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Village Voice on Gnome GUI/Linux
Jen Matson writes "Village Voice writer Austin Bunn examines the Gnome GUI, Linux, and (in a sidebar) his own experience trying to install Linux on his IBM laptop computer.
"
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I wish the writer had given greater details as to what went wrong with the laptop install. Was it mainly the pcmcia drivers? Does RH 5.2 include these?
Can't help feeling (as I'm sure others must) that "...if *I* was there, that sucker'd be up and running!"
**>>BELCH
I think his problem was that he couldn't get the cd-rom drive to install. You know how when you install linux off a cdrom often you have to create a special boot disk which has the cddrive image on it. Many laptop cdroms work on very strange standards, often which it is difficult to find the right prgrams for, personally I would suggest to him that he copy all the cdrom files into a fat16 then install from a floppydrive/harddrive combination.. instructions for that should be included in the redhat manual
Why do leftists always want to see
anyone's act of generosity or voluntary
cooperation as a validation of
socialist thought?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Jerry Pournell of Byte.com had a similar problem and fixed it by using DOS fdisk to set partition 1 active... see www.byte.com/columns/chaosmanor/1999/030199a.html
I eventually succeeded getting my linux install to work, but it took about a week and several restarts. I was working on a dell dimensions pentium ii at 300 Mhz.
The first issue was partitioning the hard drive. I used partition magic and made linux partitions. However, RHL 5.2 did not want to recognize these partitions, so I deleted them. I could then repartition using disk druid.
Next, I could not get X windows to work. The Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro that came with my computer was not supported by XFree86. Attempting to run in VGA mode caused the install to hang. I purchased the Xi Graphics driver, but I then had problems with mixing both XFree86 stuff and XiGraphics stuff (due in part to my own maladroitness). Not knowing how to correct this situation fully, I simply reinstalled everything. That worked. I could run X-windows. Other headaches followed with X-windows but having gotten the hang of rpm and configuration files, I never had to do a complete reinstall to fix them.
Next came ppp. That by itself was a one week trial by fire. I was trying to do it over a 3Com external isdn modem that uses synchronous ppp. The computer is worthless to me without net access. I discovered the rather simple solution was to get the modem to do synchronous/asynchronous translation. One week to discover this 30 second solution.
With some perspective on all of this, I realize that one of the issues is the heterogenous and complex nature of the intel platform. Microsoft has done a reasonably good job of forcing manufacturers to produce drivers, but even they have problems. The other thing is the OEM install. They face these problems with windows but solve them before you see them.
Posted by stodge:
That article should please the Linux + Gnome zealots. I'm all for Linux, KDE and Gnome, but the wording of the article was too strong for my pathetic constitution. I had to stop reading halfway down... Saboteur? Bomb? Detonation? Tyranny? Yes tyranny is probably the right word to use, but don't make the Linux world out to be full of religious type nuts....
"Are you the Linux Users Group?
Fuck off, we're a group of Linux users..."
His pal could have shared a cdrom drive on another machine via NFS and installed that way. I got SuSE 5.2 onto an old Compaq notebook that way without a hitch. I *did* have to invest in a pcmcia card (which I wanted anyways) and tweak a database (?) file (i forget the name) with a couple of details regarding the new card (AmbiCom). SuSE 5.3+ now covers this card BTW...
PLIP also works well if you don't have a pcmcia card.
Granted, tho', no new user could be expected to figure this stuff out on the fly.
**>>BELCH
I've got a TP755cx at work, and the SCSI interface card that IBM uses (Future Domain 850?) has been munged by IBM to get things like the serial and parallel port on it. That requires a change in the SCSI bios which breaks the standard drivers.
So to install linux on one of these, you have to load the CD onto the hard drive (and if you're using RH5.2, get the updated boot & supp images) and install it from there.
As for Gnome, the version that comes with the CD requires it to be installed from the CD. I played around with the script with no luck.
I'm not familar with the 560E, but I imagine that it will have the same problems as the 7xx (Dock I) series.
John Waalkes
jwaalkes@edge.net
When I was trying to install a laptop, (P90 no cd rom drive) the only way I could install Redhat was to install using NFS. It worked like a charm, but it does require you to have a machine running a copy of Linux somewhere. I ended up installing it on an old 486 setting up NFS, and mounting the cd rom. Its was that easy.
I also had problems with Gnome, (well documented on the gnome-listserve) and I found it impossible to run/configure. So I've loaded up KDE and all is fine. I realize that one day I'll switch to gnome, but until its more stable for a complete newbie, I'm staying with KDE.
See the PLIP howto, or try the SuSE boot disk, which will pretty much take you by the hand.
**>>BELCH
Fuck those New York writers; they're so
..."
provincial!!
He says "... if I can't get the
revolution mounted on my D:/ drive, there's
little hope for de Icaza's "kids" and
"secretaries,"
For a commie, what makes him think he's so
superior to "kids" and "secreataries". Too
proletarian for him ??? VV by-lines will do
strange things to English majors.
Every time I see another test drive article where the author tried to install Linux on a laptop, I cringe.
The sad fact is that laptops are actually semi-custom Intel boxes. Many have hardware that is so different than standards that the OEMs must provide semi-custom versions of Win95 to install on them. Anyone trying to install an off-the-shelf copy of Win95 on these laptops will have a similar experiance to the author of this story did with Linux.
The real problem is one of expectation. People think that the laptops are "just another intel system" when they are not. The only solution I can see in pre-installed Linux.
Even though Linux has a reputation of being hard to install, most of the people writing these articles probably could not install Windows either, so they buy systems pre-installed and hopw the hard disk does not crash.
I have this problem whenever I upgrade on a box that uses/used PartitionMagic 3.x; some (and sometimes all) of my ext2 partitions get labeled as "Amoeba" (IIRC), and if I'm not wary (like when I upgraded to RH5.2), Bad Things® will happen. If you use the fdisk (it that it?) program from the boot disk - mine was a CheapBytes CD, but I guess the real RH5.2 has it too - you can manually tell the install program that your ext2 partitions really are ext2.
--
--
=8^
a while ago i bougth a used laptop and installed linux there. the 486/50, 8M RAM, 250M disk had not CD rom and i did not have a pcmcia network card for it then.. i inserted the suse bootdisk connected it to my workstation with a laplink cable and hat linux up and running without any troubles.. even the soundcard works perfect. what i would be interested: just in case: how would i have installed windoze 95 or NT or something without a CD rom..oh NT would not even work with 8M.. maybe mister village voice could explain to me how i would have installed it there.. not that i would want to install 95 i am happy with the linux there.. in the meantime i have a pcmicia ethernet card and it is very useful as a portable network tracer.. creating TeX documents, and light development work when i am away..
It seemed obvious to me... it looked like he was trying to mount the cd as /dev/hda...
The Thinkpad 560 doesn't have a built-in CD, so that prolly stymied him a bit. The IBM solution is to use their @*()# PCMCIA interface..crap-o. I just copy the CD to HD via the network (easy since this guy kept Win95 on it) That's all.
Everything else about this install is a piece of cake & should take of itself. Sucks to be him.
I installed RedHat 5.1 on a ThinkPad 600. I never was able to get it to recognize the CD. Eventually, RedHat released an updated floppy image that recognized my PCMCIA ethernet card, and I did an install via ftp. Once installed, however, I never had a problem mounting CDs.
I've found that, in general, the boot and aux floppies for RedHat have been pretty hit-and-miss when it comes to ThinkPads. It's always best to get the latest and greatest floppy images from RedHat.
the proof is in the pudding.
You are small - you will be assimilated into the socialist collective.
Why else? I can find fault with both the left and the right since they are both extremes.
Left : Look! Gnome is great! it throws it back at the da man's face! It's socialist.
Right : Look! Gnome is great! I can package this into my own distribution and ship it all over for money!
Left : You Fascist Whore! You can't control our movement!
Right : Well, there's this loophole in the GPL...
Me, well i'm discordian and I just take the best of both worlds. Vegetarianism + Hatred of gov't comes from both sides, ya know.
Lowmag.net
I'll have to try that. I didn't mean to infere that the parallel port was a problem, it was just where IBM chose to put it. And in their defense, its not like they had alot of room to work with...
:) I may try it with my desktop monitor, but linux is still a no-no where I work...
:)
And I even have to give IBM's online support high marks, they didn't know linux (about a year ago), but they were trying. I got it installed via the hard drive method, but the LCD is only 640x480 and I'm an X sort of guy
But we're growing, there's about 6 or 7 of us who use it, do you think that's enough for a LUG?
