At a place I used to work, they made burglar alarms. One burglar alarm, the "8112", had a feature where you could lock out sensors so they would not report. This had two possible uses: the alarm company could lock out a defective sensor, or the alarm company could lock out all sensors if the customer wasn't paying the alarm bills.
Anyway, there were 8 possible sensor "zones", and there was a byte that could lock out any or all of them. You set a bit, one zone was locked out.
An upgraded version of the 8112 came out, where you could replace two of the 8 zones with serial data loops, and you could have over 100 individually reporting sensors instead of 8. This optional feature was called "Zonex" (for "Zone expander" or something like that). For no good reason, when Zonex was running, the sense of the lockout bits was reversed: instead of being lockout bits, they became enable bits.
I want to emphasize this. If Zonex was running, you had to set all the bits; otherwise you had to clear all the bits.
So the setup software knew to check the Zonex bit, and set up the lockout byte accordingly.
This worked great until a new version of the 8112 came out where Zonex was always running, whether or not the Zonex bit was set. If the user didn't happen to set the Zonex bit when setting up that version of the 8112, the burglar alarm would silently ignore all the sensors. Eeeek!
Once we figured that out, we added a check for the version of the 8112 and all was well again with the setup software.
The moral of this story is: don't randomly invert the sense of settings!
Actually, the Debian menu is one of the cool features of Debian.
You can use a menu editor and rearrange your menus as much as you like. But the Debian menu will always be there, and will always have the same things in the same places.
The Debian menu is nice if you misplaced a launcher, or if you are using someone else's highly customized Debian desktop, because you know you can always find things in the same places under the Debian menu.
I'm not sure why it is so slow for you. I use Nautilus2 to browse on a remote server, and I have tons of files on that server. It works great for me, both on my Athlon and on my K6-III/450. I seem to be using it for similar things as you: I have directories full of songs, and other directories with lots of tiny little files. It's even decently fast when pulling up directories full of photos, while generating thumbnails for the photos on the fly.
I don't know why it runs so much better for me than it does for you.
I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar.
People keep saying things like this. I don't understand it. I'm using GNOME2 and Nautilus2 on my K6-III/450, and it is both stable and fast for me.
I remember older versions of Nautilus; I took Nautilus completely off my GNOME 1.x desktop, because it was making the whole machine run slow! My computer ran so much faster when I switched to ROX Filer. But I gave Nautilus a second chance when I installed GNOME2 from the Debian experimental packages; and it is much improved.
And on my Athlon, Nautilus2 flies. I like Nautilus2.
If you think Debian is hard to install, you need to know about PGI.
PGI is the Progeny Graphical Installer. It is slick and easy to use. If you run it, it will set up your computer with a perfectly good Debian system.
You do not need to run the official Debian installer to get a valid working Debian system.
The official Debian project does not need to integrate PGI before you can use it. You can use it now.
Note that Debian supports a huge number of architectures, but PGI is only available for x86 and ia64 (Itanium). I'm sure future versions of PGI will add support for other architectures.
Now, here is the part where I was planning to tell you how to get PGI. But I'm all confused now and I can't tell you yet.
It used to be that there was an ISO image of a PGI installer CD-ROM, available for download. You would just download it, burn it to CD, and boot from the CD.
Now, PGI has released their 1.0 version, and the downloadable ISO image is gone. Instead there are the tools to create your own PGI install disk. While this is totally cool, this makes it hard for me to tell you how to get a working CD image.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that if you take the sample "configlets" from the PGI distribution, and build a PGI disk image using that, you might get the equivalent of the ISO image they used to offer. I'm planning to look into it, but by the time I figure this out, this news story will be long since gone from the Slashdot front page. So it goes.
It probably won't be long before you will be able to choose from several PGI-based installers (for free). But right now I'm not sure where to send you for an ISO image.
Minix is a toy. But that's not a bad thing, and people are still playing with it.
Minix was written to give some "real-life" examples for a textbook on operating system design. The guy who wrote it wanted to keep it simple, so that it would be easier to understand.
Back when there wasn't a free *NIX, some people hacked on Minix to turn it into less of a toy and more of a real operating system. The biggest obstacle was licensing issues: Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project. Linux would have likely never happened, and I would be using Minix to type this rather than Linux. This is nice history lesson about the importance of software licensing.
