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Open discussion of Linux Limitations
dave writes "There is a thin line between publishing groundless falsehoods about Linux (FUD) and writing about serious limitations that need to be addressed by the Linux community. Nathan Cochrane opens his first in a series of editorials on Linux Today about this very subject. "
I'm not the only one to hit two nasty realities of Linux.
The first is configuring it after installation. If you don't already know some flavor of Unix including NIS and DNS and sendmail, you're in for a world of hurt, not to mention confusion and severe criticism from your boss for making such a choice. There was a distribution of Linux that tackled this intelligently, but the Infomagic Workgroup Server is no more.
Post.Office as a mail as an MTA is quite workable, even for a nontechie. If I had to learn sendmail to use Linux, our business would have gone with NT. Sendmail is a deal (Linux) killer. It's just too much for small (50 people) orgs.
The second is the halfbaked nature of Linux applications. I tried WP8, it's so badly crippled I have can make no judgement if it is worth bothering with at work. The Applix POP3 email thingie doesn't work and Applix doesn't seem to care. Netscape? Barf.
A friend of mine mailed me this under the heading.. "why I don't use Linux." I searched around the net looking for a reasonable explanation for the numbers they got.. but couldn't find any .. does anyone know? http://advisor.gartner.com/n_inbox/hotcontent/hc_2 121999_3.html#h8
And what of command lines? Modern Unices including Linux no more rely
on them than any other desktop operating system.
The author of the article appears to be hallucinating. I don't rely on the command line at all in MacOS.
Modern X-based systems are amazingly user-friendly and often
superior in design to commercial variants
Hmmmm... I think he's still hallucinating.
The other great myth is Linux is hard to install.
Linux *is* hard to install compared to the most popular operating systems (and even some unpopular ones, such as the BeOS, which is incredibly easy to install). I never could get XFree86 to work. Fortunately, I don't really need that functionality.
Anyone else catch the reference to FUD in "The Matrix" ... at one point Neo is warned that the only thing holding him back is "Fear, Doubt, and Disbelief" ... (c:
I'm afraid I have to take issue with this statement. What exactly is wrong with the ext2 fs? From what I understand, it is a vastly superior filesystem than Microsoft's FAT16, in terms on disk size support, speed, and several other areas.
which before these same three systems ran three different flavors of Windows for years
Hmmm...I think I may see your problem...:) Disks, like any hardware, are subject to wear and tear. Try using a fresh new HD and maybe the system will work better.
True maybe my RAM was flaky, bad disk controller, whatever, but I wish ext2 was less prone to such errors, like power failures.
I really don't think its fair to expect the software to work flawlessly when the underlying hardware fails. Software tends to operate under the assumption that the hardware underneath it is operation within normal specifications.
Besides, if the power goes out unexpectedly and the filesystem was uncleanly unmounted, the fsck will fix things up 99% of the time (except when the fsck program gets corrupted which happened to me once...:). Windows does the same thing (these days) when power goes out...scandisk on reboot.
A little preview-impaired today?
Today's column by Art Buchwald is titled "10 simple tips for computer users."
No. 8 is "The more bells and whistles a computer has available, the less chance you have of doing anything on it."
Linux, the "Bells and Whistles OS." Ditto sendmail, kde, gnome, and themes anything.
Buchwald got it right.
Funny guy.
I think your problem is that you have to shutdown the computer before turning it off.
Hope this helps.
-ac
Instead, RedHat assumes (correctly) that you may
want to have other OSes installed
Wrong. How many NON TECHIE consumers (what the article was about) really run more than one OS??? My parents (a physician and a teacher, in their 50's) have enough trouble using Windows 95 and then moving to Windows 98 (when the paradigm shift is hardly noticable). Most non-power users DO NOT run more than one OS.
Take off your rose colored glasses and compare the two setups. There IS no comparison.
Installing Linux isn't the problem that's the easy part, that goes for any distribution for me. It's crap like gnome that's a pain in the ass. Try installing it (if you can figure out the maze of libs and dependencies), then have fun counting all the the stuff that breaks. Too bad to cause I'd really love to use it :). KDE just looks and feels ugly.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I know of nobody who wants ONLY linux on their machine. Most people only have one drive (2G+ or so), and they can ill afford to "jump in with both feet" and try a new OS.
The options that RH 5.2 offer don't leave much to be desired. I can't claim to have seen the other distributions, but from personal experience the 5.2 Workstation/Server setups leave a _lot_ of room for improvement. Should you go custom(like I did) the disk partitioning programs are crude at best, unintelligble at worst. After seing the mess that RH made of my drive trying the WS option, I dread to think of what other problems they would have left. If I hadn't of had my Partition Magic and Ranish Partition manager programs, I'm not sure I would have ever got RH up and running. I kept looking at my A+ certificat on the wall and thinking "I'm glad I'm not completely lost".
Free speech?
I've said a million times here, if all these supposed GUI wizards would switch their dev time to an installer focus, Linux might get somewhere. But all this endless argument leads to is someone saying anyone not running Linux exclusively, and RIGHT NOW, is a moron, which is why the Linux community is where it is right now ...
Which is several strides behind where it could be, if same people mentioned above got some sort of focus.
Hey, in the end, admit it: When you're cranking out the work, ease of use and stability walks all over whatever widget so-and-so prefers compared to so-and-so-2. Understand?
Sorry, but after installing GNOME today, I must say it was very easy, at least for RedHat 5.2.
If you go to gnome.org, and follow the install steps to the letter, it works like a charm. Yes, it's a whole bunch of steps, and a whole bunch of stuff to download, but if you RTFM, it works fine.
Easy == lack of control.
Wrong. Being easy to use does not imply anything about lack of control. Being hard to use does not imply anything about being powerful.
Better design helps make complex things easy to use.
I suspect that most (all?) KDE developers are going to be using C++. I also suspect that most of the rest of the developers who want to develop in other languages will flock towards GNOME. Why? Because GNOME is at least language neutral. KDE, on the other hand, requires C++ bindings. IMHO, this is where the major differences will wind up, i.e. what tools/languages you can use each one with. Right now, GNOME has far more flexibility in that area. KDE locks you into C++.
The only computer I was not able to install Red Hat on was an old upgraded Cyrix 486/40. What a piece of junk that was. As for modems, which modems don't have a real UART? If they're not making modems with UARTs in them anymore then what ARE they using? I'm glad I switched to ISDN and a router. ;-) As for LAN adapters, go buy a $20 ne2000 compatible card if you don't want to pick one of the 100+ different cards linux supports. Monitors are usually no issue. Pick Generic Multisync. Works 90% of the time for me on any SVGA monitor.
Modern *Unices* including Linux no more rely on them than any other desktop OS.
MacOS is not a Unix. MacOS X is. (Yes, it is important to make a destiction)
And in MacOS X, they added a command line in because it is an important feature of any powerful OS.
I am looking for an OpenSource OS for my Alpha. I am wondering, after reading reviews from VERY competent software engineers, why Linux has grown so much inspite of it's large number of design flaws while the more mature BSD products have been mostly stagnant although they seem to be superior at a technical level.
Can someone please explain this??
BTW- one such review was in the current Windows NT Magazine (Duke Press) by someone who graduated from Carnagie Mellon University (sp?). If anyone can read this article about the 2.2 kernel limitations and then compare/contrast Linux to BSD (reliability & scalability under heavy loads) I would be most appreciative.
but, why? c++ is the ultimate for creating bloat, why propegate it?????
IMHO, the GPL is why Linux is hot and not the BSDs.
Not many programmers want to work on something and give the source away when some corporation can come along, take it, modify it (if they so desire) and sell it without providing the source anymore. This is what the BSD-like licenses allow.
The GPL, on the other hand, allows you to do the same things, except you are required to provide the source.
I know that I, myself, would much rather contribute to something I know will always be available, and not to something I know can be hijacked.
>> Just don't be afraid to push some buttons and twist some knobs.
;)
Very sound advice here. Just login as a non-root user when you do it
I came from basically the same background as you (Apple, DOS, then Unix). One of the best things about Unix systems is that the help is right under your nose. A great deal of my learning process just came from using 'apropos' and 'man'.
New users should try to use these and learn the commands. I've heard people recommend aliasing the DOS commands which is just counterproductive IMO.
- Speed
How to distinguish FUD:
If the article/review/opinion/editorial
desktop applications'' it is FUD. Not because it
does not have them, but because LINUX IS NOT
THE X WINDOW SYSTEM! Linux will never
have a ``desktop'', any more than any other
*NIX will;
standardised[sic] desktop environments'' it is
FUD. See previous note. Lack of a standard
``desktop environment'' is a ``feature'' of the X
Window System; it has NOTHING TO DO WITH
LINUX!
Didn't know that the BSDs were operating under different licensing terms. Seems they would/should modify it to be GPL license. Too bad.
I just don't trust any 3rd party Linux app that was originally on Wincrap. Many seem like afterthoughts. Netscape is just plain BAD. Acts (and crashes) like IE5. WordPerfect? Scary. It's sucked since the DOS days. I dread to try it. If StarOffice for Linux is as putrid as the Windows version, we're all in trouble.
If there needs to be a "killer app" for Linux, a GOOD web browser would be it. Mozilla is all but dead. Netscape is a joke. Lynx is good but is console-mode (and fast!). How about the FSF putting Stallman to work on designing a good, free browser?
You really expect anyone to believe you compiled all of GNOME without being around to babysit it at least a little? That's plain crap right there. Every single source distribution revision I've seen so far (and I've been through alot of em) - has had at least one tripup that I had to go in to fix.
If you're just saying you periodically recompile updated portions of it, then yeah I might buy that.
A fine example of statistical bias:
> For instance, the Debian PPP install (pppconfig) is so painless, that I rarely see any Debian users cry out for PPP configuration help.
You are trying to score a point about the superiority of Debian. The fact is that hardly any newbies use Debian, and that explains the paucity of ppp-complaints about Debian equally well.
The average Debian user is an sophisticated linux user with an idealistic reason to use Debian. The point is, the pool of newbies is full of people using Red Hat.
T
For an example of the way things should be.
As I posted (if they ever post my response) to the article, "If you build it, they will come". Why does the Linux community always make it a point to convey how "great" their OS is compared to MS? The Linux community does not need to take up a crusade to gather users. If a person is a network admin, a app dev/systems programmer, dba, etc then they will be naturally drawn to the Linux platform. Average Joe user has no need for an OS like Linux, and never will. That's what Windows was designed for, Average Joe.
Don't get me wrong, I am a die-hard Linux user. For me, it's everything I've always wanted. And I didn't become a Linux user by hearing everyone say how great it was over Windoze. I was specifically looking for a stable UNIX platform for the x86, and Linux seemed to fit the bill. But, when my friends ask "Hey, do you think I should put Linux on my machine?", I reply "No, I don't think so." They do not want a task of maintaining and configuring a Linux box, they just want something that "goes".
Just my $0.02...
OK, here's one data point. I am a Linux newbie, but veteran geek (programmer/admin on many flavors of Unix and many other systems besides). I just bought Caldera 1.3 (with the "Idiot's Guide") and installed it as a dual boot with Win98.
/sbin/lilo after editing /etc/lilo.conf.
Upside:
(1) Installing was easy enough, where the "Idiot's Guide" covered my situation (fips to shrink the Win98 partition, then fdisk to add Linux partitions).
(2) Dual boot with LILO works well, but the documentation was unclear here on the need to run
Downside:
(1) My modem is a &%^!* winmodem (a Rockwell HCF, actually, but that meant nothing to me when I bought it). The box did not say "Requires Windows" or anything like that, and I've had it too long to return it. Someone is going to have to reverse engineer these things if Linux is to be usable for a large segment of the population. Has anyone tried?
(2) My Diamond Viper 550 video card is too new to be recognized by the XFree86 3.3.2 software, so right now I'm text-only.
So now I have to figure out what packages to download to make the video work, download them (using Win98), and figure out how to mount the Win98 partition under Linux so I can get to the downloaded packages. And all this just to get the initial install finished.
I can only imagine that by now a less computer-literate user would have wiped Linux out and given the disk space back to Win98.
(the following is a rant that slightly contradicts my statement that licenses don't matter, so sue me :)
On the contrary, many people start looking for alternatives to Linux after getting fed up the religion, demagoguery, idealization and mythology, endless flaming, ideology, and general yuckiness that seems to follow anything remotely GNU/FSF/RMS/GPL-related. Of course, others are drawn to exactly that. To each his own, I guess.
(rant over, sorry if I offended anyone :)
As to the original question, I'd imagine that Linux has really exploded in the last couple of years for several reasons:
Anyway, I hardly think BSD is hurting these days. In particular, FreeBSD has been keeping up a 200% annual growth rate for years, just like Linux has (although not for quite as long). It would not surprise me a bit if FreeBSD hits critical mass in 2-3 years, the way Linux did last year.
If licenses really had that much of an impact on how many people use what software, no one would have ever used KDE back in the pre-QPL days. However, it was enormously popular, even then. What about pre-Mozilla Netscape? Hell, what about Windows? If proprietary licenses didn't stop people from using that software, how could a freer license (freer than the GPL, that is) stop people from using BSD/X/CMU/whatever licensed software? I doubt anyone rejects software because the license is too free for their tastes. My own opinion is, each license suits different purposes, and projects should choose licenses based on their objectives. And of course, they can choose any license they damn well please, and no one has any right to flame them about it. For myself, unless there's some really compelling reason to do otherwise, I always try to take the freest route possible with what I write: straight up public domain, or something akin to the X license, at the very most. I could imagine circumstances in which I would want to GPL something, but thus far those circumstances haven't come up.
You're in luck. Q3 will be a shrink-wrapped product for Linux. Along with earlier id games. :)
Which is harder to install: W9x or Linux?
/dev/hdb1 or an IDE controller from a Riva TNT AGP card.
I submit that the best way to tell which is harder to install is to allow someone without any preconceived notions about how computers work (like my mom) do the installation. She wouldn't know a C: drive from
So if anybody has two wiped, but capable, systems and suitable copies of W9x and Redhat (or SuSE or whatever) and is willing to babysit Mom for a couple of weeks, then we can settle this argument.
IMHO I think PC preconceptions sometimes muddy the issues with Linux installs. Partitioning is goofy no matter which OS you use. (Try explaining differences between primary and extended/logical partitions to the novice. Try explaining FAT16 vs. FAT32 vs. NTFS vs. ext2.)
Fact is, no matter what you use, ya gotta learn something about your machine. And if you learned the M$ way of doing things early on in your computing life, then it's disappointing to have to chuck much of that hard earned knowledge when you attempt to install/use Linux.
That said, I agree that Linux installation could be improved, and having stated that, let's all realize that Linux installs are improving by leaps and bounds all the time. (C'mon remember early SlackWare? SLS? Yggdrasil?)
SuSE has some great utils (sax) for configuring X (a newbie nightmare) and configuring PPP (another newbie dread) under KDE has become a breeze with kppp (and for those who still prefer a RedHat flavor, try out Mandrake -- it's RedHat w/ KDE.)
Anyway, after my long-winded ramble, I think that if my mom sat down at a PC keyboard for the first time and was given the task of installing W9x or Linux, it'd be pretty much of a draw as to which OS was easier!
Linux has now about 20 WM (according to Suse Installation Manual) but the configuration files are all different... They should be standard, or, if that means less flexibility, at least they should be similar...
/usr/lib?
Linus has 3 desktops now, they should work together...
The file organisation should be more obvious, what is the point of installing Netscape in
The organisation of the configuration and installation files should be more clear, where are all the text files that define a ppp connection? this should be obvious for everyone, but it is not, at least for me!
Go to
http://members.ping.at/theofilu/netscape.html
and follow the directions. Netscape _used_ to crash on a regular basis, but hasn't since I applied this patch + shell script.