I've got S.u.S.E. 6.0 & Mandrake 5.3 coming in any day, I'll have to give PLIP a try.
John Waalkes
jwaalkes@edge.net
Socialism-- A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a complete reconstruction of society, with a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor.
." This does pose some interesting psychological questions, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to point out elements of socialism in a close community working together without pay for a common cause.
--Webster
Perhaps your question should be worded as "why do leftists always view anyone's act of generosity. . .
Listen up baby!
The more LINUX gets to be popular (didn't you wish that like three years ago?) the more OTHER people will press their views of the computer world or world in general on the OS. Its not bad. Or at least its not any more silly than LINUX users who are rabid about it and yet don't understand its merely a clone OS.
Expect to see more of this...just wait til Jerry Falwell gets a hold of it.
Nothing against GNOME or anything, but, uhm, it isn't quite ready for prime time yet.
uselinux@email.com
Someone name another 1.0 release of a major GNU project that is as unstable and un-installable as Gnome.
The only reason more people don't complain about Gnome than the many that I see is because it is nearly un-installable on 95% of the Linux machines out there.
InfoWorld had a forum on Gnome and very few people posted simply because Gnome is a giant un-installable piece of dooky pie.
Apple is being ME TOO!! I jumped through there hoops to get the code only to find just that... a collection of SRC, with not one document.. Not even a list of suported hardware. It apears you can't run the OS as they don't have drivers available (the driver module has no link).
"That's because the long-term future for private companies that have amassed their millions on proprietary code is one of diminishing returns."
Christ . . . this is just cant; exciting promise makes sentimental 'facts'. GNU is just as inevitable as Richard Stallman (one in a few million). My luck was his labor.
Your sig made my day alright.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm responsible for setting up all of our company's computer equipment, and every time the boss decides he wants to buy a different brand of laptop I just cringe. Most vendors provide drivers for Win95, but often getting them and making them work is a kind of religious experience.
I think before a mass-media computer "expert" tries to install Linux on a laptop, they ought to install Win9x/NT FIRST and include that in their synopsis. I would that that in many instances the NT/Win95 install would be more difficult than the RH install.
If free software isn't a case of workers owning the means of production, I guess I don't know what is. The success of Linux and other free software is libertarian socialism at work, though many of the people involved do not know that.
Kropotkin beats Marx! Kropotkin beats Rand! Go Kropotkin! Go go go! Wooo-hooo!
http://www.anarchy.org
MASON
ROCKS
It's not for you idiots to compile and install from source yourself, wait until it is included in distributions with all the extra libs that it depends on. How many of you compile themselves such programs as XFree, egcs or glibc? If it's difficult to compile does not mean that it is bad.
I giggled to myself to see
http://www.anarchy.org
I thought the definition of anarchy was the absence of an organization.
I understand that the purest form of the definition may diverge from mine, but then it wouldn't have made be giggle.
RH 5.2 on a 600 was simplicity itself, no tricks & it worked as advertised, dual-booting 95 & all that. Now all the engineers here that have Suns bolted to their desks are frolicking in Linux land with their Stinkpads, and life is good. Only sore point is the DSP-modem built into the 600. Oh well, thats what PCMCIA slots are for.
to the Popular Group of Linux Users?
Damn. I've installed Linux on my Winbook 486dx4/100 twice (slackware 3.0 and RH5.0) and in neither case did I have that much trouble. The Mediavision PCMCIA SCSI card I bought surplus for $29.95 turned out to be the "old style" New Media Bus Toaster (lucky me) and I even found the right settings for the X display driver. (I still have the .Xconfig in case you had trouble with this). Ultimately, though, I found Linux + X (fvwm) slower than os/2 v4.
Maybe KDE or Gnome will finally assist with the thing I found most frustrating about Linux - the profusion of configuration files. I never had the patience to find and set all these things. Hell, I don't have the patience for *golf*.
The success of Linux and other free software is libertarian socialism at work, though many of the people involved do not know that.
'Tis a shame 'libertarian socialism' is impossible- a contradiction in terms. In a socialist society, there are no private corporations. One of the only firm tenets of libertarianism is the non-coercion principle, which completely rejects the idea that people should be forced into something. Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.
Careful what you say. (And remember, no moolah, no Slashdot.)
-Qnar-
I tried this on an 8 meg 486 laptop... I inserted the supplemental disk, and it soon freaked out, couldn't get past fdisk. The consensus seems to be that more memory would help, but that's not an option. I tried RH5.1 and RH5.2, both failed. What did you use?
Thanks!
sandeen@io.com
Do a search on DejaNews for bunn@echonyc.com in the *linux* newsgroups - sounds like he had problems getting it to recognize an external CDRom. So he copied it to his hard drive for a HD install... and it couldn't find it. I seem to remember there were some issues with this - anyone remember?
SPLITTERS!
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
I had one og those horried experience of installing lunix. Tried for 2-weeks..either this is not there..that is not supported..not reconized..clashes....poof. I have installed more solaris than lunix sucessfully....Hey guys I bet as long as packing(installing) is good , sure the product is bad(windows), any thing sells in hhis world. Get it right. EACH LUNIX SUPPORTER COMPANY IS ADDING TO THE CONFUSION ALREADY EXISTING $%#^%
The Gnome 1.0 release should be easier to install than it is.
For all the shortcomings that KDE has, they did their installation process the right way. I was up and running on the first pass with no pain at all. I would even give my Grandmother a 50/50 chance of getting through it.
(troll)
/. blunted my angle brackets! ;)
Until we can use socialist software to
buy food and pay mortgages, I won't
be too afraid. Sorry 'bout that comrade.
(or would that be GNUrade?)
(/troll)
--Hey Rob!
No. A stable release should be installable by normal people.
Otherwise they should have labeled it an alpha or beta version.
"Apparently, this, ah, 'LINUX,' has a great number of, ah, hidden messages. 'Gnome' is a homosexual reference, and appparently there are other, ah, messages that promote drug use and fornication. Mr. Torvalds should be, ah, strung up and burned for this, ah, flagrant communistic effort to corrupt our youth."
Then Pat Robertson would lead a prayer to burn the evil Linux spawn.
Personally, I'd rather have some commie pinko from the Village Voice on our side. Anyone know if Rage Against the Machine use it?
Zagmar
Are you sure that 95% can't install it. This guy didn't have any big problems, which goes for lot's of people. Really, some people can just install it with rpm -Uvh * (not me though).
Comments directly proportional to quality? Gnome's release got well over 1000 comments here (mostly flames):
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
I think the previous poster meant libertarian socialism as more in civil libertarian, not economic libertarian as in the american libertarian (wacko nutcase) party. there are still other definitions of libertarianism. ask a european what libertarian means to him and you'll get a completely different response from what it means to an american, or african, or asian, etc. get the picture?
Actually, the textbook definitions I've seen basically have socialism as a society where the state owns and/or controls the means of production.
Frankly, I'm unconvinced that this is the case with open source software, or that it's a desireable way of doing things. And it's the way most socialist experiments turned out so far.
Perhaps a more complicated way of putting it would be thusly: what did they call generosity before the late 18th/early 19th century, when socialist philosophers first sprang up?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Well... I dunno about you... but my home computer is a standalone... no network in sight.
About the most I would have gone to would be copying it (the CD) onto a FAT16 partition, then installing from there.
That is reasonable. NFS or PLIP (when there is no network) is not. Not for someone who's just playing around for an article, and doesn't necessarily have a passion for Linux.
Nowadays, if I couldn't get it to install, I might go to such measures. But when I was installing Linux for the first time, I sure as hell wouldn't have.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
awk = american wacko kommunists
xterm = a revisionist conspiracy to promote malcolm x in schools and put fear into the hearts of good, hard-working white people
xtetris = radical malcolm x supporters allied with former soviets to instill communism in our nation's christian youth
kde = self-explanatory. you tell me what the k stands for (obviously kommunism)
AfterStep = a homosexual rite of passage, a strange dance where homosexual deviants attract young christian boys into their sodomistic behavorial patterns
WindowMaker = that dance Madonna did that she learned from the New York homosexual community in that "Vogue" video
We must stop Linux! It's Kommunism and it's seeping into our pure bodily fluids!