Anyway, between the *BSD family and Linux, we have plenty of *NIX operating systems to use; we don't need one more that is stuck back at the toy level and has a messy license. So people are not working on Minix to make it less toy-like anymore.
Because Minix is a toy, you can read the book and dive right in to the Minix code base. You can hack around with it and have a good time. As long as people still read the book, Minix will be a useful toy.
The efforts to grow Minix beyond its toy status are dead. Minix itself remains educational and fun.
That howto I linked to has those suggestions, and many more.
Maybe you think once a week is not often enough to update packages, but a Debian server admin who updates once per week will be way ahead of 99% of amateur server admins, and some of the professionals. The Slapper worm was in the news recently because it was causing problems... but the security holes it uses had been fixed months ago. There were a whole bunch of servers with really out of date software. Probably few of those servers were running Debian.
I would prefer if there was a single install option that allowed me to automatically disable all the potentially insecure services.
Dude, read that howto that I linked to; one of the things it tells you about is the "harden" packages under Debian. When you install "harden-servers" or whatever it disables insecure services, among other things.
as far as I can tell, all Linksys has done since is improved the PNIC further
All I know is that I had problems with a LNE100TX under Linux. I was getting throughput of 2 Mbps, not 100 Mbps. I was also getting lots of errors.
One of the web pages I checked identified the chipset in that Linksys card as a "really broken chipset". I have used that card under Windows, so perhaps the drivers are partly to blame... but I want speedy and reliable networking, under Linux, so I don't want Linksys cards.
Word Converters are helping me transfer old document files, Microsoft Works files, and even AppleWorks files.
Now nothing but Word can ever open these files again! Hooray!
For some reason, the above reminded me of an old Star Trek episode. Inside my head, I heard an echoing voice saying
You will be absorbed into the body
steveha
Re:Which Network gear manufacturer?
on
Ask Donald Becker
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I blush to admit this, but I have already asked him this question. Last January I was having trouble with a network card, and I sent email to Mr. Becker asking his advice.
Here a my quick summary of what he told me:
Some network cards are really pathetic and/or broken. As long as you don't buy one of those, it doesn't really matter very much which one you buy.
The 3Com 3c905 cards are a little bit better than other cards.
Based on that web page and Mr. Becker's comments, I bought myself some 3Com 3c905c network cards, and I have been very happy with them.
P.S. I used to buy my net cards by brand name. Bad idea! You must look beyond the brand name and see what chipset the net card uses. I bought a Linksys LNE100TX card and liked it, so I kept buying that card. But Linksys started making different versions of the card, using completely different chipsets, so the last time I bought that card it turned out to be really broken under Linux. Older LNE100TX cards work well with the "Tulip" driver under Linux, but newer ones are really broken.
P.S. I'm sure Windows systems can be made secure, but it has to be more work than securing a Debian system. There is nothing as cool as "apt-get upgrade" on Windows.
Thanks! You just made me laugh out loud, and that's always fun.
Having to use a debugger at all is a sign that the code doesn't clearly express what it's going to do.
No, it's a sign that the code isn't doing what you want it to do. Sometimes that's due to a flaw in your code. Sometimes it might even be due to something else, like an API call that doesn't do what you expect, or even an API call that is downright buggy.
It's as silly to say that one should never need a debugger, as to say that one cannot do without a debugger.
a debugger that can't even tell you which expression is about to be evaluated
So, when you have a project on a platform with primitive development tools, what do you do? Refuse to work on the project?
Tell me, what development tools do you use? They must be wonderful. Maybe I should use them.
it demands you will do only one thing per line. It's kind of hard to get yourself thinking this way
No, I write code like that all the time.
When single-stepping in the debugger, I really hate having multiple things happen in a single-step. It's so much nicer to be able to see things happen one step at a time.
Back in the really bad old days, compilers might have been dumb enough that you would get worse code when you only did one thing per line, but that hasn't been true in a long time. Your single-statement lines will be folded by the compiler. With optimizations enabled, the compiler will generate the same code from
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time
It is very unlikely that you can really notice the speed of code morphing. It seems much more likely that you have a very slow laptop hard disk.
Stuff your laptop full of memory; put as much in as it will hold. Then see if it feels better. Things will still be slow, as they load from disk, but once they are loaded they should be much faster.