In sum: Your system is not configured right.
Is the "fix" awkward? Yes.
Should Netscape work "out of the box"? Yes, or at a minimum tell you that it's not configured properly.
I'm running v.4.51 on kernel 2.2.5.
I dunno about that. On the voodoo1 I always turn off the video filter. It makes everything look like it has horizontal red stripes!
Real programmers need no distro. Real programmers install from source. Real programmers use X only to display graphics while controlling it from a xterm. Ditto.
Now this is another prospective Linux rioter who will be saying "death to everything but Linux!!" while being caught.
Hmm....by "everything", do you mean even your mama's butt?
I'm Joe Luser, poster of what you are responding to. No, my post was not a troll, but I have never read a Linux book and have been using Linux for months. I can find stuff in docs but and/or search on net but don't think most intelligent non-technical people can - quickly enough. Books don't help much - the docs that come with the system should be good enough, but aren't.
I'm sorry that you are not getting more posts from non technical people - I'm a programmer trying to put myself in the place of Joe User. The fact that you are not getting more posts from Joe and Jane Users illustrates my point. I *still* maintain that such people aren't using Linux and that 99% of Linux home users are programmers or sysadmins or academic (university) people.
thanks
You copy the quote but you didn't read it.
No, I understood it. You don't. linux may be great, but the assertion in the original article is plain wrong. MacOS is a desktop OS which doesn't rely on a command line at all. (Whether that is good or bad is not the issue.)
If you don't want to know much about your computer and don't want to do
diffrent things in diffrent ways then don't run Linux/Unix. If you want
a Point-N-Click computer that a 5 year old can use and are willing to
give up some speed and options and live with a few crashes then get
MacOS.
Actually you are displaying childish behavior. Who are you to tell me not to run linux? Who are you to decide that GUI's are for 5 year olds? I simply pointed out several false claims that the article made. I don't see why you interprete my pointing out of fallacies in the article as attacks on your way of life (whatever that may be). Frankly, I think you give us linux users/advocates a bad name.
Actually you can get a command line in macos... it takes some real tallent, and i've only seen it once, but it was a genuine command prompt. I couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was, or how to use it, or anythin really, but it was a command prompt.
I agree with you. And I consider myself fluent in both NT and Linux. Linux just takes more time to get things done. Is this bad? For a small shop yes. For a larger shop no.
Example is Samba. It requires way too much tuning to make it fit into my network. Once it is tuned, cool. A Windows NT network takes about 5 seconds to install and configure.
Yes, there's some bloat in Windows. Surprise surprise. And there's a few fairly convoluted and poorly engineered API's. However: you sound like you've done a fair amount of Windows programming. Take some of your Windows applications and port them to Unix. Use the toolkit of your choice, there's plenty of them. In particular, how about an application that can produce printed output, or uses 3D hardware acceleration. You will find that getting the equivalent functionality is an absolutely monumental pain in the ass, or in some cases there is simply no way at all to get it. After you have tried this (after, not before), maybe then you will understand Jordy's point about Windows offering a more complete development environment. Religion aside (religion should *always* be pushed aside, at least if you want anyone to listen to you), it makes no sense to pretend the situation is any different, unless you just want to make MS look bad and Linux look good. If everyone pretended everything was OK all the time, nothing would ever get accomplished.
When Linux becomes a main-stream software phenomenon and it looks like that is possible, hard core geeks are just going to move to BSD to be diffrent from the minions of new linux users that use it because it is cool and the thing to have installed to at least seem clueful for a minute
yet another linux geek
I'd have to say it's at least partially due to the fragmentation. With Linux, the press (which is the reason for a great deal of Linux's popularity, I'm sure) has a specific thing to focus in on. With the BSDs, well, they either do an article on all of them (which causes the article to lose focus), or pick a specific one to talk about (which is kind of silly, because they're so similar). I'm not saying this fragmentation is A Bad Thing. On the contrary, having specialization like that probably helps. It's just harder to get across to people what you're doing when there are three of you.
And we can't discount the 'logo' possibility. The penguin, although not as cool as the daemon, has a wider base of fans.
Actually, the differences between the BSD license and the GPL are very important to businesses. Many businesses will expressly forbid their developers from using the "viral" (some say "contaminating") GPL'd code. More businesses are much more comfortable using BSD-licensed technology. Personally I think everyone should stand to gain from "free" software -- including people who pay companies for not-free software. If open-source developers don't want companies to be able to use their code without giving them credit, they're just being petty and selfish. I write code so that people can benefit from it, and I don't care if they know who the programmer was or not.
I work at Encanto Networks.. I will ask around and see how they came up with these results.
"If that is true, then Windows and Intel, and possible[sic] the Mac should beat Unix and the hardware it runs on hands down [..]"
I'm having trouble understanding what you're trying to say. Are you saying "If games drive the market, then Windows and Mac should outsell Unix"? If you are, then you're in agreement with the folks you're arguing against. Windows and MacOS *are* outselling Linux. If what you mean is "If games drive the market, then Windows and MacOS are technically better than Unix", then I must disagree with you. There is very little relationship between market pressures and technical excellence.
_
"Of the big OSses, the shittiest is the one with the most games."
Yes, that is true. Are you arguing that having games will make an OS "shitty"? I really can not agree with your opinion.
_
At present, I am evaluating Red Hat Linux. What an eye opener! Linux really is nice compared to my old BSD setup. And believe me, I was a BSD bigot. But so far, Linux has been very fun and smooth to setup. I'm so glad I don't have to fool with all that silly BSD "elf branding" and load paths just to get a word processor started. BSD is too complicated, and it offers very little in return for all the complications.
I've ordered Mathmatica for Linux. I can hardly wait. That is the final piece of the puzzle in creating a computing environment that is right for me. Now I have a nice word processor, and I will soon have my favorite maths program. All running natively under Linux, plus I get all the GNU tools and e-mail. And no microsoft software anywhere!
Linux (and especially FreeBSD) are beautifully simple to install - because I for one know what a fsck'ing partition is ... jeez! (and I am not going to tell you how I found out that secret bit of information).
If a person who knows nothing about computers tries to install Windows they do *not* find it easy (I have watched). If this guy's "techie" friends have been using computers long enough they can install Windows but they don't know what a partition or mount point is then they should not be using Unix - they should focus on mastering their Word macro skills and *JUST FORGET ABOUT USING UNIX*
What you just described is the equivalent of knowing how to drive a car but not how to fill it with gas which may be the goal of the Windows OS but is is just *NOT* and will *NEVER* be the way Unix works, sorry.
...and it will give you the debugger command line. The other option was that you were viewing MPW.
Video works now!
I went to www.xfree86.org and downloaded what they said was required for XFree86 3.3.3.1. I used "apropos" to find mcopy, then mcopy to get the files from the Win98 partition to the Linux partition, and then the X upgrade went great.
(Side question: when I ran XF86Setup to configure X, the screen came out *really* skewed. I fixed it using xvidtune, but do the horizontal/vertical settings usually mismatch so much?)
Journaling file system, huh? Well, no major commercial operating system for microcomputers currently has this function, so I don't see what they are talking about. AIX (JFS) Hint: Journaling File System ! has had this for 5-6 years (?) HP has this. (Veritas ?) Sun has this. (Veritas ?) And according to those knowledgeable about NT, NTFS also has a journaling filesystem. So I'll say that Linux is in sorry group with DOS, win95 and Macintosh...
I think you might be talking about the old article. There is a follow up in this month's NT magazine where the author clarifies the case against Linux's kernel design and the 2.2 specifics.
Bingo, you just nailed the #1 problem in my book. Also notice what happened when you mentioned it...you got three answers to use some GUI/script configurator from 3 different people on 3 different distros...none of which was very helpful!
Most of the time I just get over the hurdle and forget it, I really need to doc a paper on this or something.(if you want to help email me) People need to know more than just use 'pppconfig', they need to know how to troubleshoot a misbehaving PPP.
And Redhat is the worst, I always had to go manually configure a PPP, the wizard sux roks. I suppose its because RH tries to use 10-12 files to do the same thing that only uses 4 files in Slackware.
Joe Robertson
jmrober1@ingr.com
Two things :
;)
Hardware Acceleration 2D/3D and a Standard Library for programmers a la DirectX or a DirectX Wrapper!!, ouughttt!, that hurts! I know but at least that will almost give a solution for the Portability Factor(Even tough programming with Glide [3DFX] is a Neat Contributing Effort and must say Muuuucho better than DirectX).
Hardware acceleration support for the XServer!! for free!! a la runtime DirectX dll's or something the like... (I know.. no support from manufactures practically, don't even considering implementation problems related to the current architecture of the XFree86 Server)
That will surely make Linux can Spread as the Flu!
Remember People Start Playing Games, Later They don't want to Reboot! so they seek those other applications they need to communicate with their friends (ICQ - Email - Then and FTP Client - and so on and on and on....
Suddently they realize they don't even need to have windows installed and another Three or Four Games can be installed in That Free Space! (*grins*)
I think there are really only 2 or 3 predominant WinModem-style chip[set]s. But there's still the problem of cloning _all_that_stuff_ in done in software.
I think a major thing that a lot of people have missed is Linux's lack of unified APIs. It usually doesn't matter to Linux's normal user base, science, data anylasis, server, but if Linux is to become a major OS, not just a server OS it needs good APIs. Many APIs seem horribly kludgy to me. OSS and ALSA are competing, OSS is already part of Linux, but ALSA seems superior. Linux does not support direct to the metal graphics very well. There is X for displaying the GUI, but it seems to me this client accessing the x server accessing the driver accessing the kernal is way too complicated. So like it or not, MS is on the right track with Direct X. It lets programmers use a common API to get extremly close to the hardware. Integration is not necessarily a bad thing, and integrating a set of APIs into linux without competing standards would be a huge benifit to the commercial programmers. Windows has Direct X, Be has BeDirect, Solaris has XGL, but what does Linux have?
Actually games encourages an OS to become more powerful. Windows 98 with direct X 6.1 is much better than windows 95 with direct X 1.0. Gaming has driven MS to get rid of the damn GDI to make the OS better. If developer were pushing gaming on Linux, then you can bet that Linux would get better quicly.
Now don't get me wrong, I love linux, but I realize that when it comes to games, Linux is nowhere near windows in terms of performance. The main reason is because Linux was not designed to be a multimedia OS. Sure X is neat, but the client server things is aweful if you care most about speed and efficiancy. GGI is woefully undersupported, and SVGA lib is not that great. My point is that Linux desperatly needs a set of good graphic/sound APIs. It is more important than ease of use even.
If one says that he will talk about the weak points, one should talk about the weak points, :).
not spread Anti-FUD. There are other, legitimate channels for that
I must speak out about this here, since it happened to me just this weekend.
:) ) and they were able to install.
I was hanging out on IRC, when a few people I know came in. Amazingly enough, each one had gotten hold of a new "virgin" machine to play with, and nuked the hard drive clean.
As a point of reference, both were medium-skill Windows users. Both had Windows install disks/CDs and Linux install disks/CDs at the ready.
Well, both came in looking for help installing Linux. Wanna know where the problem was? Setting up the partitions and mount points. Both of them were able to install Windows on these machines flawlessly (one with 95, one with 98) and get them up and running. Then, when they cleaned 'em again to setup 'em up to run Linux, they got completely stumped setting up partitions and mount points.
Once I got them past that part, things got better for them (mostly
IMHO (which probably doesn't mean much) Linux installation *is* harder than Windows 95/98 is. And don't tell me it is irrelevant, because it's not. People using Windows who want to try Linux need to be able to install it easily and take it for a test drive. If they cannot do that, then they most likely will not switch, even if they go to buy a new computer where they can get it pre-installed. Why? Because they want to try it out first of course.
Now, making Linux easier to install than Windows, and then saying, "Well, they are both hard!" is not good either. Linux should be made *simple* to install, with the option of doing custom installs. Kinda like lots of programs have a "typical" or "custom" installation in the Windows world, the same would be nice for Linux, which a "typical" would do the setup of things for you, using whatever spare HD space is available, etc.
But, the installation issue is not irrelevant. In fact, it's extremely relevant to the issue at hand, and that is gaining mindshare and new users. If it's too hard to take for a test drive easily, most wont even bother trying.
When I and others have brought this up before, here and elsewhere, it's counted as pure FUD, but I must protest. Saying that there are no Liunx drivers for "X," as long as that is true, is NOT FUD or anything close. It's the simple truth-- and even if it hurts, you'll have to deal with it.
For example: most 3D cards. Take an i740 chip, a Riva TNT, PowerVR, and lots of other cards marketed and sold as 3D PC video boards. How many drivers exist to really take advantage of the HW on them? [And Mesa in SW rendering doesn't count for jack s***.] Just about none. Same with Aureal and Soundblaster Live cards-- not too well supported.
This deficiency in drivers is a real problem, and needs addressing. Trying to deny there's a problem is just plain stupid. [And such discussions almost invariably degenerate into GPL vs binary-only driver debates, when such energy could be better focused into getting ANY support.]
He says "The first stems from a belief that all Unix religions rely heavily on the command line. They do, as does Windows with DOS. Try doing anything really useful in a Microsoft operating system and you will find yourself dropping into DOS frequently. Worse, the System Registry, which was supposed to kill the confusion over autoexec.bat and config.sys files, has instead made these earlier configuration trials seem trivial."
I used to think the same thing about windows WHEN I STARTED USEING IT... but I almost never use the DOS prompt anymore. Nathan has confused useful with time wasteing OS maintanence. Useful is what I do in Visual Studio, Photoshop or Wordpad.
The registry is poorly used and is itself a poor implamentation, but the same can be said about a lot of Linux things. I think it's main point was to get rid of .ini files spammed all over the place and NOT autoexec/config files as he said. Haveing shared libraries and whatnot writing to .ini and .conf files is a BAD THING. Writing to the registry is better.
After some more shoveling of crap he says: "The other great myth is Linux is hard to install. This probably comes from the fact that most PCs ship with an operating system, usually Microsoft's. In order to access another OS, you have to make room for it and this usually entails a dual-boot scenario."
I've installed Redhat, Win3.1, Win95, Win98, WinNT. Redhat loses by a wide margin. Not just that but to actually DO anything with it, you often have to wade through really poorly maintained man and info pages. That being said, it's truely frustrating with Win9X when something goes wrong because it's quit difficult to figure out the problem. Overall though, it takes far less time to do setup and (re)-config with Windows, especially for non-gurus. Now, a lot of (re)-config stuff is close or is there for Redhat, but it needs to be more intuitive. You wouldn't think it would be hard to beat M$'s ease of use with the shutdown option being in the start button... but somehow Redhat has a ways to go.
He blathers on some more about this "For that matter, how many can access Windows95 files from their NT installation like they can with Linux?" He confuses me with that one as I have NO idea what he's talking about. This machine I'm on now I've installed Win95, WinNT and Redhat 5.1. My other machine has Win98 and WinNT... Redhat 5.2 as well but X won't work.
Then he says "Technically, I would rank myself as a notch above dolt when it comes to Linux" Oh... now he tells us. We're supposed to listen to someone who obviously has no clue what he's talking about and then finally admits it. :)
The article is a great idea, but it doesn't address the real issues that frustrate people trying to use Linux. It does address some of the FUD about lack of apps, no desktop, etc., but anyone seriously considering Linux already knows the opposite. Therefore, the article is most misleading and defeats its purpose - to help address and deal with the weak points for the benefit of attracting new users who will get far enough into linux to at least install and use it.
/usr/doc and put it in /opt/usr/geek. Distros should accept NO applications or utilities from ANYONE without documentation in text and HTML.