Must be nice to be you... I would suggest that you offer to help the poor guy, but you'd probably just insult him. "Sucks to be him" - hey, I just love this Linux Community. >:/
Come on... as more people find out about Linux, there are going to be a lot of confused people out there. Take the time to patiently answer a few questions a week on comp.os.linux.setup... it's good for the soul.
I sent him a letter walking him through it, so hopefully he'll quickly move on to his next question, and perhaps someone will be there to answer it.
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.
From what I gather, the idea of "workers owning the means of production" does not preclude business, and doesn't necessarily have to involve government, other than, say, as a regulatory body, for example.
Dos centavos. Spend it wisely.
--
--
=8^
...can you back them up? How is it "not installable?" Yes, you do need a lot of supporting libraries, but that does not make it uninstallable. Did you have all the necessary packages installed, and it *still* wouldn't compile?
I'll agree that it wasn't as nice a release as I'd hoped for, but saying that only 5% of people who tried to install it were successful... that's ludicrous.
cause us dicordians are geting Sirius!
"The first issue was partitioning the hard drive. I used partition magic and made linux partitions. However, RHL 5.2 did not want to recognize these partitions, so I deleted them."
That's odd I've used PM to create/resize ext2 partitions before and after installs of RH 5.2. Works beautifully. I use it to slowly claim space for Linux on my Win98 drive. Just yesterday I used it to repartition an existing Linux disk to keep a data partition and reformat the rest for a clean install of RH5.2.
-tak
I thought the "revolution mounted on my D:/ drive" line was good.
It's the Village Voice, what did you expect? The fact that linux is in there at all is rather astonoshing.
i don't know why other people don't get gnome, but i know it was because i couldn't figure out what's wrong with my enlightenment til 0.15- a few days ago.
It would be fair if the article mentioned that the author could not have installed _vanilla_ NT or WIN9x on that laptop.
Jeery Springer Special "I can't stand your distribution"? that will be the day linux makes it.
I've seen windows installations where DOS fdisk didn't even work. Thanks to Tom's rootboot I was able to boot into linux and use fdisk there to partition the drive so that DOS could do something.
This allowed me to get around such things as the chicken and egg problem with the CD (non-bootable) where you need the drivers to mount the CD but they're on the CD, the 500MB IDE limit (yes, an old machine), and old linux partitions that wouldn't go away (I would NEVER remove a linux partition to put DOS in its place, but this was for a friend and even after the speach I gave her, she still wanted to do it).
The trouble is, most PC hardware is proprietary and incompatible, which is why people say things like 'never install linux alone'. This is foolishness- I installed linux alone on my Powermac and there were issues but none of them were showstoppers. LINUX IS NOT THAT HARD. It's PCs which are so hard. Linux is not that hard at all, I swear it. These reporters ought to try installing it on something like an old PCI powermac, or running LinuxPPC Live (if you want their experience to be of KDE only).
*grin* now that I've stirred up the hornet's nest.... *grin* *grin* Seriously. LINUX IS NOT THAT HARD. PCs are just so incompatible, klugey, and deeply proprietary that most people have problems installing Linux on them, and need extensive resources to cope. Give the reporters NetWinders if you don't want them to be touching Macintoshes, but at all costs liberate Linux from the treacherous clutches of the PC! Linux is, and needs to be, a lot more than that pile of archaic kluge.
We keep seeing articles on wizzy cases- somebody or lots of people ought to start putting together wild handcrafted linux boxen with unusual designs, quick, while the hype is big. It'd be a great way to separate Linux from the PC, and now is the time to strike. What's out there as far as circuit designers? Is it possible to buy many known-standards-compliant peripherals like keyboards and drives (not necessarily the cheapest ones!) and design a special mobo with a StrongARM chip on it or something, or several PPCs for a high-powered machine, or an Alpha or quad alpha or something? I keep returning to the NetWinder- what a great form factor, what a great energy consumption, can we have more Linux computers with a design like that?
It's because they believe that if some people can be generous,
then we can all be generous, resulting in a society where
everybody can happily share everything.
But most people cannot be generous all the time,
and it's a good thing too. Imagine if we all tried to be like
Mother Theresa, wondering the streets trying to feed the
poor. Soon we'd ALL be poor.
--
--
=8^
If Microsoft, Apple, or IBM includes a driver with their operating systems, it probably will work out of the box.
If Linux includes a driver in the kernal or in a distribution, it might work, it might not.
Fortunately, there are many workarounds, but in my experience (with RedHat), if the driver craps out, you're not going to get very far.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
--Hey Rob! /. blunted my angle brackets! ;)
Use < and > to produce < and >.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
If you follow the instructions for installation then it really isn't installable. .RPM's and it does not work. You have to be able to figure out that you need to do a --nodeps for it to install.
I used the
...and then it breaks your other apps which relied on the old libraries.
Installable yes, but considering GNOME is designed to make Linux more user-friendly for Joe Average User, GNOME 1.0 is not ready.
It's rock solid.
:(
It's also based on CORBA, and has applications like StarOffice that use it.
The UI toolkit - Qt - is rock solid and documented up the wazoo (there's even an O'Reilly Qt book already released in Germany).
It's got themes:
http://www.kde.org/kscreenshots.html
GNOME seems sexy when you see all the themed screenshots, but when you realize you can customize KDE the same amount, then start looking below the surface...
Right now GNOME is a sham. I've already seen press reviews of GNOME comparing it's crashes to Window's blue-screen-of-death... It'll be a real shame if Linux gets written off as being as buggy as Windows because of the politically motivated "1.0" release
Granted it took me three attempts (1st doing the bulk 'rpm -Uvh' (which I had to modify by throwing in --force and --nodeps...ack) suggested on the GNOME website..nothing but coredumps and grief, 2nd trying to compile the whole damn thing from tarballs...too many compilation errors that I couldn't bother to chase down, and 3rd going back to the rpms and installing them in a logical order and respecting dependencies and installing E0.15.2...success!), but I must say that GNOME IS WORTH THE TROUBLE TO INSTALL.
I really like the fact that it and Enlightenment are *highly* configurable; this allows me to create an environment that's highly tuned to my preferences. In comparison, I always found KDE to be a bit rigid and limited in terms of configurability.
Anyway, I was right on the edge of abandoning GNOME forever, but I gave it that one last attempt and now I wouldn't use anything else for a Linux desktop.
But they really do have to get their act together wrt bundling it in a saner installation package/script, that's for sure!!
"I think it is possible to construct a relatively crude, but not altogether trivial, apparatus for this purpose." - No
Mine is a Micron desktop, where some Linux Native partitions were converted to "Amoeba".
In my case I suspect that an OEM installed utility had a role in changing the formatting type. [Or do you have S.M.A.R.T. utility on your desktop.]
By the way, I believe it's PM version 4 that can format ext2 partitions.
I really have had no problems with my partitions being recognized. However, I may do things to screwup the whole system, e.g. by unknowingly substituting a user's password for root when I was learning to add users. Nonetheless, these were my errors! Moreover, I have installed both RH 5.0 and 5.2 - and it's getting better, but new problems arise as the last set are solved.
I just got around to deleting Windows from my primary computer (yeah, I hafta change my users.pl stuff) a coupla weeks ago.
Installed RedHat 5.2 on it -- no problem.
Got PPP working -- no problem.
Upgraded kernel to 2.2.2 -- no problem.
DL'ed GNOME rpms.
rpm -Uvh GN<tab><enter> -- oops. Missing a lib.
DL the lib from wherever.
rpm -Uvh lib<tab><enter>
rpm -Uvh GN<tab><enter> -- no problem.
Reconfigured the default WM to WindowMaker -- no problem.
And this from someone whose prior experience with Linux amounted to a couple of hours at max.
Now I do have to admit that when I tried to upgrade WMaker from 0.20.1 (the default with RH5.2) to 0.50, I ran into all sorts of problems. It wanted libungif4, whereas GNOME (and WMaker 0.20) was using libungif3, and so a whole buncha things conflicted, and I ended up going back to WMaker 0.20.
But seriously... that was the only problem I had that was related to GNOME at all. And you could definitely call me a new Linux user. And yes, I was doing this entirely on my own. It hasn't crashed since (except for that power outage a week or so ago.)
Stable and straightforward to set up.
*shrug*
Mebbe I'm just lucky...
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I think the previous poster meant libertarian socialism as more in civil libertarian, not economic libertarian as in the american libertarian (wacko nutcase) party. there are still other definitions of libertarianism. ask a european what libertarian means to him and you'll get a completely different response from what it means to an american, or african, or asian, etc. get the picture?