This is especially important if you are running a RAM hog of an OS such as Windows XP. When your system is low on memory it swaps some memory pages out to your hard disk; swapping to a slow laptop disk will be painful.
Also, if you have XP or Windows ME, be sure to turn "system restore" off!
Maybe someday you can install Linux on it; I would be interested to know if Linux feels any better.
The actual instruction set for the Crusoe is secret. This is so that Transmeta can change it as much as they want. For all we know, every Crusoe chip made could be incompatible with every other one; it's not likely, but you get the idea.
You are just supposed to feed x86 instructions into a Crusoe chip.
It may be a little over the top, but he is correct.
ATI's Radeon 9700 is faster than anything current from nVidia. (nVidia will ship something soon that takes first place back, probably, but right now ATI has the hottest board.)
And that last part is almost damning with faint praise: "after years of sucking, the ATI drivers are less sucky than formerly." His actual words: "relatively stable". Compared to ATI's older drivers, "relatively stable" is high praise.
So his point was simply that at the moment ATI has their ducks in a row. And they do. I hope they keep it up. (And I also hope nVidia keeps up what they are doing.)
The norton protected recycle bin really does nothing but take advantage of a few (mis)features of the FAT file system.
You are mistaken. Perhaps you are thinking of the Norton "Undelete" program, not the Norton Protected Recycle Bin.
Undelete does take advantage of the way the FAT filesystem deletes files. (However, it also takes advantage of the "image" files written by the Norton Disk Image program, which are basically copies of the FAT written to known locations on the disk. If you have been imaging your disk, your odds of a successful undelete improve.)
If this works on NTFS too, then they are actually doing something new
It does work on NTFS.
NPRB works by intercepting disk writes that would delete or overwrite files, and then backing up the original file.
If you edit a file and then hit save, and do it again three more times, then when you check the NPRB recovery you will see four versions of the file that you can recover--one for each save.
A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior.
That's cool. The problem is that KDE isn't done, and Red Hat needs something to ship right now.
The KOffice stuff doesn't work as well as OpenOffice yet. Mozilla views more web pages than Konqueror. Evolution is a lot better for a business user (especially one already used to Outlook) than anything else.
Maybe in two years KDE will have all the pieces in place, and a 100% KDE solution will work for business users. Meanwhile, Red Hat did what they had to do right now.
If you set up your system with LVM, you can use LVM's "snapshots" feature. Each snapshot is a virtual copy of the entire file system, as it existed when the snapshot is taken.
This is primarily intended for backups of volatile filesystems, such as databases. You would backup a database like this:
suspend database transactions
wait for pending transactions to finish (so database indexes are consistent)
make a snapshot
resume database transactions
backup the snapshot
remove the snapshot
But if you have a lot of free disk space, you could set up your system to make a snapshot every hour, and keep the snapshot for, say, 8 hours. Then you would have a coarse-grained undelete.
If your shapshots happen on the hour (1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and so on) and the user creates a file at 1:02 and deletes it at 1:40, the snapshot won't help, which is why I call it coarse-grained. But if you accidentally do "rm *.mp3" in your home directory, the snapshot would be a huge help. You would get back everything over an hour old.
It is specifically for snapshots that I plan to try out LVM on my next file server.
A couple of years ago I heard about something called the "snap filesystem" which would allow for recovering deleted or overwritten files. But I haven't heard of it since, or seen anything on the web. Does anyone know anything about a "snap filesystem"?
I'd like to see support for this in the kernel. What I want is to see all the functionality of the Norton Protected Recycle Bin (NPRB), which you get with Norton Utilities under Windows.
When you remove a file, from anywhere, it is saved. This means Nautilus, shell prompt, FTP client, whatever. (Tricks involving editing.bashrc need not apply.)
When you overwrite a file, it is still saved. This means if you save a huge edit to a file and then regret it, you can recover the previous version. If I am not mistaken, libtrash does not handle this case.
You can specify some files/directories to not be backed-up. NPRB allows you to specify wildcard patterns, such as "C:\Temp\*" (anything in C:\Temp) or "*.bak" (any file ending in.bak). I like the wildcard feature for "*.bak" and such, but I would also like to see this new kernel feature do the right thing with the "chattr +u" flag, which Linux has had forever but doesn't acutually do anything.
You specify an automatic date for the backups to be purged: e.g., anything older than 3 days old gets purged. A user-space utility running on a cron job would handle this nicely.