The *real* issues have nothing to to with so-called lack of desktop apps or games or use of command line. They are:
1. PC's today are no longer clones of IBM pc's. They are designed specifically for Windows in the same way that Macs are designed to run MacOS and Amigas were designed to run AmigaOS. How does this affect the typical home user seeking to install Linux on a new or relatively new PC, with or without the hassle of non-destructive repartitioning in case he wants to keep his Win installation intact? Let's assume he doesn't and wants a 100% Linux box with minimal partitioning.
a. The likelihood is that his modem is a WinModem, or if it is not the modem is almost certainly PnP. Forget it. Only a technical person can user isapnptools, in fact. In theory anyone who reads the instructions closely enough can, but in fact such "non-nerds" become nerds in the process, regardlesss of what they do for a living.
b. Ditto Sound card. Almost certainly PnP.
c. Odds are very high, but not certain, that the newest AGP graphics cards won't be supported or won't be fully supported, even with the latest 3.3.1 xfree86. However, if he is even one version back, even more are not supported. Please note that major distros like Debian and Slackware are not using the latest stable version of Xfree 86 and therefore are retrograde and to be avoided - unless you are installing on an old 486.
That's just for starters. We aren't even mentioning the latest DVD drivers, TV drivers, Scanner support, etc. All that is iffy.
No modem, no internet, no sound, no video (except text mode console). So, Joe User takes the box back to the dealer and has them reinstall Windows.
2. Linux documentation *SUCKS*. Man pages are just for reference. They have zero examples. Even one or two examples makes all the difference.
Info is a disaster, without a special info browser. Just something else GNU to be different.
Then there's Tex, postscript, SGML, HTML. That covers most of it. There are just too many formats for documentation and there is no way to get at it to find information needed for a particular topic, without building a special database constructed with complex searches using grep, find, etc., or perl, all of which are beyond the grasp of the new user. He needs documentation on how to use grep, find and perl first, remember?
There sould only be two kinds of docs for every application in addition to man. These are plain text and HTML, which can be read with Lynx in text mode or a grahpical browers in X. That's it. Anything else is extra. SGML is a development tool. Yet, typically Linux apps furnish documentation in SGML. Doh!
That should be enough to make the point that the article was incredibly dishonest about the real weak points of Linux. There are others, but if the hardware that most people now have will not support Linux without a *lot* of configuration and scripting (or not at all) and if the average literate user cannot easly find held *with examples* on imporatant topics then he can't use Linux without spending months doing what the distribution packagers should have done:
1. Honestly, and up front, list specific hardware supported and not supported BEFORE users download, order CD's or puchased boxed sets for $50.
2. Install a central documentation database with links to topic on all commands and common utilities in PLAIN TEXT and HTML *only* and with EXAMPLES. Remove all the useless postscrip, sgml Info and Tex documentation from
3. Get your distributions up to date Debian and Slackware - especially your drivers (latest kernel and modules and X) - or get the hell out of the way of those that do. Shame on you!
Joe Luser
I'd have to recommend kppp. It works great!
It allows a "demo" install of Linux on a DOS or VFAT filesystem, or a cohabitating Linux installation without requiring a repartition of your harddrive. It allows me to say my mom has Linux on her computer (does she use it, well, that's another story...).
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=16384 /swapfile /swapfile
# sync
# mkswap
# swapon
You'll probably want to add the last to your /etc/rc.d/rc.system file to automatically turn on swap at boot.
...yes, performance suffers mildly, but on today's quick li'l boxen, the casual user won't know any better or notice, and converting to full-on Linux might provide an added benefit or two....
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Worse, the System Registry, which was supposed to kill the confusion over autoexec.bat and config.sys files, has instead made these earlier configuration trials seem trivial.
The Registry was created to provide a place for Windows configuration settings. In a typical Windows installation you have 10-15k registry keys, reparsing an ini file over and over containing 10k keys to check if an application changed a setting would be silly, keeping it in memory is even sillier.
Remember databases are not evil. For all intents and purposes, your filesystem is a database, so saying text config files are more stable is a contradiction.
Autoexec.bat and config.sys still exist on windows 9x systems, they are DOS init scripts.
Just because windows has a bad implementation of a registry database doesn't mean it's a bad idea. AIX, MacOS, MacOS X Server, and a few other majors all have configuration databases which are extremely stable and robust.
Plus, you aren't meant to edit the registry directly. That's what that 500 meg GUI is for.
Modern X-based systems are amazingly user-friendly and often superior in design to commercial variants because they put stuff in there that we as users have demanded and created.
Superior is a strong word. Windows9x and Windows NT are extremely developer friendly. If you can get past the bloat of MFC (which Windows developers seem to have no problem doing), it is an extremely complete GUI API.
Consistancy is also an important part of the GUI experience. Microsoft has tried to maintain control over the consistancy of it's desktop for a very good reason. A user should be able to use any windows machine without having to relearn the interface.
I've never been a big Microsoft advocate. Their software is buggy and bloated, their development staff is directed by marketing, their spindoctors could make the catholic pope look like the antichrist if they wanted to, and their fearless leader has so much money that he simply doesn't care any more.
But, being a developer I understand that Windows does provide a lot that Linux doesn't... right now at least.
I'm ready to be flamed...
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
That would be, "Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
I'm not trying to be cute here (well, okay, yes I am). SGI has been rumbling about getting Linux up and running on a large-scale Origin system. When you think about it, it's in their interest to get behind any type of promising OS (be it Linux or NT), since there's still a lot of money to be made in large-scale systems like the Origins. After all, IRIX hasn't exactly proved to be a market slayer...
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Regarding item (2.), in RH 5.0 I too ran in text only mode, but in to Xwindows very easily under 5.2 with a Diamond Viper 330.
... [have gone]... back to Win98."
"... computer-literate user would
I probably am less computer literate than you, however, I do not give up easily.
I agree...however the program is not just one of partitions and mount points, but also the rest of the installation.
When I recently installed win95 on a desktop, it auto-detected everything need to run properly, including everything needed for the GUI. My monitor was auto-detected (it even knew the name and model number), my video card was auto-detected, same with my serial mouse. In Linux, none of this happened. In order to get Linux running with a GUI, I had to mess around with XF86Setup, which attempted to autodetect some stuff, but resulted in a lot more mucking around with video modes and a lot more reboots due to not being able to get out of a video mode that I found out (too late) my monitor and/or video card didn't support. It'd be nice if Linux would auto-detect and auto-setup those sorts of things, letting you change them later if you so desire.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree...however the program...
Oops, I meant "the problem..."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let's see what my Win98 did:
Well, it said that my Matrox G200 was an OAK SVGA and refused to configure it at any resolution higher than 640x480 in 256 colors. It refused to recognize my Symbios 53c8xx-based SCSI card AT ALL, and nothing I tried would get it to recognize it no matter how much I wiped off the hard drive and reinstalled with the Symbios driver on a disk and etc. It didn't detect my old NE-2000 clone network card at all (non-PnP, but still...).
Red Hat 5.2 detected my video card fine, detected my SCSI card fine (and let me boot off of it!), in fact, the only way I could get Win98 to install on my machine (since it wouldn't detect my SCSI card, and my CD-ROM is hooked to the SCSI card) was to boot into Linux and copy everything to the FAT32 partition that I made with the Windows boot floppy.
Point: Auto-detection depends on what hardware you have in your system. Red Hat's installer is very good at auto-detecting PCI devices, not so good at detecting ISA devices, and doesn't do parallel device autodetection at all. For PCI devices, Red Hat actually auto-detects a larger percentage than Win98 does, in my experience. But if you still have a bunch of old PnP ISA devices, well, Win98 will detect them, Red Hat won't. Time to upgrade, eh?
-- Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Linux is easy to install if you buy a real computer instead of a DELL.
For example, Linux installs on one of our computers in less than 15 minutes flat.
The DELL situation will be remedied whenever DELL gives a damn. Until then, don't buy DELL. Simple, see?
Why on Earth buy a machine labeled "Designed for Windows 98" to run Linux?!
-- E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Windows assumes that you want to use the entire drive as a Windows 95 partition. Believe me, I spent most of my weekend rebuilding my parent's Win95 box. If RedHat (blindly) assumed that you wanted to use the entire hard drive as a Linux root partition, installation would be just as easy as the Win95 one.
Instead, RedHat assumes (correctly) that you may
want to have other OSes installed. Yes it causes some trouble, and that's why RedHat offers customer support and install manuals to help. I have yet to see a manual on how to actually install Win95.
"I expect to have publicly testable code for journaling over ext2fs in about 4 weeks or so."
Should be interesting eh?
The more you know, the less you understand.
Do you still care about the matter of mounting filesystems on the tree (rather than having them all have entries on the root)? Or has someone else answered it well 'nuff?
The idea is basically that file locations are no longer tied to devices. If you want "/usr/local" (think "Program Files") to be on your new hard drive, but you don't want to have to change your applications' configuration files, some similar means is neccesary.
This way, you can also define a system that is "handy" to you. You're not tied to having your filesystems off the root. You CAN have hda1 be "/c" if you want to, but it's optional. One of the ideas central to The Unix Way is: Flexibility Is Good.
ANd you'll find that just 'bout all linux/unix folks think this same way. They have built-in assumptions about what you MUST know and what IS better. All I can offer is that once you understand where these folks are coming from, you'll agree with them (and so, you'll be one). Scary, no?
...check the docs at XFree's site, see if the GGI project has a KGI driver for your video card and consider buying SciTech Software's Display Doctor for Linux (really nice folks; They're local to me).
As for the difficulties you encourtered w/ the installation, those aren't neccesary. Using a dedicated HD when dual-booting (as I reccomend that my clients do) or some commercial software like PartitionMagic helps solve the repartitioning stuff; Installing off a $7 CheapBytes CD (or a network image if at work, or a Mandrake CD I just burned...) eliminates the mounting-Win98-partition deal...
In short, most of the difficulties you encountered have workarounds available. You were man enough to do it the hard way; More power to 'ya. That doesn't meen Average Joe Newbie has to go through the same difficulties, or even that he should. But the flexability to allow one to do things the hard way is there... and I think that's a Good Thing.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Linux needs a good ombudsman -- somebody who can give constructive criticism without laying on the FUD. I hope those involved in developing and promoting Linux give this guy some attention, without flaming him to a lifeless cinder or spamming him back to the stone ages.
Posted by cyttorak:
/usr/blah/./ -directory? Shouldn't they be in some place handy?
.." and "..it IS better that it is so..."
I see that you have the same problem i did when i installed RedHat (after using win x.xx for years).
I asked my friend (is-a-linux-guru): Why the cd-rom drive and floppy drives are hidden to some
The answer was: "..You MUST know that
That was neither fair discussion about pros & cons of Linux. It's rarely that. sad.
> I've installed Redhat, Win3.1, Win95, Win98,
> WinNT. Redhat loses by a wide margin.
You're weird. For nonstandard hardware, NT is much more painful to install.
I wouldn't know about Win95 or Win98 because it's been so long since I used an OS without preemptive multitasking that my memories would be inaccurate.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
"Sorry, but GNU/Linux can't scale to 128 processor [snip] systems yet."
Beautiful. Didn't Microsoft perfect the vaporware technique years ago? Linux runs good on systems that developers have access too, however, the overwhelming majority of Linux developers don't have access to the many processor machinery needed to fully port and extend Linux on. And it will still take quite a while to get the QoS that companies like IBM and Amdahl can promise.
That being said, there's a much better chance of getting Linux (or the *BSDs) up and running on an Origin-class server than NT, considering the OS architecture.
Explain to me why I was able to run Windows /var/log/messages
/. consensus is "Linux is
for three years solid without any filesystem
corruption, then when disks are reformatted
to run Linux, after a few months of light
usage and proper shutdowns, the
start gathering "Bad SuperBlock" and "Error
in directory" messages??? Could be flaky
RAM or bad disk controllers. Fine, but bear
in the same machines ran Windows without my
files being trashed.
Yes, ext2 is far superior to FAT16 or FAT32.
Yes, shame on me for using old hardware.
Yes, I run 6 newer Linux boxen without a single
filesystem hiccup yet. I hope they remain so...
So as usual the
fine. Windows sucks."
Very nice.
- If your modem has a real UART (many don't)
- If your LAN adapter is on the compatibility list
- If you know the gritty technical specs of your video card and monitor
- If your video card is in the XFree86 compatibility list
If your hardware does not meet these conditions, then it could hold any newbie back for weeks before they are able to solve the issue. It's easy for an experienced Linux user, but I've been stuck back there in newbieville will incompatible mystery hardware and it's frustrating, but also a great learning experience.As far as an honest discussion of Linux drawbacks, lets talk about the instability of the ext2 filesystem for starters. I'm sorry but I've hard three disks go south on my in three different Linux boxes which before these same three systems ran three different flavors of Windows for years without any corruptions in the filesystem. True maybe my RAM was flaky, bad disk controller, whatever, but I wish ext2 was less prone to such errors, like power failures. (Thank God for UPS supplies)
From linux-quotes:
;-)
:)
I've run DOOM more in the last few days than I have the last few months. I just love debugging
(Linus Torvalds)
I'm a 'real user', and not much of a consumer, but I still like games. That's why we already have xboing and xkobo, and there are people writing FreeCiv and DUMB. There are many open-source games out there, and until companies port their games, we're going to be cloning them.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The 'Joe User' argument only works with the 'Joe User' computer. I'm not Joe User, but I bought my computer for $1,100 at my local computer store, and just got cheap hardware. This is a pretty common trend these days... I installed Red Hat 5.0 originally, I think, and everything worked fine. Of course, 5.2 was even better... :)
:)
I never worried about if something was 'on the list', but I believe that 'Joe User' would have the same problem with installing NT. (However, NT4SP1 installed fine on my old P133, it's just slower than Linux was, and SP3 is much slower.
Yep, Linux ain't Windoze. I like OSes, and my Linux computer is something I use productively. I don't have to turn it on because... well, it just doesn't have to shut down that often.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm with you until you get to that "...it is an extremely complete GUI API". I guess I can't dissagree about completeness, but I would suggest that the API itself is incredibly bloated. My main beefs are with Win32 printing, ComCtrl32 objects, RichEd32 objects, and to a lesser degree GDI32 (although I have been burned more than once by their 16 bit limitations).
::EndPage() or CDC::EndPage() sometime (the CDC is a thin wrapper). There is a seperate section for EVERY SINGLE FLAVOR of windows. 5 windows, 5 behaviors (I'm counting win311 and wince here).
I do the printing module for a commercial tax application, and it is a MESS of IfNT() crap, not to mention inconsistancies in 95 and 98 that make me do a lot of redundant work-- just to be safe. Check out the documentation for
I would rather have a consistant API that may be a little sketchy in parts and make me do a little more work than forcing me to code around all the different configurations and hoping to god that they don't change behavior underneath me forcing me to ship disks again for MS changes. (I know DLLs are supposed to be backwards compatible, but in the ComCtrl case, I've noticed the details get fudged. The list control comes to mind.)
As an aside, I should mention that I find MFC pretty thin in most cases (Doc-View printing comes to mind as an exception)... The only reason I dislike it is that it immediately ties me to the "One MS Solution". I mean, we spent 10 years on a C++ standard... wouldn't it be nice to take advantage of it now that it is here?
Ah well \
Pax -- Ob
OK. Conceded. MS has a solution for your problem, whether your problem is 3d developement, network programming, or plain old vanilla applications.
HOWEVER, I still feel that many of the windows API are just a simple case of bad design. They are CERTAINLY inconsistantly designed. I furthermore think that the MS solution is almost always inferior. Rate them yourself... CORBA-COM? D3D-GL? Win32(GUI portion)-Xtk?
I like my work a whole lot more when I don't have to fight the API (or the compiler).