/. put it right:
Actually someone right here on
~"The right thinks the Libertarians are too leftwing,
The left thinks the Libertarians are too right wing"~
well that's approximate..
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law...
Lowmag.net
I dunno. Why do conservatives always want to see acts of generosity and voluntary cooperation as "leftist"?
... they "really" just like controlling others and will come up with any excuse to do it.
Certain radio blowhards like to point out every example of something liberal as an attempt to control others. Ignore the stated purpose
But then, he just does it because it generates his favorite kind of caller: the *sputtering* liberal.
I don't sputter, sorry.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
You're forgetting the "invisible hand" of the market economy. People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum. I minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Now I don't know what you mean by "labor laws" -- If you are talking about kids in factories, all get paid less because there are more workers in general. But keep in mind that minimum wage is just a price floor by which the government people "happy"
Lowmag.net
I had no problem compiling on Linux and I havent had a crash in the actual stable stuff (core, libs, some apps. gmc is not marked 'stable'.). HP-UX was a bit trickier, and Solaris wasnt that easy either, but a bit of fixing got those working too.
Wait for the distributions to include it if you're having problems with it. They are, after all, there for people who dont want to go through the bother of figuring out how to install things.
The supplementary disk image on the RedHat CD is bad. You have to d/l the new one.
-tak
Yeah, you can mount Linux on you D:\ drive;
but the revolution can only be mounted on
the C:\ drive
I've been dying to try Linux (I'll probably be purchasing Mandrake 5.3, but I'm waiting to see if their "merger" with BeroLinux leads to an improved version..), but I have serious doubts about my ability to install it properly myself. Stories like the VV one don't help, nor do the problems I read on the boards. You seem to think that anyone who can install Windows on their own should be able to install a commercially designed distribution of Linux also. I've installed Win 95/98/ & NT on numerous desktops and 98 & NT on two different notebooks (Thinkpad and Satelite Pro). Never had a problem. They virtually installed themselves (though NT involves some intervention). Hope Linux is just as easy (I hear Mandrake is supposed to be).
Doobie doobie dooo....
How can you use something that's file manager crashes during normal usage?
I know it all too well. It's a myth.
People are used to 5.50 or whatever an hour minumum.
Not in the Dominican Republic. Or [fill in the blank with any one of 150+ nations].
[If] minimum wage were to go away today, most employees would be paid the same contractually, and the others would fight for their wages or quit and go somewhere that they could make more.
Fight? Flight? This is not an option for most people. Phillips-Van Heusen closed down a plant in Central America (El Salvador?) rather than deal with a workforce that managed to win collective-bargaining rights (through an impossibly protracted process); they wanted a raise from 50 to 90 an hour. if they find work elsewhere, it'll probably be for 50 an hour.
There's six billion folks in the world, and the "invisible hand" uses that to force the terms of people's wages. While the DJIA has risen hundreds of percent (adjusted for inflation) in the last 20 years, average hourly wage in the nation that houses the Dow has gone down, IIRC, or flatlined. An example of the global effect of the "invisible hand". If people around the world were happy with The Hand, they wouldn't be heading for The West.
I both lament and benefit from this. This makes me a hypocrite. Or just brutally honest.
--
--
=8^
gmc isn't marked stable? How can you release a DE that's supposed to be easy for anyone to use if the file manager is not yet stable? If people have to fire up a term and type 'mv foo bar' to rename or move files, then, well, what's the point?
uselinux@email.com
Why will you one day switch to Gnome, if all is fine with KDE? Do you feel obligated to switch to Gnome because it's the politically correct thing to do, or because you think it's sexy?
Don't trust developers and companies that hype up a product the way they hyped Gnome and then dump an alpha quality release on those who were willing to give it a try. What will it take for you true believers to learn? RedHat continues to play along with the notion that the mainstream press has that Gnome is the "first" desktop for Linux which may make it easy for non-techies to use Linux. Linux had a good desktop before Kde - that is not the issue. It's RedHat's lies. RedHat will have hell to pay.
It's amazing how Linux fanatics will play along with deception by a corporation in the name of freedom and open-ness.
Others who may use Linux later will not play along (if they ever get a chance to use the Linux desktop). Most people I know who want to use computers to get things done would first try Gnome because of all the media hype, and then throw out Linux along with Gnome in disgust, never giving viable systems a try.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law...
hah! sure go ahead and quote aleister crowley, the same guy who said that education was wrong because it made it harder for ppl like him to control ppl!
Actually, I have never seen "vanilla" 9x/NT fail to recognize an IDE CD-ROM, even on a laptop. (or a SCSI one on a supported controller). Yet in my limited linux experience, it's happend three times.
You may need to get a whole mess of drivers to get the video/audio/modem working right, but for the basic stuff, Windows at least finds your drive controller.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
i agree that it's a buggy 1.0 release, i disagree that it is useless to install. i am simply amazed at how much work went into it since last summer.
compiling from source isn't going to work on platforms it hasn't been tested yet. right now, it looks like the latest releases of debian and redhat should be fine. and please upgrade to libc6 if you haven't already.
i just tried it with red hat 5.2, it installed without any problems and actually worked well. no horrible bugs and no crashes, though it suffers from intense feature overload. red hat better make the default a lot simpler than what i was presented with when i first started it up, or else the non-techno people out there will simply be overwhelmed by the number of options.
it's not at the stage where everyone in the world should startusing it, but it's at the stage where all curious linux users should give it a try and help pound the remaining bugs out. (without having to expend effort to just get it working)
cause he may have been a JOKE but then crowley's jokes can be hard to GET, AC to AC i think you should read roberanton wilson's cosmic trigger he exlaines crowley a little...
Damn. I installed it alone. No wonder I can't get a job anywhere like Austin Bunn.
In an economy with low unemployment (USA), service related industries would get ticked at major corps that reduced the wages of their employees, because it would mean less money for the service industries. If wages were dropped too low, CEO's would begin being assassinated.
I use Gnome over KDE even though I think KDE currently is much more polished, easier to install, and provides more functionality. Wanna know why? 'Cuz I think Gnome is sexy. Sure I'm a programmer, but I'm also an aesthete. What's wrong with that?
I agree that KDE is getting the short end of the stick as far as press coverage goes. And I shudder when I see articles claiming that Gnome is the first easy to use desktop environment. _And_ I'm annoyed that the Gnome developers felt the need to "go 1.0" because it timed well with the LinuxWorld Expo, when I don't think it was quite ready.
But I've tried using KDE several times; it never lasts on my desktop for more than a day. Something about it just doesn't feel right to me. When Gnome was REALLY unstable I just didn't use a DE at all. Now I'm hooked on the Gnome panel with my beloved Window Maker. (I know, I know, like you care...)
I didn't think I'd ever stoop to entering a Gnome/KDE flamewar. I use some of the KDE apps daily, and I really appreciate the KDE team's work. But I have a problem with you implying that choosing something because it's sexy is bad. And if you think that the sexiness factor isn't going to have an effect on at least some portion of the desktop market, then, well, I guess you have a right to be wrong...
-posting anonymously because I forgot who I am
I don't know about you, but MY revolution is mounted on the /dev/hda1 drive.
-posting anonymously because I forgot who I am
First of all, Gnome is a disgrace. First of all, I am not a newbie and I am compiling gnome 1.03 on a glibc 2.1, egcs 1.1.2, XFree 86 3.3.3.1, kernel 2.2.3 system compiled from scratch by myself. Now, when I first run panel I get many debugging messages printed to stdout (not something I'd expect from a 1.0 release), then within a minute of using the configuration programs (keyboard, mouse, etc). the panel with core dump. There are atleast 20 different ways to make Gnome dump core on demand.
As for posting these bugs, the answer is no... If it was a single bug or two, yes I would report them. However, when there are so many bugs that it is obvious the Gnome developers didn't debug it enough, then I'm not going to do their job for them. I work on too many other projects to spend my time posting bugs about obvious problems they know about but care to ignore.
Well, the only thing you should have to --nodep is gtk+... they should have explained that a bit better. They have a gtk+10 RPM to replace your current gtk+ rpm, so that your gtk+ 1.0 apps will still work, and the gtk+-1.2 package will give you the shiny new GTK as well. Any other --nodeps probably mean that you're going to be missing libraries that you actually do need.