There should be user-space utilities that allow for recovering a deleted file (to original location or to someone else), and for purging all the kept files to truly get the space back. (And I want a nice Nautilus interface for this stuff.)
When you are up against the wall on disk space, the oldest files get purged automatically to make enough room for a file write. (This one would be nice but I could live without it.)
This would be nice on servers, but I also want it on the workstation!
NPRB is the one big feature available in Windows that I really wish for in Linux.
steveha
//machine_name/current/directory in the title bar
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
·
· Score: 2
I used to have my shells set up to display the machine name and directory in the title bar of the xterm. It was sweet; you could have a really long directory path and it would all fit up there. (A proportional font helps it fit nicely.) Then the actual shell prompt was history number and a # (if root) or a $ (if not root).
I was using tcsh in those days, and it has a feature called "cwdcmd" where you could set up a command to be executed when changing directories. But you don't need that; you can just alias the cd command itself under bash or whatever.
Red Hat used to be pushing GNOME, and pretty much ignoring KDE. The KDE guys didn't like this.
Now Red Hat is trying to integrate KDE into their distro seamlessly. The KDE guys don't like this at all.
What should Red Hat do to make these guys happy? I think the only way the KDE guys would be happy is if Red Hat puts in KDE without changing anything. Great, now Red Hat has two different install options that look and work very differently. What a support nightmare. So, Red Hat would have to budget more money for support of KDE, or else just say it isn't supported... in other words, push GNOME and ignore KDE.
So it looks like the only way the KDE guys will be happy is if Red Hat goes out of their way to increase their support costs. Let's face it, if it is going to cost money to keep the KDE guys happy, Red Hat isn't going to do it!
P.S. Calling the Red Hat version of KDE "crippleware" isn't helpful. Red Hat isn't trying to hurt KDE; they are a business, and how does hurting KDE make money for them?
Any bugs Red Hat introduces to KDE will increase their support costs. People who buy Red Hat call Red Hat when they have trouble.
Red Hat is doing this so that a user can run KDE apps or GNOME apps without really caring which is which. Some of the KDE guys are complaining that Red Hat will make KDE look bad. The idea is that no one will even notice whether they are using KDE or not.
Slashdot Mirror
At a place I used to work, they made burglar alarms. One burglar alarm, the "8112", had a feature where you could lock out sensors so they would not report. This had two possible uses: the alarm company could lock out a defective sensor, or the alarm company could lock out all sensors if the customer wasn't paying the alarm bills.
Anyway, there were 8 possible sensor "zones", and there was a byte that could lock out any or all of them. You set a bit, one zone was locked out.
An upgraded version of the 8112 came out, where you could replace two of the 8 zones with serial data loops, and you could have over 100 individually reporting sensors instead of 8. This optional feature was called "Zonex" (for "Zone expander" or something like that). For no good reason, when Zonex was running, the sense of the lockout bits was reversed: instead of being lockout bits, they became enable bits.
I want to emphasize this. If Zonex was running, you had to set all the bits; otherwise you had to clear all the bits.
So the setup software knew to check the Zonex bit, and set up the lockout byte accordingly.
This worked great until a new version of the 8112 came out where Zonex was always running, whether or not the Zonex bit was set. If the user didn't happen to set the Zonex bit when setting up that version of the 8112, the burglar alarm would silently ignore all the sensors. Eeeek!
Once we figured that out, we added a check for the version of the 8112 and all was well again with the setup software.
The moral of this story is: don't randomly invert the sense of settings!
steveha
Actually, the Debian menu is one of the cool features of Debian.
You can use a menu editor and rearrange your menus as much as you like. But the Debian menu will always be there, and will always have the same things in the same places.
The Debian menu is nice if you misplaced a launcher, or if you are using someone else's highly customized Debian desktop, because you know you can always find things in the same places under the Debian menu.
steveha
I'm not sure why it is so slow for you. I use Nautilus2 to browse on a remote server, and I have tons of files on that server. It works great for me, both on my Athlon and on my K6-III/450. I seem to be using it for similar things as you: I have directories full of songs, and other directories with lots of tiny little files. It's even decently fast when pulling up directories full of photos, while generating thumbnails for the photos on the fly.
I don't know why it runs so much better for me than it does for you.
steveha
I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar.
