article concludes by saying: 'If you plan on adopting Windows 7, you have the netbook to be thankful for, because Vista's successor would be a very different beast if Microsoft had less motivation to pursue performance.'"
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.
Vista 'helpfully' virtualizes file access and this breaks a lot of such apps.
And that'll work fine in Vista, because that's not Program Files. Like in Linux, there are a few privileged, protected folders, and pretty much everything else, including mountable r/w media like flash drives, is essentially an extension of one's home directory. (Unless you do something fancy with the permissions, of course.)
/usr/local/* is for you stuff you've installed manually. /usr/bin is a perfectly sensible place for a package manager to put executables it installs. The package manager shouldn't fuck with anything in /usr/local.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Hi,
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
This is simply not possible to realistically do on a linux distribution because there are usually multiple options. I admit a description field below the application would be nice.
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
There are quite a few applications that allow you to do this. Use google.
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.
Learn how a linux file system works and learn how bash processes commands. The space character is a special character in the linux command line for good reason.
To me your argument is the same thing if you were at the command prompt in Windows command prompt sitting at:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserName>
and typed
> cd Windows.
Expecting it to magically figure out you want C:\Windows.
It should know what I want right? WRONG. It doesn't and for this feature to even work it would have to index the entire file system.
Solution: Learn how file paths really work.
These are all valid /etc/X11
cd
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc
cd X11
Simple solution for a beginner: Always use absolute paths until you understand relative paths.
Alternative: Use a different shell, there are plenty of options.
4) Create an alias if you find yourself using the command often.
alias editxorg="sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf"
(See Bash Aliases for further details)
5) Tab completion plus using all lower case for file names make this trivial. I find it much faster to find things than navigating my media in explorer.
6) A shortcut on linux isn't exactly the same thing as a shortcut on windows. It probably created a symlink which makes the folder appear to be actually on your desktop to most programs. This is by design.
Create a launcher that runs your file-manager with that particular path if you want to mimic windows shortcuts
7) This is linux and not windows. Bash is much more powerful than the pitiful shell windows provides. Learn to escape spaces, avoid spaces in file names, use tab completion, or enclose spaces in quotes.
8) Traditionally extensions have no meaning in the unix world... this is by design.
9) Not understanding permissions is why you are running into these problems. Probably because you tend to resort to running things with root privileges instead of figuring out why the permissions are incorrect.
It takes a while to understand but once you've got it you'll wonder why you thought it was hard.
I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
File that as a bug with Ubuntu. RH/Fedora are starting to do what you describe, at least for typical desktop user apps, like the file browser, web browser, email, text editor and so on.
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
It's not safe to run GUI applications as root. If you insist, and your distro vendor agrees, then they may configure it (using PAM) to use consolehelper (part of the usermode package) to ask for the root password when you run it.
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal. These fail: cd etc/X11/ cd etc/X11
To be expected, unless your Current Working Directory (CWD) is the root of the filesystem, known as /, or you have a duplication etc/X11 hierarchy under your CWD. The trailing / on the first example is redundant, BTW.
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc/X11
Both those should be fine. Did you test before posting?
cd etc cd /X11
cd etc
cd X11
First pair will try to change to etc in the CWD (and fail), then try to go to X11 in the root (and fail). Second will try to go to etc in the CWD (and fail), then go to X11 in the CWD (and fail).
This doesn't: cd /etc
cd X11
Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...
It's impossible to be intuitive when they mean entirely different things. Would you expect 'CD D:\SYSTEM32' to Do The Right Thing on Windows when Windows is installed on C: and SYSTEM32 is inside the WINDOWS directory? Same deal. If it helps, think of C:\ being roughly equivalent the root of the filesystem (i.e. /). It kinda breaks down because UNIX doesn't have drive letters, and actually Windows uses the backslash in the same way as UNIX uses the slash; note how you can use 'CD \' to go to the root of the current drive.
4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.
In addition to the earlier explanations, it's really not safe to let just any old user have write access to system config files by default. At best, they might mess them up, at worst, they may make them do bad things (install spyware, delete their home directory) to other users. If you wish, if you're the owner of the file (i.e. root in the case of xorg.conf), you can loosen the permissions on specific files using chmod.
5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.
You know about tab completion in the shell, right? Hit tab on a partial file or directory name, and it'll complete as best it can. If there are multiple matches, it'll beep. Hit tab again, and it'll show them.
6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and cop