How better to get bug reports than to use leverage numerologists like yourself? It also serves the double-purpose of making you a wiser software consumer. The world is a better place now that you've been inconvenienced. Thanks for your service. ;-)
Come on. Gnome 1.0.0 is:
A) Easy to install if you follow the instructions provided on gnome.org, I follwed the instructions to the letter for RH5.2 and have a stable system, and I did not have to do any --force or --nodeps
B) Pretty stable for x.0.0 release. Most of my headaches came from Enlightenment, I simple switched to WindowMaker and poof, problems gone.
So kids, whats the moral of the story?
RTFM
Whils't Crowley repeats that phrase, it's older than he was...
Lowmag.net
FDisk should be the same with pretty much all distributions - your problem is probably one with crappy proprietary laptop harddrives. I know that I have installed Linux w/o a cdrom at least five times on different computers, with either the method described earlier or simply by downloading it from the net, without any problems.
Tough shit:)
I know I will be moderated down for this, but . . . Vincent
The moral is that gpanel shouldn't be crashing in an easily reproducable way in a 1.0.x release.
Same goes for the file manager.
kpanel didn't crash on me, even when I used beta 4 last summer.
I guess we are to assume you have coded something of gnome's level and better? Perhaps you have a few recommendations for them?
Did you pay for gnome?
Did you contribute to their budget?
Did you buy a cd or some other form of donation?
Did you submit "detailed" bug reports?
Did you create a suggestions list and emailed it to them?
Did you contribute code snippets?
Do you belong to "any" linux based organization to where you are actively involved with "any" of the above?
Written any docs perhaps?
Personally, I have had little problem installing gnome via RPM or compiling it. (I prefer RPM's , I'm lazy)
rpm -Uvh --nodeps --force filename.rpm
(The quick way, does all rpm's in the directory based on installed packages)
rpm -Uvh --freshen --nodeps --force *.rpm
Any of these has worked without failure for me and anyone I know.
granted, there are quite a few bugs with gnome its self and the applications, but considering its age, the amount of coding necessary, and what it does for the cost, I'm impressed. They also have the burden of being current and utilizing the latest GTK widjets set.
PS: Don't just complain, its allright to point out bugs and shortcommings, but just to sit there and rant with little to contribute in exchange for an organization of people gearing their efforts to provide "you" a potentially microsoft free , open sourced windowing environment for not a single dime out of your pocket, only demonstrates your absolute shortsightedness and lack of ambition.
I surely hope the linux community is not mostly comprised of this sort of attitude. Linux needs doers... The complaints are not in shortage.
I can also report that installing Mac m68k-linux on a IIci isn't that hard, but I don't know if I'd recommend it to the masses :)
-kx
Did you use disk druid or the other partition utility? I used disk druid and had the partition recognition problem.
-kx
In my case I suspect that an OEM installed utility had a role in changing the formatting type. [Or do you have S.M.A.R.T. utility on your desktop.]
In mine, it's a self-assembled box (DOS or Win9* originally), so there's no weird OEM utility AFAIK.
By the way, I believe it's PM version 4 that can format ext2 partitions.
I know, but his 4.0 and my 3.x versions seem to have a hard time convincing RH's install program that some ext2 partitions are really there - the unifying factor is that the original formatting and subsequent partition changes were done by PM (of course, I didn't have the benefit of being able to tweak ext2 partitions directly). Bug or Feature? RH's fault or PQ's? I've never found out.
--
--
=8^
In socialism there are no private corporations. How does this lead to the conlusion that Libertarian Socialists want people left to deal with only the gov't, when they want to *eliminate* it?
Libertarian Socialism: No private corporations, no government.
You may as well RTFM (or at least the FAQ.)
Because it is a perfectly applicable validation of Libertarian Socialist theory and practice.
You don't think that the GNU and Linux communities are a perfect example of the structure of anarchy?
Actually, it's supposed to be "He's over there." before the "Splitter!"
Nah, it's not crappy - it's a nice new IBM (I swapped it out) - I've seen others on the net who had the exact same problem with an 8 meg install. The floppy just starts churning when you get to the fdisk / disk druid part. I wish there was a way to enable swap early on... I managed to make a swap partition with a minimal boot disk, but I can't make the install program use it. Grr. :-)
What part of gnome in particular?
I still have a libc 5 RH 4.x system and it seems to work ok for me. I just downloaded all the source and compiled it in the order that was given on the web page.
I must odd. I always get the tarballs and compile. Other than extracting stuff from a redhat source rpm, I haven't used rpm since the first time I installed linux on the machine.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
And I equally hope that most of the community isn't composed of people that think a 1.0 release can be as unstable and buggy as parts of GNOME are and still be entitled to a 1.0 version number.
Did I report bugs? No.
Did I test alpha releases? No.
Did I write docs/contrib icons/suggest ideas/ect? No.
Does it matter? No.
GNOME is now supposedly release quality (or it can't reasonably be called v1.0) and its stability should match its release version status. It doesn't.
People are within their own right to complain if something is touted to be the 'next great thing' as much as GNOME is and then, suprisingly, it doesn't function as a 1.0 release should.
Since KDE is the only other DE to have reached a '1.0' release, what else could GNOME 1.0 release possibly be benchmarked against? Hate to say it, but GNOME isn't anywhere near as functional, stable, easy to install, or as well documented as KDE (at 1.0) and based on KDE's status at 1.0, I think GNOME should've tried to be at that same level when it hit 'release'.
All, I think one of the hardest things is to get the PPP running. (And then there is the F@#$ing ISP running there own stuff..ie: you need there internet explorer CD for windoze to get the connection..grrrr) It would be nice if slashdot..had a area where we could put scripts for people. It is nice to have ethernet..but how many people have it at home?..And to install the patches..you need to get to the net most of the time..So in short of burning the patches to CD-ROM...where do the average user run..Real chicken and egg problem.....
i do a lot of programming using RPM. in fact, most of my programming is done using RPM as a build environment.
:)
but then again, i'm trying to deliver stuff to 'users'
The funny thing is: nobody's wages have been cut. Some high-paying jobs have left the country; some low-paying (by US standards) have left the country as well, since there's always some third-world economy that features lower labor costs. The long-term effect is an overall lowering of wages, but that Hand is invisible, remember? The resultant increase in job/wage insecurity (which Comrade Greenspan often finds to be a Good Thing®) prevents (or subverts) the traditional upward wage pressures that "full employment" would bring. Again, no-one's getting their wages cut. Corps bring in scab labor in order to get some extra leverage against striking workers - that works to keep wage increases down or nonexistant, and often gives the corp carte blanche to move X number of jobs overseas. Again, not a cut, but it has helped keep down overall growth in wages. There will not be masses of people going postal - just as a frog won't jump out of the pot if you slowly raise the water temperature to boiling point.
Mmmmmm. Frog legs!
Disclaimer: IANAE.
--
--
=8^
Boy you fellows may know your Linux, but you don't know much about right-wingers. They caught on to computers and the internet many years before the media did. Not the Falwell types, of course. Rather the types who think Falwell & co. are a bunch of....never mind.
/. on his spankin' new G3. Mit LinuxPPC, ja!
I can see it now, in some future Simpsons episode: Hitler hiding out in South America, pounding out his AC messages to
gnulix!
Hum. You must be rather lucky. I tried the FreeBSD ports of gnome and its related bloat. Basically all the panel applets crashed and burned. Eventually tho if I clicked enough things restarted, but the help browser really sucked (crashed and burned the first time I ran it). In fact I didn't realize all the little applets were crashing until I did a ls ~/*.core. Not too shabby, but not a 1.0 release quality either.
The revolution will be mocked
Uh yeah. Easy to install. I work (against all logic) with the stuff from the KDE cvs tree. And in fact I've done a tad of mucking with the autoconf/make crap already. Even though this stuff is from the HEAD branch, at least it's easy enough to build. Gnome OTOH was a bitch to get configured EVEN when I was downloading .33 or .99 or somesuch. Sure if you use RPMs (cause you're stuck with Linux) it might be easy to install. But compiling Gnome from source is something only true sadists would/should try.
The revolution will be mocked
I setup several IBM 770x laptops with RedHat 5.2. No problem as long as you don't want to use the internal modem. Installed it on a AMSTech too. Works fine.
KDE is slow and bloated.
To give you an example, I'm still running GNOME 0.99.8 on my P200 64meg box that I use full time at home, my desktop has been up for 4 days now and E running the clean theme is using approx 1.7% ram. A freshly started KDE-1.1 session uses much more ram, and kwm itself is using 6.2% ram (from top).
Just loading KDE and netscape causes my box to start swapping. Not so with GNOME and E.