I am also looking at this from a programming point of view instead of a user interface point of view. Consistancy of UI is important- blah blah blah. We've heard it before. I believe you. That said, I personally don't care too much about GUIs. I think they cloud the process unless done right, and I don't think MS does them right very often. Please, go out, write the best GUIs out there. I will appreciate it, others will appreciate it.
All that said. I write WinXX software because I get paid for it. I go home at night and write *nix software because I love it. Someday I'll get paid to write *nix software, and there will be dancing in the streets, and good old biblical celebration.
->You are right: it is complete.
->Complete or not, I would rather work with consistant, well designed API.
If I sound cross, my apologies.
Pax -- Ob
What are you on? You only need to know about name servers and directory services if you need such things. For a small workgroup, you likely won't.
The same is somewhat true of sendmail. For the most part it's preconfigured. There is very little to configure for the small network or single user. The canned defaults are pretty much useful as is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Interoperability has nothing to do with what the widgets look like. That is one of the singlemost boneheaded fallacies of the MacOS & Windows way of looking at the desktop. It's the message passing and object sharing standards that are relevant. All of this eye-candy BS is just a distraction from the real issues.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...assuming you're lucky enough for it to work for you that way.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Printed output? Render to postscript? You can render video to poscript if you like too (openstep).
Hardware Accelerated 3D? Use GL.
Either are vendor support issues not API issues. The abstractions are there, they just need vendor support underneath (printers, vidcards).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you really want easy you should have bought a Mac and have no damn business bothering with a Wintel PC at all. It's more likley that you just want cheap and will only buy cheap or perhaps want the market leader and won't buy other than the market leader even if it's not gauranteed as easy as you claim you want it to be.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
rpm -i --nodeps --force *rpm
This is pretty much a nobrainer and is even documented in several places where there are a maze of dependencies to deal with (E for one).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's far too easy to bring in stupid Windowsisms into criticisms of Linux or to bring up the obvious (lesser 3rd party support).
While many criticisms lack any real value for lack of detail.
Any useful criticism basically needs to be a specification for that thing which Linux lacks. Far too few criticisms of Linux get anywhere near such a thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My scanner and my TV card work just fine under Linux. It helps to look before one leaps and there are some obvious unecessary problems (ATI) however it is not as grim as you paint it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
An expensive 'dedicated hardware firewall' just might end up being little more than a specialized PC with a freeBSD kernel in it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Red Hat 5.2 includes "server" and "workstation" auto-installs, which wipe the disk clean and automatically configure some sane partitioning scheme, as well as a "custom" installation that lets you have control over the sizing and mounting of partitions. I used custom, because I was setting up a dual-boot config. People who want to have control over their partitions can do just that; people that are willing to trust Red Hat's idea of a good partitioning scheme can skip the partition configuration step of the installation.
Chris DiBona
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Funny...the one time I did a precompiled installed I just told apt-get to fetch the files and it worked. Of course, most of the time I recompile and install it in a cronjob while I'm asleep, so I can't comment on the current set of packages..
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I have to take issue with this one. Microsoft certainly tries to maintain control, but not consistency. I have MSIE4 and MS Office 97 installed on top of NT 4 here, and each of those has subtle differences in their widgets, layout, and behavior. They're not as different as Motif vs. OpenLook, and people seem to have little problem coping, but it's probably no more different than Qt, Motif, and GTK+ (using the default theme).
And for that matter, people moving from Win 3.1 to 95 had to relearn basically all of the interface. People did it, probably because the new interface was so much better.
Not to knock consistency, but I think that sometimes it's emphasized at the expense of quality.
These examples don't have so much to do with Linux as with the hardware vendors. Linux is not intrinsically harder than Windows to install on any hardware. It certainly has nothing to do with Linux giving you greater control. It's just that hardware vendors tend to help Microsoft make it easy to install Windows, and get in the way of making it easy to install Linux.
Which is not to trivialize the issue. There's certainly effort that can be taken by Linux developers to increase hardware support. But this effort is a) hard (and more so than for people like Microsoft who get the specs and/or drivers from the manufacturers), and b) relatively expensive. I think for the time being, it's much better to be able to auto-detect hardware and have the installer say "I know what that is, let me configure it for you" or "I don't know what that is, but if it's one of the following, you can configure it yourself..." or especially "I know what that is, but Linux doesn't support it."
On the other hand, we're obviously likely to see more and more hardware vendors offer explicit Linux support as the market demands it.
Just typing the command name should work (like in DOS) unless "/usr/games" isn't in your PATH environment variable (also like in DOS). Unlike in DOS, the path entries are separated by colons, and the current directory is generally not included (for security reasons). I suspect that this latter part is what tripped you up, since it seems counter-intuitive, but it's really a good idea.
I as a computer user don't care if my desktop is consistent with others desktops. They can do what they like. I do care if mine moves around on me. Consistency is not the same as homogeneity.
But I don't care about consistency nearly as much as I do usability. I'm willing to learn a new thing if it offers an obvious, significant advantage (e.g., Windows 95 compared to 3.1). Most people would agree.
Which is not to say that Linux is superior in either regard.
There are plenty of users with atypical needs who aren't willing to spend a lot of time mucking around with their computers to get stuff working (especially when it works quite easily in Windows). Musicians and artists are a good example. You simply can't do serious music work on Linux, not because of any intrinsic flaws, but because there's a lot of work to be done.
--
Some of the conclusions drawn in the article are not valid because they are based on statistics based on a sample of one. For instance, the author says that he didnt have any trouble hooking up a dialup connection, therefore, installation ease in Linux is good.
False! One only has to look at comp.os.linux.setup or the linux-newbie list. A huge number of help requests are from newbies having trouble with (a) PPP or (b) configuring X for their video adapters.
Of course, this installation ease also seems to be distribution specific. For instance, the Debian PPP install (pppconfig) is so painless, that I rarely see any Debian users cry out for PPP configuration help.
So how is one to make an assessment of whether the installation procedure is good, bad, or ugly? A fair assessment could only come from a large number of samples. For Linux, this is pretty easy to gather as all / most cries for help are in the public domain. This is not true for other operating systems. So I dont think that it is possible to get a meaningful comparison of ease of install between operating systems. An objective assessment for Linux only, should however be possible.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
I think that one roadblock to a truly easy install is that you typically need TWO partitions. One for swap and one for files. This makes it impossible to just install to the active paartition like Windows does. You need to make some assumptions on how to set up the paratitions. Is it possible to use a swap file on the ext2 partition? If so, then an install as easy as Win 95 should be possible.
Okay, how much credibility does a Windows--recently-turned-Linux user have when talking about the fundamental drawbacks of an OS? This article was about as useful as the wonderful IRC answer "Well, it works for me... you must be doing something wrong."
"Modern Unices including Linux no more rely on them than any other desktop operating system. "
MacOS excluded, of course.
"And the world's most popular operating system -- Microsoft's command line only Disk-based OS (DOS) -- is still the most popular. If difficulty was a barrier to adoption, then how did Microsoft succeed?"
Different era, different users. PCs are now being targeted at EVERYONE. In the 80s, they were targeted at over educated, over paid yuppies. (Look at the ads from back then in Compute or Byte - you had the white male in a suit, housewife, 2.5 kids and a dog, clustered around thier floor model wood cabinet TeeVee, with an IBM PC Jr. plugged into it.)
Oh, yeah, there was the office workers, who don't exactly have a choice in the matter, and whose bosses were seduced by the cheaper price of IBMs.
I agree with you.
However, this coloum starts out on the right foot, but descends into Anti-FUD. As I said elswhere, it's about as useful as the Linux user on IRC that says "Well, it works for me... I don't know what's wrong on your end."
Having someone that can address drawbacks impartially would be... I don't know. It would just be.
It's from the book The Psychology of Computer Programming (which I have on order) or something. It was reviewed a while back here.
"offical and supported"
... only on 3dfx hardware, and we all know how wonderful that is (yay... 16 bit colour... pretty.... NOT.)
It's disappointing to see a linux user spreading fud. The review I was hoping to see, and didn't, wouldn't have needed to mention MS. Is there anyone out there that knows of an article that does what this one should have done? Otherwise, is there anyone interested in writing one? I'm willing to provide input and would be looking forward to reading it. I'd also hope a paper like this becomes the goal list for linux and is maintained as changes occur.
For your three key points:
1. The information is there if people want to get it - it's not concealed by anyone. I wouldn't even buy hardware for my Windows box without first checking that it was supported, let alone under Linux. Windows NT has a similar problem.
2. All documentation should be provided in SGML at the maintainer level so that distributions can put out text and HTML, or anything else they decide is appropriate. For many purposes, HTML simply isn't good enough, so a blanket ban on SGML is short-sighted. My theory is that any documentation is better than none, so I wouldn't complain if it came in GIF format.
3. This one's nonsense, I'm afraid. Debian is using 3.3.2, which is hardly "retrograde". So it's missing the G200. So what? You fail to understand that upgrading an enormous suite of software like X takes a long time to fully test and integrate with the rest of the distribution. Fortunately for Red Hat, that's something they've never been too bothered about (hence all of the recent updates and patches, security advisories, etc). Shame on Red Hat, perhaps?
Rob Wilderspin
This has actually been remedied by the LinuxPPC group for some time. They have a small linux partition that will mount on the MacOS's HFS or HFS+ filesystems then quit the MacOS and provide a good little demo of the power of linux. All without even reformatting. Yes, it is a very limited version of LinuxPPC, but it allows those that are not yet ready to repartition their drive for LinuxPPC/MacOS (or have a spare drive) to try out Linux. I think that some of the large x86 Linux Distros should take notice of the elegance that LinuxPPC took with their "live," version.
Windows assumes that you want to use the entire drive as a Windows 95 partition.
...
If RedHat (blindly) assumed that you wanted to use the entire hard drive as a Linux root partition, installation would be just as easy as the Win95 one. Instead, RedHat assumes (correctly) that you may want to have other OSes installed.
You may want multiple OSes installed on your computer, but you're in a decided minority. The majority of people who buy computers have no interest in maintaining multiple OSes. Therefore it is correct from the standpoint of "what most people want/will want" that Microsoft assumes your entire drive will be used for Windows. Just as it should be a correct assumption for Linux distrubutions like Red Hat.
I'm not saying there's no room for an advanced setup wizard to allow those of us who are technically included to fiddle with every detail, but if the goal is to get as many people up and running on Linux as possible, there must be a "most" common setup that is no more difficult than popping in the CD-ROM, booting, and perhaps asking the few questions that the Windows 98 setup requires.
'nuff said.
If you don't want to know much about your computer and don't want to do diffrent things in diffrent ways then don't run Linux/Unix. If you want a Point-N-Click computer that a 5 year old can use and are willing to give up some speed and options and live with a few crashes then get MacOS.
Trying to make one OS a cure all is DUMB. It's just as dumb as thinking Windoze is for everyone and can be used to do anything. If MS was just happy with the desktop client world im sure they could make a real good OS with a real nice GUI. BUT they try to be a cure all, and you end up with 3 diffrent OS versions(9x,NT,CE) that arnt realy (i mean REALY) good at anything.
I have to return some videotapes...
'nuff said.
/Could/ just replace the GUI with a CLI.
If you don't want to know much about your computer and don't want to do diffrent things in diffrent ways then don't run Linux/Unix. If you want a Point-N-Click computer that a 5 year old can use and are willing to give up some speed and options and live with a few crashes then get MacOS.
Trying to make one OS a cure all is DUMB. It's just as dumb as thinking Windoze is for everyone and can be used to do anything. If MS was just happy with the desktop client world im sure they could make a real good OS with a real nice GUI. BUT they try to be a cure all, and you end up with 3 diffrent OS versions(9x,NT,CE) that arnt realy (i mean REALY) good at anything.
Oh and BTW:
X is just a shell same with the CLI(bash,csh,whatever). X dosnt run on top of the CLI it runs on top of the kernel. The CLI also runs on top of the kernel. It is the same way with the MacOS GUI. You
GUI's are also not a cure all.
I have to return some videotapes...
>>For example: most 3D cards. Take an i740 chip, a >>Riva TNT, PowerVR, and lots of other cards >>marketed and sold as 3D PC video boards. How >>many drivers exist to really take advantage of >>the HW on them?
/NEWEST/ X didnt support.
Well what are you wanting to do with your linux box? play games? If so I think you sould be running a diffrent OS.
You want to do some real gfx work then maybe you should be looking at a SGI system or something.
I think the reson you dont see support for all the 3D cards is that there is no real need for them in Linux.
As for the 2D card i have yet to run into a PCI (or ISA) VGA card that the
I have to return some videotapes...
>> "For example: most 3D cards. Take an i740 chip, a Riva TNT, PowerVR, and lots of other cards marketed and sold as 3D PC video boards. How many drivers exist to really take advantage of the HW on them?"
/NEWEST/ X didnt support.
Well what are you wanting to do with your linux box? play games? If so I think you sould be running a diffrent OS.
You want to do some real gfx work then maybe you should be looking at a SGI system or something.
I think the reson you dont see support for all the 3D cards is that there is no real need for them in Linux.
As for the normal 2D cards i have yet to run into a PCI (or ISA) VGA card that the
I have to return some videotapes...
>> "As I posted (if they ever post my response) to the article, "If you build it, they will come". Why does the Linux community always make it a point to convey how "great" their OS is compared to MS" It's not the whole community...just a few with nothing better to do. To me it dosnt realy matter if 100 other people run linux or 1000000000. I would not like linux any less/more.
When you try to make a OS that is good at everything then at the end you end up with a OS that is good at NOTHING.
I have to return some videotapes...
What the hell are you talking about?
:) ) You could open up the desktop from your own box no matter who's box you are on. It is like you are sitting at your computer yet you are on someone elses. Whats this good for? Well remote admin for one. Or you could have one balls to the walls server that runs all the apps that suck up alot of ram/CPU power and have them displayed on little 386/486 clients that just need enuf power to run the X client. This also works cross platform. *BSD,Linux,etc running on x86,alpha,ppc,etc can all share desktops. Its all X, it's all good. Try that with any other GUI.
/I/ feel isnt good for Linux. I see alot of people(not so much you) bitching and crying about how linux sucks in area's that it was never ment to be good in.
I said a 5 year old COULD use the MacOS GUI. What is so bad about that? Show me a 5 year old that can edit init scripts and setup sendmail or bind.
> I simply pointed out several false claims that the article made.
What you pointed out wasnt even wrong.
He said:
"And what of command lines? Modern Unices including Linux no more rely on them than any other desktop operating system."
You said:
"I don't rely on the command line at all in MacOS."
umm...isnt that just what the guy said? The CLI is just a shell, like bash OR the MacOS GUI. Linux/UNIX and MacOS dont realy need a CLI at all. You could just use X as your shell (but Im sure you would be giving up all the good things you could do in a CLI)
He said:
"Modern X-based systems are amazingly user-friendly and often superior in design to commercial variants"
You said:
Hmmmm... I think he's still hallucinating.
What? I still think X is superior then any other GUI system. When you are on a network (where Linux/Unix realy kicks but
he said:
"The other great myth is Linux is hard to install."
you said:
"Linux *is* hard to install compared to the most popular operating systems (and even some unpopular ones, such as the BeOS, which is incredibly easy to install)."
Keyword is "MOST". Ya linux is harder to insall then MacOS or BeOS. But Redhat's install is MUCH easyer (IMHO) and faster then NT or Solaris.
"I never could get XFree86 to work. Fortunately, I don't really need that functionality."
RTFM, get the newest X, and don't buy your vga cards at K-Mart...use the HWCL.
>> I don't see why you interprete my pointing out of fallacies in the article as attacks on your way of life (whatever that may be).