People keep saying things like this. I don't understand it. I'm using GNOME2 and Nautilus2 on my K6-III/450, and it is both stable and fast for me.
I remember older versions of Nautilus; I took Nautilus completely off my GNOME 1.x desktop, because it was making the whole machine run slow! My computer ran so much faster when I switched to ROX Filer. But I gave Nautilus a second chance when I installed GNOME2 from the Debian experimental packages; and it is much improved.
And on my Athlon, Nautilus2 flies. I like Nautilus2.
steveha
If you think Debian is hard to install, you need to know about PGI.
PGI is the Progeny Graphical Installer. It is slick and easy to use. If you run it, it will set up your computer with a perfectly good Debian system.
You do not need to run the official Debian installer to get a valid working Debian system.
The official Debian project does not need to integrate PGI before you can use it. You can use it now.
Note that Debian supports a huge number of architectures, but PGI is only available for x86 and ia64 (Itanium). I'm sure future versions of PGI will add support for other architectures.
Now, here is the part where I was planning to tell you how to get PGI. But I'm all confused now and I can't tell you yet.
It used to be that there was an ISO image of a PGI installer CD-ROM, available for download. You would just download it, burn it to CD, and boot from the CD.
Now, PGI has released their 1.0 version, and the downloadable ISO image is gone. Instead there are the tools to create your own PGI install disk. While this is totally cool, this makes it hard for me to tell you how to get a working CD image.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that if you take the sample "configlets" from the PGI distribution, and build a PGI disk image using that, you might get the equivalent of the ISO image they used to offer. I'm planning to look into it, but by the time I figure this out, this news story will be long since gone from the Slashdot front page. So it goes.
It probably won't be long before you will be able to choose from several PGI-based installers (for free). But right now I'm not sure where to send you for an ISO image.
steveha
now overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft's inelegant but overwhelmingly dominant Outlook
This surprisingly clumsy phrase was clumsy but surprising to me.
steveha
Minix is a toy. But that's not a bad thing, and people are still playing with it.
Minix was written to give some "real-life" examples for a textbook on operating system design. The guy who wrote it wanted to keep it simple, so that it would be easier to understand.
Back when there wasn't a free *NIX, some people hacked on Minix to turn it into less of a toy and more of a real operating system. The biggest obstacle was licensing issues: Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project. Linux would have likely never happened, and I would be using Minix to type this rather than Linux. This is nice history lesson about the importance of software licensing.
Anyway, between the *BSD family and Linux, we have plenty of *NIX operating systems to use; we don't need one more that is stuck back at the toy level and has a messy license. So people are not working on Minix to make it less toy-like anymore.
Because Minix is a toy, you can read the book and dive right in to the Minix code base. You can hack around with it and have a good time. As long as people still read the book, Minix will be a useful toy.
The efforts to grow Minix beyond its toy status are dead. Minix itself remains educational and fun.
steveha
That howto I linked to has those suggestions, and many more.
Maybe you think once a week is not often enough to update packages, but a Debian server admin who updates once per week will be way ahead of 99% of amateur server admins, and some of the professionals. The Slapper worm was in the news recently because it was causing problems... but the security holes it uses had been fixed months ago. There were a whole bunch of servers with really out of date software. Probably few of those servers were running Debian.
P.S. Yes, backups! Run backups!
steveha
I would prefer if there was a single install option that allowed me to automatically disable all the potentially insecure services.
Dude, read that howto that I linked to; one of the things it tells you about is the "harden" packages under Debian. When you install "harden-servers" or whatever it disables insecure services, among other things.
Debian rocks. But then, you knew that already.
steveha
as far as I can tell, all Linksys has done since is improved the PNIC further
All I know is that I had problems with a LNE100TX under Linux. I was getting throughput of 2 Mbps, not 100 Mbps. I was also getting lots of errors.
One of the web pages I checked identified the chipset in that Linksys card as a "really broken chipset". I have used that card under Windows, so perhaps the drivers are partly to blame... but I want speedy and reliable networking, under Linux, so I don't want Linksys cards.
steveha
Word Converters are helping me transfer old document files, Microsoft Works files, and even AppleWorks files.
Now nothing but Word can ever open these files again! Hooray!
For some reason, the above reminded me of an old Star Trek episode. Inside my head, I heard an echoing voice saying
You will be absorbed into the body
steveha
I blush to admit this, but I have already asked him this question. Last January I was having trouble with a network card, and I sent email to Mr. Becker asking his advice.