As for the crashes, I have seen none yet, and have been running 0.99.8 since it was released (I dont run gmc however).
From top:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1839 matty 0 0 4452 4452 3044 S 0 0.0 7.0 0:01 kfm
1841 matty 0 0 4084 4084 2812 S 0 0.0 6.4 0:01 kpanel
1830 matty 0 0 3980 3980 2768 S 0 0.0 6.2 0:00 kwm
1849 matty 0 0 3892 3892 2672 S 0 0.0 6.1 0:00 konsole
1842 matty 0 0 3636 3636 2500 S 0 0.0 5.7 0:00 kbgndwm
1840 matty 0 0 3588 3588 2460 S 0 0.0 5.6 0:00 krootwm
475 matty 1 0 2772 2384 1240 S 0 0.1 3.7 0:32 gnomepager_a
504 matty 0 0 2028 1532 808 S 0 0.0 2.4 0:02 x11amp
508 matty 0 0 2028 1532 808 S 0 0.0 2.4 0:00 x11amp
859 matty 7 0 2028 1532 808 S 0 1.3 2.4 0:00 x11amp
860 matty 0 0 2028 1532 808 S 0 0.0 2.4 0:00 x11amp
466 matty 0 0 1728 1336 872 S 0 0.0 2.1 0:07 panel
456 matty 1 0 1276 1112 692 S 0 0.0 1.7 0:18 enlightenmen
477 matty 0 0 1372 916 648 S 0 0.0 1.4 0:00 gen_util_app
Was it L.A. Rollins who defined a Libertarian as an AYNarchist....a la Ayn Rand?
Did you pay for gnome?
Why would I pay for something of THAT quality?
Did you contribute to their budget?
Did you buy a cd or some other form of donation?
Again, why would I spend my money on something that's really not ready for prime time. Did I mention that I really disagree with the religious , political, whatever, frevor Gnome is attracting? I'd rather sit back and watch the extremists self destruct thank you.
Did you contribute code snippets?
Yeah, give me decent C++ bindings and I'd love to. Not.
The revolution will be mocked
My GNOME file manager works fine, you should get it, its called xterm.
Anyway, in my experience, kfm is not much better than gmc.
There is a freeware software group based in New York city that serves linux and freebsd and I need to know the name and the web site of the organization. A past article here at slashdot mentioned this but I guess it was deleted. I signed up at the main linux users group server to register a name of a "forming" linux users group here in NY. I have a bunch of emails from various linux users who want and need to know this information and have been waiting for a week or 2 and are getting pretty fed up. I know this is slightly offtopic but I have been searching the web for weeks trying to find it. Any information about this would be helpfull. Thanks
tim@gibney.net
Although, I'm still on 0.99.8, and very happy with it.
I installed it all by hand, follwoing all the dependancies, and it works great. Granted I dont use gmc tho.
Agreed, they need the whole package in a few rpms to make the install much easier.
You might actually find the CVS to be easier to build. I have the impression that the developers put a lot more effort into the CVS sources than into making working tarballs. I've been compiling from CVS for months with almost no hiccup now...of course, the only Gnome programs I use are panel and gnomecc and those don't crash any more. (I start gmc every so often to see how it's doing. Getting better. Still falls over. Unfinished software.)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
it was a bit involved, but it did work), I found GNOME to be rather disappointing.
It was very unstable, almost embarassingly so.
What bothers me is that one of the dominant distributions has made
such an unstable desktop their default.
As Linux is gaining more attention, and as people begin to learn that there's an
alternative to Windows, they're more than likely to try RedHat and discover, "Hey!
This is worse than Windows! It crashes all the time! Whatever." and go back to 98/NT.
/* Socialism-- A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a complete reconstruction of society,
with a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor. */
This is an especially bad definition as it could apply to just about any theoretical political system. It all depends upon what you think "just" and "equitable" mean.
This is an extreme. If we take the oposite extreme then 1 person will own everything and we would all be owned by that 1 person (therefore hitler), in that sense we would be poor, the same result but at the oposite extreme, much like touching something that is extremely cold feels like touching something that is hot, or like, not eating enough and you can die of malnutrition or starvation, eat to much and you can die from a stroke or a heart attack. Not enough water and you die of dehydration, to much water and you drown.
There is never been a true communist government (by the definition that is), russia and china are more like government monopolies, and there for a monopoly is not the american dream, then does that mean a monopoly is a russian dream?
What has been bad is monopolies, russia when it was SAID to be communist, was simply a bad implementation of communism. it was a government monopoly, the government controlled everything, there fore it was a goverment monopoly, everything was government owned not publicly owned as the definition of communism, therefore, microsoft being a monopoly, is closer to the russian government, simply a bad implementation of a company, a "false communist" company.
bah. libertarianism and socialism is for the kiddies who come out of college thinking they know everything. I ignore the politics and ask "what do you really have to offer?" Linux isn't about politics-it's about technology. If Windows beat the stuffing out of linux, I don't think anyone would pay much attention to it. The point is, linux does beat the stuffing out of windows and all this other stuff is just a mere diversion.
---
That pig of a window manager sucks all the memory
my computer has. no thanks.
Now that will get some blood boiling!
Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.
Of course in the absence of the laws that allow corporations to absolve actual human beings of responsibility, (limited liability being the sole reason for the existence of corporate charters) corporations would not exist either!
Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.
Actually...there are businesses in a socialist world. Just not corporations.
I have found this thread rather interesting, as I got into Linux mostly because I found a lot of resonances between the way the Free Software/Open Source movement actually worked, and the theoretical works of Kropotkin like Mutual Aid
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Took me about 5 minutes to download and install the GNOME RPMs on my PII with RH 5.1 (OK, I have a cable modem.) I then put a single line:
.Xclients and it came up a looked great. .8 or .9 release, but that's all numerology. You can't take anybodys version numbers very seriously these days.
gnome-session
in my
Has a few odd bugs and infelicities. I'd say it should have been a
Dave Cook
Sorry, but what distribution are you talking about?
If it is just for RedHat, don't you realise that
the version 6 is not out there yet? You can bet
it won't until there is an stable enough version
of Gnome working. As far as the Gnome 1.0 release, only
the core libs are really 1.0 - everything else is
beta or pre-beta, so test it at your own risk but
then don't whine about how unstable or unfinished
it may seem.
That's complete crap - all that refers to is the economic command system as opposed to the market system. The point of socialism is that the WORKERS, the people, control the means of production. Government control of the means of production is not inherent in socialist philosophy.
-lx
No, we'd all be fed.
-lx
not mine. it's on /dev/wd0a
-lx
I doubt they use it - ever see the snotty "we don't use electronic stuff" messages on the inside of their albums?
Sheesh, and here I was thinking that amplifiers, mixers, and electric guitars were electronic.
-lx
I agree.
I have a Dell OptiPlex GXa PII300, and installed recently Slink on it (it was my first experience with Linux...) dual booting with the NTloader.
I used Partition Magic 4.0 and it worked for me, but, the install boot kernel was hanging the computer after a few seconds, maybe on my SCSI card (adaptec 294x). Besides, my video card is a ATI 3D Rage Pro, and that also creates some problems, and finally, the mouse is PS2.
It managed to solve the probem with the second CD, containing a special kernel for tecra notebooks. But my desktop is not a notebook !
Well, it works now, and NTLDR can boot the two OS.
PS: This is my work computer, so NT...
I giggled cuz I thought "now there's someone who knew the importance of registering domain names early..."
Like christian.com back in the old days...(*sniff*)
-lx
I am Jay Sulzberger and I am the Corresponding secretary of LXNY, New York's Free Software Organization. There are at least five other free software groups in New York. The two Linux groups are NYLUG and LUNY. NYLUG will meet tomorrow at 6:30 pm in the IBM building at 57th Street and madison Avenue on the Island of the Manahattoes. AnyNix SIG of the NYACC is another very active group, whose charter includes any *n*x, but with focus on the most Unixy of all Unices the free *n*ces, such as free systems with a Linux kernel, and the free *BSDs.
http://www.lxny.org
http://www.nylug.org
http://www.luny.org
The 'invisible hand' theory is utterly ridiculous, and one has to look no further than the slums of any large city to figure out why. The invisible hand is a way for rich folks and corporation owners to lessen their burden of guilt. People acting selfishly do NOT do what is best for society - that shouldn't be too hard to figure out. It's a contradiction.