Umm...what ever, I didnt see an attack. Just the start of a new trend. A trend that
"Linux's GUI has come along way but it's not quite there yet, MacOS still is far better and easyer to run"- well fine dont run Linux, run MacOS
"Linux dosnt support this and that and PnP, also can not run MS-Office or my new games"- well fine then...run Win*
Alot of people are stating weakness in area's of Linux that where never ment to be strong. It's kinda like saying "Mack Trucks are slower and handle like crap compared to my littte fast sports car."- Try towing a semi trailer with a Mustang.
>> Frankly, I think you give us linux users/advocates a bad name. I couldnt care less. I don't want to be an advocate. My OS serves me, I don't serve it.
What it comes right down to is if you try to make a OS that is good at Everything then you end up with an OS that isnt realy good at anything.
I have to return some videotapes...
No, really.
Why in _hell_ should the widget set be forced upon applications by the OS? What on _earth_ should one have to do with the other?
I love Linux, and firmly believe it's the HolyOS. But lets face it, not everything in Linux is beautiful. It can be pretty downright complicated and difficult to deal with at times. All these little components with their own little configurations to get right.
But the problem is just on an order of complexity less than that of the Windows System Registry, where everything gets screwed up at the same time in the same place. Linux is _modular_, which means we can make one thing work right at a time. No wonder the Windoze flavors are so poor. Wouldn't your baby OS be unhappy if someone hacked a ring3 UI from a completely unstable OS in on top of your ring0 kernel (can you say WinNT 4?).
I think it's pretty impressive when we moved my friend's HD to his new 450a, and spent 7 hours getting Win95 to work right. See, it needed drivers for the new IDE controller (BX chipset). Which were on the CD that came with the motherboard. But Win95 couldn't talk to the CDROM since it was using the realmode disk drivers since it couldn't talk to the IDE controller...and after we fixed that we had to fiddle with ever _bloody_ one of his interrupts. And all this in 640x480 since untill the interrupts were right we couldn't install proper vidcard drivers. Yuck.
By contrast, when I moved my old HD to my 450a, Linux worked perfectly and flawlessly with no effort. I was up in 30 seconds, and had X reconfigured for the new video board in 30 more.
Don't even _talk_ to me about MacOS. The last time I used a Mac, I got a window open with no little close box on the title bar. The program provided a "quit" button in the interior of the window, but it didn't work -- just restarted the app. I had to shut off the frikkin computer. Now that's _sad_.
You want a consistent look and feel? Use the same widget set (GTK+, Qt) in a suite of applications (KDE,GNOME). I'm not impressed by interoperation except between _MS_ apps. Which is the same as saying the KDE and GNOME apps work right with other apps in their respective suites. No biggie.
But the GNOME and KDE developers are working towards a common ORB that will bring true interoperability to the desktop. Users will be able to mix and match at will.
Now _that's_ cool.
Speaking as a game developer, 16 bit color on a 3dfx is a bit different than on other boards, due to the filtering the hardware does before it displays. Filtering so insidious and crafty that the combined wits of Dave Rosenthal & Dave Scherer, our resident graphics hackers here at Singularity Software, gave up and politely asked 3dfx how on earth they do it.
BTW the dithering on a V3 or SLI'd V2's in 1024x768 is pretty sweet.
It is debatable whether nVidia's TNT boards come close to 3dfx (speed penalty due to D3D tho). Nothing else on the market today even competes.
And how that shiny new WinModem can hold up a newbie's install (connection-wise) until they go to DejaNews or something and look up "linux win modem" and see the miles and miles of posts saying: "Give it up. Your WinModem will not work with Linux. Please tell all your friends..."
**>>BELCH
Just because you get a lot of flack back from mindless zealots (every community has them) doesn't mean that nobody's listening.
Solid engineering criticism that is clear and well presented will usually be accepted by any half-decent engineer that happens to read it. That doesn't necessarily mean that he or she will voice their support, but then that shouldn't matter to people that want input rather than political visibility.
Also, if you state reasonable specific requirements rather than making broad-brush criticism then you'll stand a much better chance of affecting the course of development. Even better, join a development team (not necessarily officially) even if you're not a developer: evaluators are needed just as much as programmers, and any reasonable designer will be more than happy to accept additional "customer requirements".
Finally, it's pointless to say that "the community needs to accept criticism better". As we get more and more non-professionals in our midst, the situation will get worse in this regard, not better, so what you're asking for becomes ever more like changing the world. As a direct goal, that's impossible in practice. Just aim to change your own microcosm instead, and if everyone does so then the world will in time slowly change for the better.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Choice can be bad, yes. The Microsoft monopoly shows that people desperately want One Standard, even if it's a proprietary and really bad standard.
But this phase, with KDE and GNOME competing, is a necessary one in reaching the One Open Standard, which is what is really needed.
I don't doubt that one will eventually remain. When KDE and GNOME will have more or less ripened, then I think development will probably focus on compatibility with each other, and after that they'll merge or something. And all those differently looking WM's will probably become skins on the One Emerging Open GUI Standard. Which will of course never stop evoluting.
Hope so, anyway.
Problems hit so far:
1) My hard disk was too big. I had to specify 'linux hda=1580,255,63' when running the boot disk.
2) My network card wasn't supported with the supplied kernel (2.0.32). I had to download a new version of tulip.c and recompile the kernel to see the network.
3) My graphics card & monitor *still* aren't set-up right for X. They weren't listed in the Xconfigurator program, and I'm having a hell of a time hacking through the config file. I gave up yesterday, and went out to enjoy the sun instead.
And I haven't even *STARTED* with the sound card yet.
Searching Dejanews has uncovered a few odds&sods of useful information, but I'm still not quite there.
OTOH, I have floppies with Windows drivers for my monitor, graphics, network & sound cards. So installing them is a total no-brainer.
Windows installed with no fuss whatsoever. Linux isn't there after a week of plittering. Fact.
--
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
It's BEING addressed, you moron.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
From my expirence, Linux and ext2 let you know something is wrong with your hardware *before* it goes south. Example: A friend tried to install Linux on a older hard drive he had laying around. During mkfs it complanied about the disk 'delaminating' and aborted the install, so he gave up and installed Win95 (which went without a hitch). Three weeks later the drive failed completly (without warning from win95).
Try pppconfig in debian it took me 5 minutes to be on the net.
Maybe it's a anomaly but I don't think so, with the same login it took me much longer with Redhat/Caldera.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Maybe the question should be, who is Linux for? It's strange to think that Linux could be for everyone. It's not somthing that entered my mind until recently. I always thought of Linux being my own private universe, with just a few members. It pleases me; but the idea of winning (Meaning that everyone uses it) is so strange, and cool. :> Linux on every desktop?
So I ask, what is Linux for, and who is it for? It's so damn cool to be even able to ask this question.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
Hang out on #linux on your favorite irc network, and the number 2 question (after "what's a partition") seems to be "how do I configure dial up networking?"
I think that's one area that could really be improved, judging by the amount of confusion that seems to be out there. Once a newbie can get on the net, they can seek out the information from within Linux, rather than booting back to windows to search... and Linux suddenly becomes a lot more enjoyable.
Some of the linuxconf / control panel / whatever tools have certainly helped, but there still seem to be a lot of people confused about this basic setup.
Consistancy is also an important part of the GUI experience. Microsoft has tried to maintain control over the consistancy of it's desktop for a very good reason. A user should be able to use any windows machine without having to relearn the interface.
Oh, yeah. Lemme see, compare Win2.1, 3.1, '95, and '98 (with the IE-integrated desktop enabled). Click the box in the upper right corner of the window to maximize it -- or was that end the program? Double click on the desktop to bring up the task manager -- or was that move to the bottom of the screen to reach the taskbar? Double-click the program name in the Executive to launch it -- or was that on the icon in Program Manager -- or single-click on the icon in the Start menu -- or single-click on the icon on the desktop?
Yep. Can't fault Microsoft for interface consitency. It's always different.
Okay, but it took five years of development (1990-1995) before Windows reached every-box consistency on GUI. One desktop would be running Progman as the shell, one Fileman, one any of the dozens of third-party shells. And all sorts of apps expected Progman and broke on third-party shells (especially when installing, but plenty of other times as well).
In short, Windows only had a consistent interface if you stuck with the default installed GUI shell. And, if every one of those Linux boxen was installed with the same version of the same distro using the distro's default shell, you have the same consistency.
Picking a local standard of KDE or Gnome or CDE isn't much different than choosing between Win98 and WinNT. You can't have a mixed 98-NT environment and install an off-the-shelf package on every desktop unless you watch compatibility issues, and you can't choose NT or '98 and run every "Win32" tool from it.
Frankly, there isn't enough KDE or Gnome specific software out there to make the issue any more serious than the NT-98 inconsistencies. Sure, they're worse in potentia, but right now they're both just different frosting that run "generic" X apps.
It sure *sounds* a whole bunch like cheerleading -- Kind of the inverse of the rhetorical approach he goes to so much trouble to describe.
With regards to the content, I say the following. I've spent a *lot* of time behind multiple flavors of UNIX, including my own Redhat Linux variant at home, and they are all shades of the same, ungracefully aging way of doing things.
NT & 98 are by no means the wave of the future, but they are more hardware-compatible, easy to manage (on a small scale), and more suitable for the modern desktop than anything running X. Sorry.
"Professional coder on closed source. Do not attempt."
> If you could only get Q3 Arena on Linux, you could bet that market share would increase.
You can. Or, at least, you will. id is releasing Q3A concurrently on Linux, Mac, and Win9x. Thus, not only will playing on Linux be possible, it will be official and supported.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
Maybe your video hardware wasn't supported ? ( if it was supported, installing would be dead easy )
Unfortunately, installing an OS on unsupported hardware is kinda difficult. Try installing Win95 or MacOS on an ultra-sparc some day.
The more toolkits, the fewer the apps that will adopt them. Soon we'll be back to good 'ol Athena.
KDE and GNOME are shells. Just like Windows/386 (remember that?). Meaning only a few apps are compliant.
The MacOS has an interface.
EVERY application on the Mac conforms to and uses the interface in some way. Heck, even Windows has better coverage.
I'm not picking on KDE and GNOME just because they are late to the game and have not picked up steam - I'm saying that until there is one pervasive standard that eveyone can agree upon, you can forget any notion of a pervasive GUI.
No one in the real world wants to make the distinction between KBiff and GBiff. It might be entertaining to you, but its a hassle for people who want to get things done.
On the topic of installation, I had opportunity to install Mandrake 5.3 (RedHat-5.2-based) on this Toshiba Satellite 225CDS notebook on a virgin hard drive.
From sliding in the CD to finished product was about 30 minutes -- and it was considerably easier than the Win95 installation for this machine!
Whereas the Windows 95 installation required DOS-mode card services for my two PCMCIA cards (Ethernet and modem), the Mandrake installation Did The Right Thing -- this is by far the smoothest install of any operating system I have ever installed -- and I have installed plenty, from Novell NetWare 2.15 to MS-DOS to Win3.11/95/98 to other far more esoteric systems.
I simply picked "workstation" installation, and away it went. No boot floppies, no fuss about PCMCIA, no fuss about the nonexistent floppy -- no fuss at all. The Win 95 installation requires the manufacturers' disks for the PCMCIA cards -- the Mandrake installation Did The Right Thing and loaded the appropriate modules automagically. All I had to do was configure the networking interface (which, with Linuxconf, is a snap), and I was back up.
The Win 95 installation required fdisking and formatting the hard drive from floppy (can't boot from CD!) Win 98 can boot from CD -- but still requires me to swap in the floppy to get the PC-card drivers! Mandrake booted from the CD smooth as silk.
The only fly in the ointment was the poor quality of the XFree86 display, but that is a Cirrus Logic problem.
As someone else said this is from "Psychology of Computer Programing." The idea is that you allow others to look at your code and to criticize it, and that you use these criticisms to improve your code. Of course no one said there wasn't a lot of yelling and screaming involved.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I'm not so sure about the egoless part. Care to clarify that one?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
If you look at the RedHat installation guide, it recommends a certain set of partitions. For new users, why can't there be an option that allows the installation process to create these partitions/mount points for you by default? Not only that, but the hoops you have to jump through to support a large hard drive seem unncessary - these should also be hidden from the average user. There's still a ways to go before Linux (Redhat at least) is as easy to install as 'doze is.
I am not the least bit impressed by this article. The poster on
However, the main flaws in OSS and Linux are more fundamental than merely the status quo of today's Linux. They are inherant structural flaws in the OSS development method. This kind of attack is hard to argue, and it relies mostly on intuition and reason. I believe that Linux's lack of user friendly features is a shadow of the true nature of OSS development, not something that time will ever address entirely. OSS, as described by ESR, exists to 'scratch an itch'. It doesn't take a great leap of faith to assume that it is the developers itch that is getting scratched. Neither does it take a leap to assume that OSS developers are different from the rest of the world. Thus their needs, 'itches', are different as well. An experienced hacker doesn't code an intuitive and coherant graphical help system to help himself. He may do it to prove a point, that Linux can be user friendly, but I don't believe this is an integral feature of OSS. Once this point is 'proved', then what. What keeps the hacker asking, "What does the user want?" I have strong doubts about OSS' ability to meet and sustain the needs and wants of the average user. Both in quantitative and qualitive aspects.
I also think that people need to bear in mind that software is not a static thing. Commercial software will continue to raise the bar and mix things up. It is not as if OSS can slowly rise to level of commercial software. It must move rapidly if it is to have any chance of supplanting commercial products in any arena.
There is a bunch of linux is hard to install comments made here. Having a recent experience in installing linux and win 95 on a machine I would like to share my experience with you. But first:
I think the reason winXX often is easier to install is that:
1 M$ assumes you don't have any other operating systems (all the winXX's overwrite the MBR I think).
2 You probably don't need partition you hard disk to install windows, as some form of winXX has probably been on it before.
3 M$ makes a lot of choices for you.
I am sure one could make a linux distro that did the same assumptions and therefore would be as easy to install.
To my own experience, I have a toshiba libretto 50ct on this I wanted both linux and win95. I have no CDROM for this.
To install linux I used a laplink-cable (plip and nfs) and a boot-floppy that's all.
To install windows I had two choices, floppies (all 22 of them, yeah right!), or install dos and the use fastlynx (via laplink again) to copy the contents of the win95 cd to my hard drive and install from there (I did this).
I other words the Win95 install was harder, needed additional sw (fastlynx), and a lot less elegant.
Linux, coming to a desktop near you!
I like Linux the way it is, with its powerful, text-based typesetting, database, software development, and data-analysis tools. If I wanted a very visual desktop, I'd be using Windows (it already comes "free" with all the PCs I have), and I think the same is true for most current Linux users and contributors.
In my experience, non-computer types have no problem learning systems like LaTeX, SQL, or AWK. The initial learning curve is a little steeper than for the GUI-based equivalents, but people seem to come up to speed on the more powerful aspects more quickly than on Windows. Windows is designed for quick and easy selling; it promises to be usable by anybody without any investment of time, but it only delivers that for the most trivial aspects of its programs. That is appealing to customers, though, and it is achievable only with something Linux cannot easily compete with: expensive marketing and public relations.
Windows-style GUI apps isn't even where the next generation of mainstream applications is going. Rather, they are going to be web-based, server-based, and use small Java GUIs downloaded on demand. Linux is in an excellent position to cover the server end of that, and if Mozilla doesn't completely disintegrate, it will also be a reasonable client. KDE and Gnome are looking towards the past, not the future.
If Linux just became a free Windows clone, it would lose something in the process. While there are still some rough edges even in the text-based tools, I believe that efforts should be directed at addressing those. It seems to me that a focus on beating Windows at all cost is harmful.
Maybe Linux can retain its current user base and also acquire a serviceable complement of Windows look-alike GUI apps. But I'd rather tread very carefully in that direction; there are a lot more important areas to worry about it seems to me.