Here a my quick summary of what he told me:
Some network cards are really pathetic and/or broken. As long as you don't buy one of those, it doesn't really matter very much which one you buy.
The 3Com 3c905 cards are a little bit better than other cards.
I found this web page:
http://www.fefe.de/linuxeth/
Based on that web page and Mr. Becker's comments, I bought myself some 3Com 3c905c network cards, and I have been very happy with them.
P.S. I used to buy my net cards by brand name. Bad idea! You must look beyond the brand name and see what chipset the net card uses. I bought a Linksys LNE100TX card and liked it, so I kept buying that card. But Linksys started making different versions of the card, using completely different chipsets, so the last time I bought that card it turned out to be really broken under Linux. Older LNE100TX cards work well with the "Tulip" driver under Linux, but newer ones are really broken.
steveha
I am not an experienced sysadmin, but I have found sysadmin tasks to be pretty easy with Debian. Here is how to run a server with Debian:
- howto/
0) install using the Debian "stable" branch. (Use the pgi to install; it's easy.)
1) once a week or so, run the commands:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
These will go out and get all the latest updates to your packages.
If you update your packages, worms like Slapper will not be able to get into your system.
Debian also provides a really excellent howto. Any Debian server admins should study it:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian
P.S. I'm sure Windows systems can be made secure, but it has to be more work than securing a Debian system. There is nothing as cool as "apt-get upgrade" on Windows.
steveha
Thanks! You just made me laugh out loud, and that's always fun.
Having to use a debugger at all is a sign that the code doesn't clearly express what it's going to do.
No, it's a sign that the code isn't doing what you want it to do. Sometimes that's due to a flaw in your code. Sometimes it might even be due to something else, like an API call that doesn't do what you expect, or even an API call that is downright buggy.
It's as silly to say that one should never need a debugger, as to say that one cannot do without a debugger.
a debugger that can't even tell you which expression is about to be evaluated
So, when you have a project on a platform with primitive development tools, what do you do? Refuse to work on the project?
Tell me, what development tools do you use? They must be wonderful. Maybe I should use them.
steveha
it demands you will do only one thing per line. It's kind of hard to get yourself thinking this way
No, I write code like that all the time.
When single-stepping in the debugger, I really hate having multiple things happen in a single-step. It's so much nicer to be able to see things happen one step at a time.
Back in the really bad old days, compilers might have been dumb enough that you would get worse code when you only did one thing per line, but that hasn't been true in a long time. Your single-statement lines will be folded by the compiler. With optimizations enabled, the compiler will generate the same code from
x = foo();
if (x)
return;
as from
if (x = foo()) return;
And I know which one I'd rather single-step.
steveha
The problem is, it "feels" slow. There's just this little bit of latency, particularly as something starts up for the first time
It is very unlikely that you can really notice the speed of code morphing. It seems much more likely that you have a very slow laptop hard disk.
Stuff your laptop full of memory; put as much in as it will hold. Then see if it feels better. Things will still be slow, as they load from disk, but once they are loaded they should be much faster.
This is especially important if you are running a RAM hog of an OS such as Windows XP. When your system is low on memory it swaps some memory pages out to your hard disk; swapping to a slow laptop disk will be painful.
Also, if you have XP or Windows ME, be sure to turn "system restore" off!
Maybe someday you can install Linux on it; I would be interested to know if Linux feels any better.
steveha
Can't you install Crusoe-native software?
No, you can't.
The actual instruction set for the Crusoe is secret. This is so that Transmeta can change it as much as they want. For all we know, every Crusoe chip made could be incompatible with every other one; it's not likely, but you get the idea.
You are just supposed to feed x86 instructions into a Crusoe chip.
steveh
It may be a little over the top, but he is correct.
ATI's Radeon 9700 is faster than anything current from nVidia. (nVidia will ship something soon that takes first place back, probably, but right now ATI has the hottest board.)
And that last part is almost damning with faint praise: "after years of sucking, the ATI drivers are less sucky than formerly." His actual words: "relatively stable". Compared to ATI's older drivers, "relatively stable" is high praise.
So his point was simply that at the moment ATI has their ducks in a row. And they do. I hope they keep it up. (And I also hope nVidia keeps up what they are doing.)
steveha
The norton protected recycle bin really does nothing but take advantage of a few (mis)features of the FAT file system.