/. that mentioned Adam Smith's invisible hand being firmly implanted in his invisible butt. That was funny. :)
I think it was an article on
-lx
Crowley adopted a VERY old philosophy. Do what thou wilt shall it harm none.
Besides, you don't think that crowley might have been being sarcastic when/if he made that comment about education?
-lx
I don't -- WindowMaker works fine for me.
E isn't part of GNOME, or vice-versa.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Uhhh... how many people use Windows?
:-) :-)
:-)
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Actually, if you believe in software as a community, then you shouldn't say that the developers didn't put enough effort in debugging it - by using it, you are a developer yourself. Don't complain when someone gives you a program for free, along with the source, and then you aren't even willing to tell them in return that you can reproduce a bug (let alone the several you are griping about).
How 'bout a shell script that you run that downloads and installs everything you need?
extremists rule!
c++ sucks!
Mine's on /dev/sda1
Vegetarianism is all a big conspiracy to kill animals by starving them to death because they will eat all the plants and there will be alot more animals.
EGCS compiled KDE?
... recompile with -fo-exceptions and enjoy ...
Blame cygnus guys, who enabled exception handling
by default
Hell NO.
... .... ... .... .. ..... ..... ... ...... ......
....... .... ...... ..... day. :)
I've HAVE to use windows software for my work, bugs and blue screens galore.
It took me a day to install linux RedHat 5.2 from CD, it took me a while to start learning and playing with XFree86, and it took me a couple of days to install gnome (mostly because I wanted 1.0, and had not downloaded all the files by mistake), but other then that the few hang ups that came along were nothing, and I would say I had virtually no problem installing gnome at all, and I hear people on the mailing list help people all the time. Gnome is going to be my replacement for windows. I'm already developing with gtk+, and my goal is gnome.
Maybe you had trouble for your first time, well be patient, I'd say the biggest problem with people now a days is that they don't have that important ingrediant, patients. No one cares if it says 1.0, the biggest problem is that gnome looks better then a lot of interfaces, and people are to impatient, if they can't get what they want when they want it they through a sissy fit, this happens all through the emulation scene, its just plain disgusting. I could be wrong about you could be at an extreme, in this way you could be one of those people with a mental disorder of perfectinism, or puritism. In which case to you no software should be so conceded as to call its self 1.0, software should just keep adding 9s to the end of its version number, 0.99999999999.... the best way to answer this is if someone throws a cruppled up peice of paper in front of you, do you freak out and yell at them and/or pick it up and through it in the trash.
The other type you could be is an eleetist snob on the other hand.
Lets get this straight version schemes don't fu..ing matter, the number just goes up because they accomplished a set of goals, that is all that fu..ing matters. Or does this bother you because it does not fit in your perfect little fu..ing world? In which case who made you the king of fu..ing standards, you self appointed fu..ing
Have a nice
Simple ... you used native GNOME's distro - RedHat. Try another distro or non-Linux OS ;-)
One thing that bugs me about all these 'Linux is hard to install' articles is the authors are comparing it to Windows which is preinstalled on their systems. The comment is usualy something like 'Linux is too hard to install for the average user'. Well I want to see the average user install Windows 95 from scratch. Yes, at this point Linux is a little harder to install than MS Windows products. But with either OS, the 'average' user will need help.
It was very unstable, almost embarassingly so.
.30, inside of RH 5.2, but it is not installed by default, the user must manually install it. So at this point it doesn't matter if they do or don't.
Are you talking about gnome, or its software? If gnome was unstable gnome would crash, if an application of gnome is unstable the application would crash.
What bothers me is that one of the dominant distributions has made
such an unstable desktop their default.
As the other guy said, they have not even released 6.0 yet, they did include an older version, gnome
As Linux is gaining more attention, and as people begin to learn that there's an
alternative to Windows, they're more than likely to try RedHat and discover, "Hey!
This is worse than Windows! It crashes all the time! Whatever." and go back to 98/NT.
I have to disagree, I've worked with windows software, and it is buggy as well, and to top it off some times its not even reversable (like uninstalling or reinstalling anything).
Next, most of the media coverage of gnome has been more of like, "its not ready", which essentially means, "go there and do it if your interested and/or wish to research a potentially new environment", and the people likely to be interested are software developers, which is a major part of the equation, you can't have an OS/gui with out the killer app.
So chear up, its to early to even think about being depressed, think of it more as bleeding edge version 1.0, BTW it is functional you know, and developement and the comforts of developement seems to be there, I enjoy the programming so far.
Someone should tell this person -
www.varesearch.com
www.penguincomputing.com
Pre-installed Linux Systems - NOW.
KDE also works fine with WM, blackbox, afterstep, etc...
Who cares if Windows is hard to install. That's not the point. The point is that Windows users, who already have Windows installed, are having a hard time installing Linux. Who cares if they have a hard time installing Windows if they never have to do it?
For them to switch their computer over to Linux, they need to install Linux. If that is hard, they won't do it and will continue using Windows.
So, saying, "Well, Windows is hard to install too" is silly.
I installed RedHat 5.2 on my Thinkpad 600. The machine booted off the CD. The install went without any hitches and I was even able to get the sound to work via ALSA drivers. To get vid to work I had to ftp the current neomagic driver from RH but this is now included in the 5.3 images. I later upgraded to Mandrake 5.2 then 5.3 and now life is good :) My version of the machine has no built in modem so I can't bitch about their crummy internal modem chip which IBM NEEDS TO WRITE A LINUX DRIVER FOR!!!
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Who cares if they have a hard time installing Windows if they never have to do it?
But they might, unless they want to lug their computer back to the store (and probably pay) to have it "fixed" when they blow their registry, or they corrupt their hard drive, or a virus wipes out their drive or any one of the thousands of ways a Windows installation can get hosed up enough it needs to be reinstalled.
So, saying, "Well, Windows is hard to install too" is silly.
It isn't silly, although it still isn't completely an excuse.
Absolutely RedHat 5.2 includes PCMCIA drivers,
and all available during the install process.
I'm with you, had I been there, that sucker'd be up and running, even if I had to resort to installing from the hard drive and sort out the PCMCIA details later.
The Linux Laptop home page
has no less than 6 different pages about installing on an IBM 560*.
One point I make to people over and over is that installing an operating system from scratch on a PC, ANY operating system, is difficult. It requires knowledge of the hardware that very few ordinary users have.
I have done over 100 Linux installs from scratch on various hardware, and have done several dozen installs of Win 95/98. I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
While most users can install an *application* the majority of people when faced with the proposition of breaking open the shrink wrap on that OEM Windows 95/98 CD that came with their computer because their hard drive got hosed and they are facing installing windows from scratch are totally in over their heads.
These same people couldn't install Linux either.
This means that the writer has a very good point that the availability of computers with Linux pre-installed is essential for it to ever become a major player. Fortunately, this is happeining.
But my difficulty was getting X setup. SuSE X setup tool, sax, wouldn't let me select the neomagic driver (I have the latest XFree86). It kept saying I needed to install it (the file that was requested wasn't on the CD). Some research on the 'net and I found out the driver is part of XF86_SVGA driver. So I tried to do it manually in XF86Config, but X would crash saying no 'neomagic' driver exists. Ugh. So I reran sax again and by some magic, I could select the neomagic driver. I had to guess at the screen frequencies and card memory to get the 1024x768 resolution.
But now, I'm stuck getting the sound card to work. The SuSE tutorial didn't help at all. I've never done this before, so I'll be excited when I get it to work.
And I can complain about the "crummy internal modem chip which IBM NEEDS TO WRITE A LINUX DRIVER FOR!!!"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I had this problem when I ftp'd the RH5.2 install files to a fat partition using win95. Win95 doesn't use the correct capitalization on the directory names and the install program is case dependant.
/fat and mount -t vfat /dev/hda(number for vfat part.) /fat.
/RedHat2 and under it put dir's called RPMS and base. cp the rpm's from the old rpms directory into the new, /RedHat2/RPMS dir. Do the same for the base files. RPMS and base should be all you need.
/RedHat2.
(Note: the following is from memory, it otlines the concept but may be slightly off.)
The fix is to go through the normal install procedure to the point where it fails to find the files. As this point, all of the vfat stuff is loaded. Then, use alt-f2 to get a command line. mkdir a directory like
From there, you can mkdir a new directory called
Finally, alt-f1 back to the install program, use back and reselect the location of the install files using
Posted by HolyMackeralAndy:
I was a newbie too, but using RH 5.2 I had my machine up and running in under 30 minutes....hmmmm.....