PS: Yes, Linux is easier to install than Windows.
The argument that the MacOS has an Interface while KDE or Windows are shells does not hold either.
The Mac has an INTEGRATED graphical interface. KDE is an interface, so is a keyboard, the screen, a cranial implant... Wether the interface comes with icons and windows as part of the OS, or layered on top of a CLI, makes no usability difference, does it?
KCD, GNOME, etc are shells - true. They are layered on top of X, the standard graphical interface to unix, which talks to the OS just as all the various CLIs do. The argument is purely about the definition of the term.
If there was a ubiquitous, common 'interface' to Linux, I'm sure that the same argument could be had between software types and purists. The latter would argue that it's not really an interface to the computer, but rather to the software, and who would claim that it should be embedded in hardware - much as you claim that it's not an 'interface' simply because it is not integral to the OS. A purist could make the argument that the human 'interface' to the machine should be uniform, regardless of the hardware or software. We should be able to walk up to a Cray, and SGI, and HP or a PC and interact with a standard interface.
As I recall from recent discussions, one goal in the Linux kernel is to keep the actual OS interface small and clean. We layer the MMI 'interfaces' on that standard, and thanks to the clenliness of it, we have a choice of 'interfaces' to place between ourselves and the machine.
So the issue is really about keeping the interfaces between the layers standard. Sounds like a sound programming practice. It would be really nice to be able to run any application on any GUI on any OS on any hardware. Now, how do we get there?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
> Superior is a strong word. Windows9x and Windows
> NT are extremely developer friendly. If you can
> get past the bloat of MFC (which Windows
> developers seem to have no problem doing), it is
> an extremely complete GUI API.
Out of curiosity, in this "complete" GUI API, how does a user change the look of the widgets by changing themes (like Gtk+), and from the programmer's perspective, how does one to remote displays to other computers?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
While what you're saying is true, the complexity of something tends to go up with the amount of control that you have. More control means more variables that you control, more variables is the definition of complexity.
:-)). Making them simpler than their inherent complexity, which is fairly complex, only means that you can't do all the stuff that you imagine. Of course, you can have levels of complexity, and as long as your top level of complexity has all of the inherent complexity of the tool, that's fine. It's just that when most people say simple, they usually seem to mean simpler than the inherent level of complexity.
Now, one can make things more complex than the inherent complexity of a given level of control fairly easily, but you will never be able to make things simpler than the inherent level of complexity of a certain level of control.
That's why computers will never be appliances. Appliances have one function, sometimes two. A computer can do almost anything that you can imagine (using computer-oriented imagination on a reasonable scale
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Actually, while Linux certainly can't do the 128+ CPUs, it has been tested and worked on a 12 CPU sun box, I think. I don't have a link though, so I wouldn't go with this. I thought that VA research had an 8 Xeon system running Linux at Linux Expo.
Anyhow, NT can't do 8+ processors any more than Linux can.
The journaling file system is a real fault that doesn't affect all that many people, but I suspect a good portion of the intended recipient of that article. I think that this is in the works, so it is a real problem, but isn't being ignored.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Has it ever occured to you that software writers don't like answering technical questions? that's hwy documentation gets written, and that's why things will get more "user friendly". Dealing with those who need it is a pain, so the "user friendly" stuff will be written. Installation will be easier. Have you noticed autoconf lately? Who do you think came up with that?
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I've had Linux installs that went through blindly clicking. Getting it working on my Alpha took work. I've had windows installs that wend through blindly clicking. I've had windows installs that plain out don't work. Small sample sizes mean nothing. Windows doesn't always work, Linux doesn't always work. Nothing always works. Nothing in life always works. Giving one example of a difficult Linux install doesn't prove anything at all, just as giving one example of a difficult windows install doesn't prove anything either.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
This is why we need a FAT-based install option. I should talk to the Debian people about this. We need a ZipSlack that's current (i.e. not libc5 based).
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Firstly, BeOS can be terrifying to install if it doesn't support your hardware. GNU/Linux supports more hardware than BeOS does. Sure, BeOS has a cute install procedure--but so do some GNU/Linux distributions, like EasyLinux.
Did you try running XConfigurator or XF86Setup? If your video chipset simply wasn't supported, than XFree86 never will work for you. This is no different than complaining that ``I can't get Windows 98 to install on my iMac'' (yes, I've heard that one before).
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
OTOH, ext3 is in the works. Once I get some other projects finished, I will work on a journaled filesystem for GNU (including Linux). I really like OS/2's JFS, especially for development where I was crashing the machine every five minutes (video chipset drivers), often during periods of heavy disk activity--but CHKDSK (equiv. of jfsck) never had any errors.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
That said, NT delivers none of these, and people in droves talk about migrating from IBM mainframes to NT, so there's no reason they shouldn't migrate to GNU/Linux too.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Installs
configuation
using
the drawbacks
using Linux is not that bad most GUI pgms for Linux that I have seen lately are really pretty good .. modeled after windows, whihc gives users somewhat familiarity
well this is my humble opinion.. being a windows user for 5 or more years and a Linux/unix user for 3 years.. I love my Linux workstations, and with that there were more drivers out there, and more programs .. may the best OS win..
Only 'flamers' flame!
As a system builder and possessor of a Microsoft OEM liscence (Don't like 'em , never have, but thats what people wanted...) I've done over 100 win95 installs ( 950, 950b and 950c ). Sure it's easy to install if win95 doesn't get flaky. If it gets flaky ( about 1 in 10 installs i would estimate, and this is on hardware that is fine, i don't count problems related to hardware thats flaked ) it is a complete pain to get it straightened out. And that doesn't include problems related to somewhat non-standard configurations. ( disable primary ide inter. boot from a adaptec 2940, and hang the cdrom off of the secondary ide inter., 95 really doesn't like that one) The only install problems i've ever had with linux were due too bad hardware. That includes the first install from diskette, using the SLS distro. ( even got X working in 4 mb )
( scary thought, doing an oem install, it takes longer to install ie than it does the rest of win95 )
... but, Mr. Cochrane's point that Linux's real problem isn't an installation problem, but a channel distribution problem, is still well taken. The majority of users just don't install operating systems on their on computers: they've become used to running an "update" program on their machines, or buying them pre-installed.
While I'm sure that everything you said is correct, I think you are looking at it from the wrong perspective. I think what he was talking about was consistent UI, look and feel type of thing. Users really don't care what the programmer had to go through to make it work...they just want it to work.
having said that, I can see your point, and I hope that all the X developers see it too.
We can learn a lot from successes and blunders that MS has made, I know most people would rather have nothing to do at all with MS, but I think that is the wrong attitude. We need to take our collective past experiences, and turn it into one killer OS.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
Like any feature rich OS, Linux does take some
time to get used to. It is not all that difficult
to install if you RTFM(Read the Fsckng Manual).
It isn't exactly a no-brainer, but neither is
Win 9x or Win NT. For most things, the defaults
are choosen well, and the casual user will not
have to muddle with them much. Getting on the net
is easy. It's getting X to work that can be a
challange. However, again, if you RTFM, and
you have supported hardware, it's no big deal. I
particularly like Red Hat's Xconfigurator. It
does the job in 90% of cases I have encountered.
What it mostly boils down to is that you should
READ the documentation available to you. Most
users don't get Linux because they want point and
click mindlessness. They get it because they want
the power and stability that it offers. Anyhow
I'm done preaching to the choir.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
NE1000
NE1000! Yikes. You poor SOD. An NE2000 is bad enough... The NE1000 is an 8 bit card if memory serves.
I think what he mean was that if it was only on Linux, and not on Windows.
How many people who are new to Linux grad the CD and say, "Great, now I can get rid of Windows." I bet that number is TINY. Microsoft can safely assume that no one else wants two operating systems (unless of course it's 98 and NT!), thus we have to use workarounds like LILO and fips. Redhat cannot make that assumption, because how many people who are innocent enough to have to use the defaults are going to want to use just Linux and destroy Windows from their computer? Very few. A great deal of the pain of installing Linux comes from the issues of Windows insisting that it's the only game in town.
All the things he mentions are limitations to gaining marketshare, but he missed one very big one: games.
Think about it for a minute. Do most people really need Pentium 3s with 128MB RAM? Or 8MB video cards? Or huge, fast HDDs? If they want to play games they do. But if all they want is MS Office and Net access, a Pentium 100 works just fine (and a Linux 486/66 box does that job even better).
But if you want to play games (and who doesn't? that's the only reason I keep a Win95 partition around), you have to go with Windows. Except for Quake, Q2, there's just no games for Linux. And games are really what drive hardware advances, and are probably responsible for most decisions to buy a new PC. If there were shrink-wrapped Linux games on the shelf at Fry's, the average guy would start noticing Linux. If you could only get Q3 Arena on Linux, you could bet that market share would increase.
I seriously don't think that Linux will ever be a choice for desktop users (and I'm talking about home PCs, now) until there are as many games for Linux as there are for Windows/MacOS.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Do $1000+ Oxygen OGL cards mean anything to you?
I have yet to see a manual on how to actually install Win95.
You just buy another computer don't you?
The thing that gets me is there is only two ways to install Win95. CD, of floppy disk (From memory it was done on floppy, if not, I'm wrong). Now, my computer doesn't have a CD rom drive and I'll be damned if I install *anything* that requires more than one or three floppies (BAD memories of installing MS Office off 25 floppies... (got me out of science though... (off topic???)))
But as I was saying. Trying to install win95 on a dumbish terminal is a wee bit fiddly: boot from any bootable dos disk, partitition hdd, format hdd, plug a null modem cable in, connect up to another computer with cd-rom, load FastLynx, copy everything across, get something to eat, and then... you can install it.
Buuut. With linux, it detects me lil' ol' NE1000, and low and behold I can install it via FTP off another computer.
IMQHO I believe they're just as easy to install, but linux simply gives you more options.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Journaling file system, huh? Well, no major commercial operating system for microcomputers currently has this function, so I don't see what they are talking about. They mention the need for logging, not a journaling file system. Currently, Linux has better logging capabilities than Windows NT.
They don't say Linux needs large scale multiprocessor support: they say Linux has no multiprocessor support. Out of the box, Linux suports 8 processors: this is *more* than adequate for the vast majority of situations, given Linux's clustering capabilities (ala Beowolf). It is certainly possible to hack the kernel code to support more. I should point out that Windows NT out of the box has this same limitation, only worse. In fact, NT out of the box only supports 4 processors. Only other Unixes support more processors out of the box than Linux.
My journal has hot
Do you know how SICK I am of arguing this point with Mac-weenies? ;)
User interface consistency is a *myth*. If programs on *any* given OS were truly consistent, there would be no need for level 1 technical support.
The fact is that even on MacOS, there is the occasional program that doesn't really conform. For instance, there are some programs (typically *older* MacOS applets) that do not let you quit via Command-Q. This is a minor point, but it is *not* consistent. Also, some MacOS programs (like Microsoft Word) make use of multi-tabbed dialog boxes, while other programs, like QuarkXPress, are a mish-mash of disorganized dialog boxes. This is *far* from user interface consistency.
Also: Windows/386 is by no means a *shell*. Anyone who knows *anything* about the underlaying code in Windows since Windows/386 (I'm particularly thinking about VMM and VxD layers: if you don't know about these, get Andrew Schulman's *excellent* book Unauthorized Windows 95: it talks *exclusively* about these layers), you'll know that Windows is 32-bit multitasking operating system, even Windows/386.
Gnome and KDE are also not a "shell". They do not have the same relationship to Linux that Windows has to do DOS. Gnome and KDE more accurately map to the USER/USER32 modules of Windows, while X maps loosely to the GDI/GDI32 modules of Windows.
My journal has hot
Someone is going to have to reverse engineer these [WinModems] if Linux is to be usable for a large segment of the population. Has anyone tried?
As I understand it, the thing is that every one of them are different, so you'd need a driver for each! With normal modems you just have a standard protocol and issue standard modem commands to communicate with them. So to support WinModems would take an enormous effort, as opposed to virtually no effort with other new modems.
With WinModems, all work is done in software, so the modem itself is probably easier and cheaper to produce.
I had a meeting today to discuss problems with our current Firewall implementation (linux 2.0.36 with ipfwadm). We were hacked into a few weeks ago, and I had the wonderful job of cleaning up after the poor script kiddie.
:)
I made a formal recommendation that we install a separate server with NO user accounts, unlike the server our department had which was a general purpose workgroup server and doubled as a firewall. I said for $1000 we could get a PC, install linux on it (as is on almost all of our servers) and have it be completely secure to anywhere except the local console.
Then the Windows Guru spoke. Things went downhill from there. Suddenly, the meeting which was about "when do we install the Linux firewall" turned into "why don't we evaluate hardware-only solutions" (ie Cisco, etc). And then it got even worse. When I mentioned the high price tag of the Cisco equipment, it instantly turned into "Oh, anyone can hack linux because the source code is available. Let's use NT and install firewall software on it."
These people whose brains are numb from staring at Outlook and Office and Publisher 24/7 scare me. I didn't realize there WERE people who were so loyal to Microsoft that they would suggest NT over a hardware firewall unit. Every arguement they made about the OpenSource community could be turned back around to stab them through the heart (and I tried), but those who were weaker minded were swayed to the banner of the Man from Redmond.
SUMMARY: Can anyone recommend or share experience with their hardware or NT firewalling solutions? Evidence towards IPChains being significantly better would be much appreciated.
-Chris
willie@perigee.net
You do have a good point. And one that could be overcome by developing partion 'ware that would ask you a few simple questions as to how you would like your system to be set up. Which in itself is rather difficult to do unless the author/s decide on some pre-configured schemes to use. (this may already exist in some incarnation or other. I don't know of one yet though) IE which file system/s to use (depends on your current kernel), generic partition sizes based on available space, or in the case of swap - what you intend to use your system for. Etc etc... For Windows, Partition Magic would solve this problem completely. I've heard it supports linux. Or at least it should support ext2 if that is true. It is a commercial product though. I will however mention that upgrading and or installing linux on a machine that already has/had linux on it is just as easy as it is with Windows or MacOS.
On a blank system, it's about the same. Assuming your CDRom can't autoboot,(Mac's have been doing it for a long time now) you have to have an initial install disk for either OS to get everything started. Without that, it is very difficult. =) The only part about one being 'easier' than the other is if you only want one partion in a Windows install. Otherwise you'll have to fool with that for a while. Although much simpler than using pdisk or fdisk for linux partitioning I'll agree.
Any more options given than just a few examples of typical installs would make it confusing to most new users without the proper background. With something like partition magic, I would imagine you would still need to have a good idea as to the sizes of your new partitions as well. I've never used it so I wouldn't really know. What I don know about it is that you can partion your drive without losing your windows installation that is already on it. Much in the same way pdisk works on the mac. I wouldn't put all of your trust into it though.
It actually can get much more complicated than that just by the sheer fact that linux (or many other unices) by nature, are so flexible and configurable. By making judgments for other users you in turn limit the intial installation to a much smaller degree which may or may not be in the users best interest of intent at that point or at some unknown future. Which then in turn _may_ actually steer them to the decision that the OS is incompetent or lacking if they don't know any better at the time.
Knowledge about the tools you use never hurts and a basic understanding of what those tools are capable of doesn't hurt either. Sooner or later something like understanding the geometry of a disk is going to be very handy and sometimes needed depending on what you might want to do.