> It's rock solid.
:(
.0 releases since a lot of users don't install a new project until it hits the major version.
From all reports I've heard, that is the case, so I won't argue with that.
But on the other hand, when I did try it on a 486/50 with 32MB of RAM it crawled. Gnome ran without a problem on the same machine, as far back as 0.13 and as recently as 1.0.1.
> It's also based on CORBA, and has applications
> like StarOffice that use it.
Is there an ORB as part of the KDE downloads? Is there a document object model or applet framework as part of the KDE downloads? No.
MICO is only installed currently as a support app for Koffice, a alpha/beta suite of applications.
I'm not saying that this isn't going to be expanded in the future, but considering that the current desktop runs independant of CORBA, I would not say that KDE is "based on CORBA".
The StarOffice announcement includes some minor concessions (a link on the panel and a handful of icons), some features that will work with Gnome as well (dnd interoperability), some features that should not be a consideration (SO tries not to cover kpanel - this is a WINDOW MANAGER issue), and one real integration (the KDE control center being available in the SO settings menu.)
> The UI toolkit - Qt - is rock solid and
> documented up the wazoo (there's even an
> O'Reilly Qt book already released in Germany).
GTK documentation has been an issue in the past, since it's been a moving target during the 1.1 series.
But things are becoming a lot better. Eric Harlow's book has been released by NewRiders, Redhat is gearing up for it's own reference manuals, and the online documentation project has been accelerating ever since the code freeze of both GTK and Gnome.
> It's got themes:
> GNOME seems sexy when you see all the themed
> screenshots, but when you realize you can
> customize KDE the same amount, then start
> looking below the surface...
Themability in Gnome includes the ability to have replacement rendering engines for the Widgets, this is far more configurable than KDE is currently.
> Right now GNOME is a sham. I've already seen
> press reviews of GNOME comparing it's crashes to
> Window's blue-screen-of-death... It'll be a real
> shame if Linux gets written off as being as
> buggy as Windows because of the politically
> motivated "1.0" release
Gnome is far from a sham. I'll agree that the 1.0 release had a handful of bugs, but a large portion of the "bugs" people report are in fact configuration problems.
Initial installation is still a bit too difficult, I'll agree, but Gnome is more ambitious than KDE - the base installation includes an ORB, a CORBA naming service, an implementation of IIOP, a set of C convienence functions (memory allocation, data structures, cross-platform compatibility functions), a generic plug-in interface, a thin wrapper for X, a graphics library, an image manipulation library that can handle almost any format, audio support libraries, a network aware audio server, high level graphics libraries, an xml parsing library, a cross-platform system monitoring library, a vt emulation library, http access functions, truetype font libraries, etc, etc, etc...
And that is just support libraries, not applications.
Not to mention that the acid test for Gnome will be the release of Redhat 6.0, when the majority of users are exposed to it, not the 1.0 release.
On the whole, the 1.0 release has gotten the name out, gotten a lot of people to try it finally and submit bug reports, etc, etc. Even the Linux kernel goes through such "brown paper bag"
If you cant figure out whats wrong with the syntax of "dev/hda1", you need to get a guru to help you. If he doesnt know he isnt a guru. I got tired of needing a CDROM all the time, so I did this 1 single speed cdrom, 1 8port hub. nics all around. LAN in my house where I do ftp installs with redhat with out a hitch. Redhat 5.2 comes with PCMCIA support and redhat 5.0 does for that matter too. Both of them found my 3com etherlink III pcmcia card in my notebook with out a problem. Installation was a breeze, then again I have lost count of installations I have done.
You cant be a newbie and install an OS that didnt have the hardware designed for it. Microsoft is an easy install because *ALL* PC hardware vendors support them. Linux you have to know what hardware is supported and only purchase that hardware. It bothers me that these "tech writers" attempt installations of linux, they dont know anything about the OS, there hardware, or hardware in general then do a bad write up about it. There is also an IBM laptop -> linux faq out there also that shows you how to get the sound working/cdrom (atleast for the 380). IBM's pcmcia nics are supported as well. Its not that hard people. Just make sure you have supported hardware, or complain to your hardware vendors if they dont support it.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
What's the big deal about pre-installed Linux? I don't think it's going to attract more people to the OS. Most people don't know crap about their computer or their hardware and the only way to get people to hop on the Linux bandwagon is to dumb it down for the average person. Nobody wants to spend months or years to learn the ins and outs of Linux just so they could get their report to print.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
All DOS 6.x needs is the boot floppy. It helps with the fdisk and format. But we could argue that DOS is just a slightly better interface than the BIOS itself.
I run into puzzeling stuff at least as often during windows installs as during Linux installs.
Windows can be way beyond puzzling. What the hell does "A fatal exception error occurred in module (Unknown) at memory address (Unknown)." mean? If Windows can't tell me what memory address it happened at, how on earth am I supposed to know which device did it?
Those of us with experience installing *operating systems* (which probably includes a majority of those reading this) know that Plug-n-Play is a bad joke, "auto detection" often doesn't, etc.
Plug-n-Pray is more like it. Windows has on more than one occasion lowered me to "ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease...yes!" or more often "no!!!!". I liked DOS devices: Jumper the IRQ, DMA, and memory addresses on the card and put the corresponding values on the command line. The problem with Windows is that I cannot see the command being issued to do whatever it is that's it's doing when it's trying to load the driver, so I can't see what's going wrong. And AutoDetect usually only works with things like "101/102-key or Microsoft Natural Keyboard" and "Generic IDE drive type 47".
At least back in the day computer use required some technical competency. Now that you don't have to think to do anything, people who can't think are using them.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Among /. readers I would think a high proportion have ethernet at home. I do, and I think the price of 10BaseT equipment is such that it is quite affordable for anyone who can afford a computer in the first place.
/. readers either. We're a self-filtering, self-referential group.
If you have more than one computer, I think is is useful to network them, even at home. Do you want to sneaker-net print files to your printer when every OS you buy these days can share printers? Why wait for 'net access when there are ways to let every client on a LAN use a dialup link simultaneously?
Of course, Jane and Joe Sixpack may not have ethernet at home, but they are probably not
I tried this on an 8 meg 486 laptop... I inserted the supplemental disk, and it soon freaked out, couldn't get past fdisk. The consensus seems to be that more memory would help, but that's not an option. I tried RH5.1 and RH5.2, both failed. What did you use?
For a limited memory install you might want to try Slackware. I have successfully installed Slackware 3.x on a 386SX-25 with only 4M of RAM. I have also installed it on a Toshiba 3300SL laptop (386SL-25) with 8M of RAM (from floppies no less).
I know that it is possible to install Red Hat 5.2 on an 8M machine (I did it on a 486DLC-40 with 8M), but I have heard that prior versions had a bug that caused
my cable company ISP that I still have not got to work properly. And to build my LAN I would prefer to have another separate ethernet card, but I am out of irq's!
To what if any extent is USB supported under Linux? I have the impression it is not supported even under kernel 2.2. However, researching some problems with sound configurations I found it USB listed in a configuration file.
Anyone know for sure?
Personly I have not had any trouble with it all all. It installed fine for me, I am very close to a newbe since I installed linux (RedHat 5.2) for the first time, a couple of weeks ago, I managed to install gnome, not using any of the CVS or anything like that, I just installed 1.0, and had virtually no problems. I do have experience with computers already, so I'm not a newbe in that sense, but it was not that difficult, most of my problems came from X server configuration and right now I am having touble configuring linux for an ethernet card, but the only part of gnome that is buggy is mostly the software that it runs, at least for me on the RedHat 5.2 distribution of linux. The intsall isn't perfected yet, and they are widening its usage on unix OS's. These are thier goals, these are not hype like others mistake it as.
The animals I'm thinking of exist for the sole purpose of human food. No food, no beef cows.
If the people in the US would eat 10% less meat there would be enough excess crop to end the third world famine.
hehe.
/adam
If the people in the US would eat 10% less meat there would be enough excess crop to end the third world famine.
And it wouldn't matter, because they'd just produce enough less grain to make up the difference. Seriously, famine in the third world isn't caused by excess consumerism in the first world. Its caused by political problems in the third world that wouldn't go away even if there were plenty of excess surplus grain. There is already tons of surplus grain and the western governments pay farmers not to grow as much and there are still surpluses. And it doesn't get sent to the third world, and even when we try to send it, it doesn't get distributed because of political reasons.
And it wouldn't matter.
Sad, but true.