I admire the fact that now a days virtually anyone can buy a system and use it without too much difficulty. Ease of use I guess is what it is termed as these days. I wouldn't go as far as to call it 'user friendly' though IMHO. Not everyone would agree with me but I have my own reasons. Here is one, I'll try to make it short. Bear with me. =)
My first 'real' computer aside from a cocoII or vic-20 or a c-64, was an amiga. At first glance the system looked no different really than any other GUI based system in terms of use. But that wasn't why I bought one. Part of the reason and a large one at that was because of the CLI along with the GUI. Both worked extremeley well together and I could exist virtually forever using only one or the other. I got used to using both and realized the importance of that flexability in terms of my own values of using an OS or simply using the computer itself to it's fullest potential.
Eventually as the years went by, I was forced to buy a new system (both my amigas died). I had a choice to by a Macintosh or a Wintel. I ended up choosing a MacPPC for reasons that aren't important here (basically Hardware oriented). I had no experience using the Mac except for way back in high school during a course in computer animation. (back in 1987. A lot has changed since then) =)
The system was completely functional out of the box and asides from needing some input about myself and my internet account, there was no configuring necessary. Which to me was a decent bonus. (I'm quite impatient when I get something new.) As time went by, I became accustomed to my new home and realized that in fact, MacOS is extremely easy to use. As was/is Windows. And has a fair amount of power of use in areas. Some of this power is directly related to it's ease of use. The same can be said about Windows too. But there is a tradeoff, as soon as I learned my way around, I wanted(needed) to start using the machine in ways that the OS wasn't really capable of doing. At least not easily. The same goes for my experience with Windows (to rewind a moment, Some may be thinking about my comments of a cli in a gui system. Dos Shell isn't exaclty a viable alternative for myself. It doesn't communicate with Windows in the way I would expect a cli/gui system to act. Applescripting really doesn't either) And no fualt to Windows. As Windows was intended to replace Dos(or at least that is the way I understood it). As MacOS was from the start of the Macintosh, intended for complete ease of use without any complication.
It came to the point that I felt that I was using a machine at only part of it's potential. Basically only half of an OS was available to me.
(this is just in my case. Not true for everyone)
Unless I opted to use 3rd party applications that would come somewhat close to my needs but usually not on the mark. As well those same apps were very hard indeed to get to work well together by communicating with eachother directly or by way of setting some sort of environment variables. Applescript is actually quite functional but only if the authors included various support for it in their apps.
In no way am I cutting apart the OS('s), I'm just expecting more from it than was intended. There are solutions to my problems as well. And this is where my point is.
The OS suddenly lost it's ease of use. It in turn has actually become more difficult to use via the solutions than it is for me to use another OS such as gnu/linux. So now I have a reason to migrate as where before I was being served right. My needs just changed is all.
Earlier on I mentioned that I had 'started' out as an amiga user. I ended up taking a lot of things for granted because of that and for a while I thought that there was no real alternative to the WB. For the past few years a friend of mine was running linux and I was honestly impressed with it. Unfortunately I had shied away from it because my main hobby is creating music and I didn't see much in the way of that department for linux. I was wrong on that and I'll blame that on FUD. =)
As it turns out, I did find my alternative to WB. In fact, linux is by far the best OS I've used.
Which brings me to say this. I beleive that linux (in my case) is the best alternative because I needed to graduate from another system that hampered me. If that first system did not hamper me, then I probably wouldn't use linux. Or even need to for that matter. The first OS (ie MacOS or Windows) would be adequately doing the job it was intended to do.
If for by chance those OS's were fulfilling my needs, there would probably be no need for me to know or understand disk geometry. Let alone be aware of disk geometry.
But if they didn't do their jobs, my guess is that the reason would be because of one's need for more configurabilty and/or the need to get closer to the hardware you are using. In other words something like disk geometry would become an asset to your knowledge base. Using a loopback device is quite handy for creating disk images with various file systems. You may even need one to create a compressed file system for a rescue disk or some such.
The idea of linux on every desktop is an exciting vision. It would help educate most of us or at least tone down the 'blinking 12 problem' to a degree.
I have to remember though that with the advent of Windows and the MacOS as an example, the target audiences were mainly those who didn't use computers or really have any knowledge about them prior. The majority of users today, be it at home or at work, are those that entered the computing world relatively late. It remains to be seen how many of this newer computing population would have chosen more "robust" operating systems if the new user population wasn't so reliant on the popularity of these easy to use OS's in particular. Not to say that an OS driven by ease of use makes or keeps one stupid or ignorant. But in my opinion, the trade off for this is that many aspects and functions that can be acheived are hidden completely away from the user or tucked away in such a way that you may never be aware that you have options or more capabilities. It takes time for a user to outgrow an OS and migrate to a more suitable one if that user was so inclined.
Installation in my opinion is not an actual issue. The issue as others here today have mentioned, is _who_ should be installing linux.
I suppose though that if you want to switch from say An Apple or MS OS to linux because of moral issues alone instead of more technical ones, a more straight forward and easier install in the partitioning department would be a definite asset.
But be aware, eventually you might have to start learning a few more things anyway after you've commited. Not necessarily true, but highly probable.
On a side note. I'm just extememly happy and content that I can do everything I want to do regardless if it takes a little brain sweat. I'm sure I'll be sweating a lot less in the longrun because of this. I'm also happy that I can do anything that any other OS is capable of doing as well. And that things as far as development are concerned seem to me, to be heading in a decent direction and at a steady pace.
One last thing. Something I find a little interesting and possibly at times, mildly annoying. Notice that no where until now have I mentioned MacOS X or WinNT. I read and hear so much about whether or not linux is ready for the desktop environment. Why do I not hear about the same debates with NT and or MacOS X? Until just recently MacOS X wasn't even available and we are still waiting for the next release of NT. (Win2000 of which is directly related to this point).
It seems to me that at least right now, those two OS's aren't viable maybe because of price or because of useablity in a desktop environment. I'm not sure.
But what I am sure about is that Linux is ahead of either product at this point in time. Whether one finds it hard to install or not. It's the server OS's that linux contends with. Not the server OS's soon to be dropped predecessors (IE MacOS X end user, and Win2000) in the desktop sector of users. When that happens, then it is safe to speculate as to what system has what merits and which one doesn't as far as desktops go. And maybe then there will be a more pressing need to make something like partitioning a little more transparent. I actually think that installation in general has become much more a joy than it was some while ago. It's all happening, it just takes time.
The debate is a lot more complex than what is generally being discussed. Codependent aspects are either being overlooked or ignored to simplify the argument. This can't really be done without producing some flaw or notion of FUD in one's impending conclusion. Heck, I'm more than likely guilty of this myself. =)
On that though, I've blurted enough...
Just my 2cents(CDN) for what it's worth.
- Jase
GNOME and KDE are application frameworks, in the same manner as MFC under windows.
GNOME's panel/GMC and KPanel are shells, much like Explorer (handles the desktop window and taskbar) under windows and Finder under MacOS.
I've seen plenty of programs for Mac that do not follow the Apple style-guide. The big diff here is that for *nix, there are many style-guides and for windows there is one written guide which nobody (including MS) follows.
The search effects the results.
Though I kind of agree on the PnP stuff... you comment about the documentation for Linux sucking is completely stupid.
I've tried almost all major dist's and have *NEVER* really had much of a problem finding documentation on any of it.
Have you checked your local book store's shelves lately? There is a lot of documentation out there.
If you actually bought your copy of Linux (not the $1.99 deals either) you should have received documentation. Of course this could never fully teach you the in's and out's of Linux (that would take volumes).
If you knew how to search the internet you wouldn't even have to buy a book...
Hell SuSE comes with so much documentation that I have had to delete it to make room on my HDD.
That was a really dumb comment about Debian and Slackware BTW... I don't think they are targeting newbies... anyone using these dist's will know what they are doing... they can install the latest versions of X and the kernel on there own w/o going back to the Dealer . Shame on you.
ciao,
rimez
am I getting worked up over a troll?
C'mon. I've been using computers for less than three years (Linux since July 98) and I can find all the info I could ever want. If it's not on the disks or manual I can always find the answer on the net. If I really can't seem to figure something out I can go out to the bookstore and look through the many books available.
Linux requires the user to learn a little something about his/her computer... there is nothing wrong with this. It's a good thing really.
ciao,
rimez
a non-tech Linux user
now now, you can set aside seperate partitions for different OS's, and windows just wants to grab that first one... the so called "C" drive. And then smack your MBR around. *sarcasm*
karnal
Karnal
I was really looking forward to reading some honest, even-handed criticism of the OS we all know and love, and instead I got to read several paragraphs of stuff that I already know, and that I've read 50 times elsewhere.
Honestly, what was his point?
-zack
This isn't FUD...
They're talking about the very real need for a journaling file system and large scale multiprocessor support (8+ processors)
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
...would not surprise me a bit if FreeBSD hits critical mass in 2-3 years, the way Linux did last year.
I think it might happen sooner than that.. IMHO, FreeBSD doesn't lag behind Linux per se.. more "develop at a more 'patient' rate". The kind of philosophy is "it's better to do it right rather than on time".
I switched to FreeBSD back in the days around Slackware 1, and then I had the recent misfortune to work somewhere with a diehard SuSE zealot as technical director. So I went back to Linux and just got sick of the all the inconsistencies and megabloat. Those are the reasons I hate Windoze. Linux could be the Windows of the future: hate it, but you gotta use it.
How long's it going to be before Linux is one big bloated rolling stone (or avalanche of different stones), mashing everyone in it's way without due regard for whether it's the right direction to roll? Sound familiar? The fat-ass hideous penguin's an apt mascot for it. (Better than a piece of flying double-glazing, though. Damn dangerous that one.)
FreeBSD manages to be stubborn enough to stick when it's the right thing to do. eg. SMP support. "Let's take it nice and easy, and do it right", rather than "Let's throw everything we can think of in." Oh and one organised OS release tree, rather than the pick-n-mix of Linux distributions.
This is not to say there isn't a place for Linux, or even NT. Linux does have better [software|hardware|phonecall] support. It does have a larger user base. It's just that once every intelligent IT manager has finally exorcised NT from important systems, then the holes in Linux might start showing. _Then_ they might ask for a well engineered clean build (poss. one of the BSDs). _Then_ they'll want something better. (HURD? BeOS? Who knows..)
When that happens, FreeBSD might have its day in the limelight. For now, it's benefitting from the low exposure. So much less pressure to poison it with 'must-have's
A Windows NT network takes about 5 seconds to install and configure.
5 seconds?? talk about reality!
try to get some soon.
ok, samba may not be a breeze to set up, but I've replaced heavily loaded NT file servers with a samba box & the only reason anyone noticed was because it quit crashing.
there are also some Tk smb config tools coming out IIRC. (or maybe they're already out?)
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
yeah... sure. That's the way it worked for me.
The seventh or eighth time I think it finally worked.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Linux is powerful because it is maleable. It is my OS made available to me by giants whom I stand on their shoulders. Why is it necessary for every drooling caveman to use Linux. As soon as people say "Make the install easier" I think OK why haven't you? Please stop crying for "easier to use" because all it means to me is less options. Does anyone else think RedHat install is a little restrictive and deceptivley too simple?
> Today getting on the internet from Windows 95 on MOST isps is as simple as entering your local POPs #, login, and passwd
...
Interestingly enough, that's all I did to get my Linux box attached to the 'net! (Well, to be honest I did have to enter the IP addresses of the name servers as well but that wasn't exactly a great hardship.)
That said, getting PPP and X11 to work are probably the two things that could do with some work (IMHO obviously). I didn't have any problems with either but my hardware isn't exactly cutting edge stuff - I worry about some newbie with their "latest stuff"(TM) PC not being able to work it out
sniff sniff, here is a tissue. What is sad with your response
is the fact that you voiced your stupidity. I
would not even consider myself more than a user when it comes
to system administration, yet I set up a virtual server for an ISP in less then
16 hours. I bagged sendmail for qmail. Set up was a snap.
Don't poop on linux for tools that were created for unix
15-20 years ago.
~pearcec
That is the only question in my book. In the article there was mention of users complaining about installing linux. It is so easy now compared to yesteryear that if they can't figure it out by now screw 'em they probably shouldn't be using it anyway (eh hem excuse me).
Why does linux have to be the dominating operating system anyway? I believe that it is doing just fine as is. People who see the inherent usability are rewarded with installing it. And for those who are pushing to make Linux the only operating system. They should ask themselves why they still run win98 or NT? For the longest time I only ran Linux because that is all I needed. Now I have a mixture of both. Since I like to play Quake2 and the 3dfx drivers for Linux suck I am semi forced to use win98. But I don't mind. One more piece of dribble. If we get incompetent users much like those who use win98 who is going to help them recompile there kernel when they want a newly added feature? You?
~pearcec
Not to go off on a tutorial session. The current directory is ``.'' and it shouldn't be in your path for security reasons and if you are going to put it in your path make it the last directory. This prevents users from sticking a program like ``ls'' in the path before /usr/bin and having it execute code on a non suspecting su - individual. If you want to execute a file in the current directory use ``./''. (ie ./cribbage)
Anyway you think using the linux command line is challenging try some of the other shells. ksh, csh, etc.
If you sit down and read the man pages you will find bash is quite wonderful. So many of my friends wondered how I typed so fast. Then I clued them into TAB-completion. What a concept. Anyway I learned linux by exploring it with others. We constantly challenged eacho other and gave each other new ideas. Do we need a LUG in your area? Check it out.
~pearcec
Either I miss your point or you are not talking about 5.2 - it *does* create default partitions if you choose workstation or server class install.
From spending some time on redhat.general and redhat.config and redhat.x.general, the majority of problems people seem to have are with 1) video cards not supported in 3.3.2 of xfree86 and 2) winmodems
There should be a bright pink card that falls out of the box when you open the RH 5.2 distribution that says "look at this list of supported video hardware, if your card isn't on it, go to www.xfree86.org and dl 3.3.3.1 - if you have a winmodem, go buy a new modem before you try to install RedHat Linux 5.2"
This would eliminate 20-30% of posts on these newsgroups by prople having trouble installing Redhat 5.2
...who noticed a very wide gap (yawning chasm, even) between the Title and intro of this article and the actual content!
Got to the bottom, said "hmmm... what was this supposed to be about again?"
I would agree. I think that a lot of kids out there would try linux, but then they see that there are "no" games available, so they drop the idea.
To bad. I know it would make a difference.
What's really holding game developers back? Apart from the obvious marketshare advantage of windows games?
Yeah. I wonder who Billy Boy sold out to become the rich and successful dude he is now.
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
Nah, I think this kind of thing varies wildly from person to person. Some people have a near impossible time learning a "first" interface. The oh-so-easy point and click interface has been known to baffle otherwise intelligent people.
Personally, I grew up using the Apple IIe. When it came time to switch to DOS, I found my Apple experience helped me. Same concept, just slightly different words. Then from DOS to VMS, same thing. From VMS to unix, even better. Unix command lines work the way I always wished all the previous ones had.
Like I said, it really varies from person to person.
But I'm still perplexed why you couldn't start cribbage. In both DOS and unix, it has to be in your path. You would then type the name of the executable "cribbage" (which you said you did). That should have been it. Only thing I can think of that might have thrown you is case sensitivity. But that's something that's usually stressed in any "intro to unix" sheet. The other thing would be using "/" instead of "\" if you were typing out the full name. But that, also, should be one of the first things explained to you.
Every car seems to have the controls set up just a little different (some a lot differently). But after a few minutes, you figure it out. Just don't be afraid to push some buttons and twist some knobs. And if all else fails, read the labels.
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
well...all the info i've seen for the TNT2 shows that it beats the Voodoo3.
that's what i would expect though. when you consider that the voodoo technology's foundation is at least a year older than what their competitors are creating, that doesnt surprise me.
i expect 3dfx to come out with a new chipset not founded on the voodoo chipset and i expect it will rock. i also expect it to fix all the shortcomings that resulted when the industry finally outpaced the voodoo technology.
and then, in a year or two, they'll be beaten by a competitor again and it'll all start over.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
The Windows NT magazine article (What are they going to call it when everything is called Windows 2000?) I think you are talking about was discussed on these pages. http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/06/1339230.shtm l
The posting by Scott Crosby are particulalry informative.
One main point was that the supposed benefits of NT's multithreading were more theoretical than practical and that kernel 2.2 had them anyway. The discussions on security were particularly amusing. I also seem to remember a detailed attempt to debunk the article appearing a little while later but where escapes me.
You are now the second or third person I have seen taking this in apparently the wrong context. Why are you all comparing different versions of the Windows OS, when they span some 10 years (or more) of development?
If you took a room full of Windows 98 machines, each with the user's own theme, appearance etc, and a room full of Linux users, each with their preffered window manager and theme and layout, who would win the consistency challenge? Windows.
I have tried Linux from RedHat 4.2, 5.1 and 5.2, with various Window managers and office programs...and I hate to say but at this stage it doesn't come close to the ease of deployment and management of Windows desktops.
I agree with you Tim on the issue of usability. Linux is a great OS, however the desktop add ons for Linux ie. XFree86 + window managers are not yet quite up to scratch for me to switch to Linux as a full time OS, nor for coporate deployments.
When I talk about consistency, I'm speaking about the ability to install an off-the-shelf package on every desktop in your organistation, and have no compatibilty issues with different drag-and-drop libs, different graphics libs etc.
It would seem at the moment that you can't choose Gnome or KDE or whatever as your preffered environment, and run every tool from it. As soon as there is some cross compatibilty here, it will definately attract more attention on the desktop front.
I thought this was a well-written article, but the headline 'Discussion of Linux Limitations' was a little misleading. Perhaps future columns in this series will conform more to this, but the one linked was really just anti-FUD.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I disagree. The right thing to do is to standardize on some SGML or XML format, from which the end user can extract exactly the documentation (s)he wants, in the format (s)he wants, without much trouble.
The problem is that:
Standardizing in one format (like docbook) requires that enough people agree with it. That's a problem.
-segfault
From a WSJ article found in my inbox today:
"""
Mr. Iams said Linux excels in four areas: Internet providers, entry-level computer networks, specialized computing devices such as network routers, and scientifically oriented computer "clusters" that link scores of PCs to make a single supercomputer.
But he said Linux currently lacks some of the features demanded by corporations that intend to run their entire business on computers. Among them are the ability to run simultaneously on many processors in a single computer and to keep a log of what the computer has done.
"""
Or to languages that embed C++.
Higher-level languages such as Perl and Java are built to add capabilities by linking in C++ modules. Expect such C++-extensible languages to have compatibility libraries shortly. Better yet, make it happen.
--The basis of all love is respect
You ask, "Linux on every desktop?" I say, "why limit yourself?" Linux can be used for desktop computing, but that's a small amount. Linux can become a contender on the desktop, in the back room, in your basement, your car, your pocket.
Linux is an OS that can be used all over the place, for all sorts of users and all sorts of applications. It's not ready for everybody now, but can be made ready.
Does Linux even have to be for anybody? With a monolithic OS like Windows/?? or MacOS, the question "Who is it for?" is very important. The user interacts directly with the OS every day.
Linux (or other Unix) isn't monolithic; you can build any user interface you want on top of it. Even the mighty X is not sacred to Unix; it can be thrown out if need be. Given that a user doesn't have to deal with Linux on a daily basis, the question "Who is it for?" is less important than the question "What can it do?". The answer to "Who is it for?" is "whoever wants things that it can do".
Neal Stephenson (earlier story) described OSs as cars. He described Windows as a clunky old station wagon and Linux as a tank. I'm going to go one step further. Windows, the monolithic OS, is the clunky old station wagon. It's got a badly tuned engine that sucks down too much gas and stalls a lot, but at least you have a steering wheel where you expect one and the gear selector works as normal.
Linux, the operating system (or more appropriately, the kernel and drivers) isn't even a tank. It's a tank engine, one of those powerful turbine jobbies that can haul twenty tons at 150 MPH, while taking up half the space of the MS piston engine.
By custom, we throw the geeky frontend onto it: X, shells, Lesstif, Emacs, and similar apps. That frontend is the tank that we build around that turbine; geeks love it, because they're all tank drivers. It can go anywhere the station wagon can, and places the station wagon can't. It can beat the wagon off the line, and do it with less fuel. It has a zero turning radius: it can even park easier.
But it doesn't have a steering wheel. It has two hand throttles, one for each tread.
I may like cars, but I've never been in the army. Put me on Stephenson's intersection, and I'll buy the station wagon over the free tank, every time. That tank scares me. I don't know how to drive a tank, and the tank driver schools aren't advertising. Even if they were, I don't want to bother.
You can get Linux to work for everybody. You can't get that damned tank to work for everybody. You need to build different vehicles, all powered by that rediculously powerful turbine called the Linux kernel. You need the sexy sports car for the executive to put on his desk. You need the Station Wagon From Hell, for family use (expands to fit your entire family, then cruises along at Warp Factor 6). You need the network server semi-tractor (nowadays, you see Linux M-1s pulling corporate trailers). You need those specialized backhoe units for specialized applications. Now you're selling a half dozen different vehicles. But they're all running the same OS, all have the same power plant.
Linux can go everywhere. Things like Emacs can't.
Possible new applications and the interfaces to go with them:
1: the Linux Game Console. Built with high-end video cards and largely yesterday's hardware for the rest of it, this will likely be more expensive than other consoles but cheaper than normal Linux boxen. And since the interface is open, you can snarf down free titles. When the technology increases, you either upgrade or replace your console (depending on your faith in screwdrivers), and your old games still work! Also, this could make Linux a tier 1 or 2 platform for game ports, and many have said that the games sell the platform in computing. This is the NASCAR stock racer--not useful for normal applications (don't try to get the milk with it), but very good for exactly what it does.
2: The out-of-the-box server. This may already be available. I need a file server, I buy one. You set it up with a local HTTP browser, and add RAID units on demand. If you have to go under the hood to do some funkier configuration, you have your sysadmins do it. Otherwise, some applications (esp. home use) don't need sysadmin assistance. These implementations are trucks; anywhere from pickups to semis.
3: The palmtop. You need a simple user interface because of the limited options you get with stand-up computing. The nice thing about this is that palmtopping isn't an exact science yet; Linux may be able to make one that's easier to use than others come up with. This is one of those foldable mopeds that fit in a briefcase.
4: The home box; the Station Wagon from Hell. Here we have a couple of problems. Since everybody's used to the Microsoft Station Wagon, they can get frightened off by non-MS station wagons. As a suggestion: the trick may be to have a configurable UI, originally set to as close to Windows as allowed by law. Then let users reconfigure their UI to "improve" it, bit by bit. The Law of Least Astonishment applies.
5: The specialized applications; the backhoes. Home controllers. Automotive Linux. Control boxes for things like broadcast booths and sports arenas. These won't even be recognizably Linux; if you want to do some maintenance on these, bring your own console.
Finally, we must make sure that we leave a tank folded up in each of these applications. The geek is always going to want the high-control, many-choices interface. Leave Emacs and friends on the hard drive, so that the Linux tank drivers can fix it if and when it breaks.
--The basis of all love is respect
A large percentage of the Linux (or better, Unix users (probably VMS as well)) are real users, not consumers. For them, the computer is the game.
:o) (Personally I think that any reason people have to use Linux is a good reason :o)
Where would Linux be if Linus (and RMS and many others) had waisted their time playing games?
Interesting points; however they fail to address the underlying point of the previous poster, which is "games drive the market."
I'm one of the "real" users you mentioned (I think I've spent a total of 30 minutes playing games over the past 3 years.. - by choice- there are simply too many other things I can do with my computer time.) but my preference (and yours, from the tone of your post) for computer use doesn't change the fact that OTHER people use computers for games, and that because there are (few) games for Linux, means that these people won't use it.
Whether or not this is a bad thing is entirely relative of course
More specifically, Linux needs more critics who are able to get the zealots to listen to them without kneejerking.
There are many things I find distasteful or downright wrong about Linux, but as soon as I open my mouth to compare them to things that other OSes have (say, BeOS or MacOS), the 'linux weenies' will immediately stop listening to anything that's said of substance.
The community needs to accept criticism better...
and accept that maybe, just maybe, software that's come before Linux has something useful in it.
Win 95 install
1. insert install disk and CD
2. restart computer
3. select which drive/partition and directory
4. selection install options blah blah blah
Is that so hard? I even installed this over Linux and NT and I still had my boot selector too.
Strongly about this subject...
see my earlier post about this subject...
"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
DOS always puts the current directory in the PATH.
UNIX doesn't do that.
You should put it _last_ in your path. If you put
it first and use a system with other users, you
could be tricked into running a trojan.
Don't worry about typos. They are rare and mostly
unpredictable. (if not, write aliases for them)
My Diamond Viper 550 video card is too new to be recognized by the XFree86 3.3.2 software, so right now I'm text-only.
Did you upgrade to the 3.3.2 SVGA server? It supports the V550 and other TNT boards. You might also need to upgrade your X configuration program so it will list your board.
I am tired of reading this propaganda. I use Linux happily on a number of computers. I also use Win98 and NT on a number of computers. I like Linux for many reasons but ease of use isn't one. Installing RH Linux easier than Win98? You must be joking. You compare BETA releases of the MS OS with Linux? Why? Win98 and RH 5.2 both offer disk or cd-rom boot up (depending on BIOS capabilities). Both offer the same "easy" disk administration (compare MS fdisk and RH disk druid). Both offer on the spot LAN Network configuration. None of these can be recommended to the novice. Now try setting up a dial up configuration: Win98 click an icon, answer a few questions on numbers, modem device (which more likely than not is autodetected) and tell it the name of your mail server and news server and you are pretty much Internet ready. Don't have an ISP... MS helps you look for one. Sure, your choices are limited but that's easy. Easy == lack of control.
Try installing Linux on a machine with a CD Writer or ISDN card or TV card. I ain't saying it isn't possible but it sure isn't as easy as Windoze.
Your article began promising to tackle the real issues of using Linux and ended being a propaganda piece. When are all the Linux hackerz going to realise that by giving people the false impression about Linux you are doing more harm than good?
Take Joe User: he reads this, is tired of Windoze, thinks "okay, Linux ain't so scary I'll try it." Buys the CD. Puts it in... oh dear, his AGP video card isn't on the list... what to do? Download some guys source and compile it. Oh dear his standard issue network card (say DLink DFE 530TX for sake of argument) isn't standard either. What about his ISDN card???
Net result: Joe User is never to be seen using Linux.
Tell people the truth! Linux ain't Windoze. It has power, raw power but it won't making using it easy. If you like OSs you'll like Linux. If you think a computer should be something you turn on and start using productively it ain't for you (without some expensive consultancy fees).
"Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and my monkey" - The Beatles "If you're not part of the solution, you'
1) Linux needs to catch up on hardware suppt. No game head will settle for 'generic nVidia' as a card like I had to
2) Absolutely. Games have driven PC (as opposed to just computer) technology since, for ever? Games get people using PCs - they buy 'em as games consoles they can justify to themselves, then when they get bored of Gran Turismo, whatever, or their printer goes wrong, they start learning how to really use them.
Then they get p1ssed of with W9x...
If I had Gate's loot, i wouldn't care either...
It's a truism to say that Linux is hard for newbies (ME!) because it was/is created by hackers for hackers. There are always skill-swaps (He teaches me Linux, I can rebuild his 486) but these can only go so far.
The first distribution to say: leave a large portion of yer HDD unformatted and unpartitioned, put the boot disk in, select a video, sound card, modem and LAN and let the boot do it's thing will score big. YaST (SUSE) is a good start. I've seen criticisms of it being arbitrary, but I just wanted to get started!
(I had a Linux0using friend come round and help me install. he did it all in 15mins. I couldn't duplicate that if my life was at stake. Yet.)
You're in my country....keep the faith! get someone to teach you a few of the basics and you'll soon get started.
Cool thanks!.. It'll be good to see what the reasoning is.. I think at worst if the numbers are right it'll show us where to optimize some of the code :)
Sun's journalling file system is not from Veritas (although VxFS does run on Solaris). It's an extension of UFS. I could be wrong, but I think the source to all of Solaris (including logging UFS) is available to educational customers.
I've seen mentions in ZDnews and elsewhere that all of Solaris is going to be released under Sun's Community Source License (the Java/Jini license) in the near future.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Something I don't quite understand in this argument is the assumption that linux is ready just now to be "for everyone." I'm currently running debian, and have used linux for over 2 years now, and I just don't see it as being an OS for the people. I don't feel I need to extol its virtues here, as anyone who's used it should know them, and anyone who hasn't shouldn't have an opinion about it, but part of linux is its stability, and part of linux is its raw power. Everyone likes stability. But you pay for power. And the price you pay is in user friendliness. The more powerful something is, the less likely it is that you'll be able to adapt it to common usage. There're something things about linux which could use a bit of work. One being the basic linux floppy writing system. There're ways around the ohh so easy to remember dd=if...... command, and I've tried a few and some are quite good, but standardization on one of those would be handy as a time saving feature. But it's things like that, and things like reading logs and man pages, compiling files and the kernel, and configuring X and your window manager that the average user just doesn't have the experience with or the knowledge as to how to do. It was Bill Gates himself who decided that every person needed a computer, and so to try to make linux easier that it might be installed on everyone's computer now, rather than improving the user interface over time while keeping the basic reasons that linux was created intact in the distributions, seems to me to be something we should all reconsider. A computer in every house is something that's becoming a reality, but linux in every house is something, I feel, should be a few years off at the very least. Conquering the world for linux is something I hope we one day do, but let's make sure we conquer it with the power of linux, not just the name.
-Mike
What's really holding game developers back? Apart from the obvious marketshare advantage of windows games?
If you think it's necessary for the Linux community to have games, fire up your editor and write one. Don't count on me, because I don't think there's anything to gain with it.
--- Abigail
Interesting points; however they fail to address the underlying point of the previous poster, which is "games drive the market."
If that is true, Windows and Intel, and possible the Mac should beat Unix and the hardware it runs on hands down, as there are only a few games available for Unix platforms, and hardly any large, graphical ones. Intel certainly doesn't produce the best quality hardware that's out there, and I doubt many people in this forum will say that Windows beats Unix hands down. I certainly won't say that.
In fact, I'd like to make an observation. Of the big OSses, the shittiest is the one with the most games. Does anyone suggest Linux should go that way?
--- Abigail
My point is that Windows is *not* technically better than Unix, despite the "driving force" of games. Hence, Linux doesn't have to have games just to advance itself.
--- Abigail
I just recently installed (1 week ago) Linux on my computer. With a little help from the manual, installing Red Hat 5.2 was a breeze. However, the command line continues to stump me.
/usr/games, but I couldn't for the life of me get it to work. I typed "cribbage" as I would an .exe file. I tried "run", "start", even "compile" to see if I could envoke the file. No such luck. Clearly, I was still trying to speak English to my now Slavic computer.
And the real reason it does is not that I'm in some way afraid of typing commands instead of clicking them, but because when I see a command line I instantly harken back to my days of DOS.
Think of it this way: As little children, most of use learn to speak only on language early on. After that point, it becomes progressively harder to learn a second language as well as the first. I grew up on DOS, and when Linux uses some convention that DOS didn't, I become easily confused and frustrated. Just last night, I was trying to run a cribbage game. There it was, "cribbage" in
But just as we all struggled to learn Spanish or French in high school, so I struggle with Linux. Sure, I'll get some terms wrong and native speakers will make fun of me. I may never use Linux as well as some one who learned Linux as their first language. But slowly I'll get there. That's just how the human brain works sometimes.
- FR