You are mistaken. Perhaps you are thinking of the Norton "Undelete" program, not the Norton Protected Recycle Bin.
Undelete does take advantage of the way the FAT filesystem deletes files. (However, it also takes advantage of the "image" files written by the Norton Disk Image program, which are basically copies of the FAT written to known locations on the disk. If you have been imaging your disk, your odds of a successful undelete improve.)
If this works on NTFS too, then they are actually doing something new
It does work on NTFS.
NPRB works by intercepting disk writes that would delete or overwrite files, and then backing up the original file.
If you edit a file and then hit save, and do it again three more times, then when you check the NPRB recovery you will see four versions of the file that you can recover--one for each save.
steveha
A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior.
That's cool. The problem is that KDE isn't done, and Red Hat needs something to ship right now.
The KOffice stuff doesn't work as well as OpenOffice yet. Mozilla views more web pages than Konqueror. Evolution is a lot better for a business user (especially one already used to Outlook) than anything else.
Maybe in two years KDE will have all the pieces in place, and a 100% KDE solution will work for business users. Meanwhile, Red Hat did what they had to do right now.
steveha
This is primarily intended for backups of volatile filesystems, such as databases. You would backup a database like this:
suspend database transactions
wait for pending transactions to finish (so database indexes are consistent)
make a snapshot
resume database transactions
backup the snapshot
remove the snapshot
.mp3" in your home directory, the snapshot would be a huge help. You would get back everything over an hour old.
But if you have a lot of free disk space, you could set up your system to make a snapshot every hour, and keep the snapshot for, say, 8 hours. Then you would have a coarse-grained undelete.
If your shapshots happen on the hour (1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and so on) and the user creates a file at 1:02 and deletes it at 1:40, the snapshot won't help, which is why I call it coarse-grained. But if you accidentally do "rm *
It is specifically for snapshots that I plan to try out LVM on my next file server.
steveha
A couple of years ago I heard about something called the "snap filesystem" which would allow for recovering deleted or overwritten files. But I haven't heard of it since, or seen anything on the web. Does anyone know anything about a "snap filesystem"?
steveha
When you remove a file, from anywhere, it is saved. This means Nautilus, shell prompt, FTP client, whatever. (Tricks involving editing .bashrc need not apply.)
When you overwrite a file, it is still saved. This means if you save a huge edit to a file and then regret it, you can recover the previous version. If I am not mistaken, libtrash does not handle this case.
You can specify some files/directories to not be backed-up. NPRB allows you to specify wildcard patterns, such as "C:\Temp\*" (anything in C:\Temp) or "*.bak" (any file ending in .bak). I like the wildcard feature for "*.bak" and such, but I would also like to see this new kernel feature do the right thing with the "chattr +u" flag, which Linux has had forever but doesn't acutually do anything.
You specify an automatic date for the backups to be purged: e.g., anything older than 3 days old gets purged. A user-space utility running on a cron job would handle this nicely.
There should be user-space utilities that allow for recovering a deleted file (to original location or to someone else), and for purging all the kept files to truly get the space back. (And I want a nice Nautilus interface for this stuff.)
When you are up against the wall on disk space, the oldest files get purged automatically to make enough room for a file write. (This one would be nice but I could live without it.)
This would be nice on servers, but I also want it on the workstation!
NPRB is the one big feature available in Windows that I really wish for in Linux.
steveha
I used to have my shells set up to display the machine name and directory in the title bar of the xterm. It was sweet; you could have a really long directory path and it would all fit up there. (A proportional font helps it fit nicely.) Then the actual shell prompt was history number and a # (if root) or a $ (if not root).
I was using tcsh in those days, and it has a feature called "cwdcmd" where you could set up a command to be executed when changing directories. But you don't need that; you can just alias the cd command itself under bash or whatever.
steveha
Red Hat used to be pushing GNOME, and pretty much ignoring KDE. The KDE guys didn't like this.
Now Red Hat is trying to integrate KDE into their distro seamlessly. The KDE guys don't like this at all.
What should Red Hat do to make these guys happy? I think the only way the KDE guys would be happy is if Red Hat puts in KDE without changing anything. Great, now Red Hat has two different install options that look and work very differently. What a support nightmare. So, Red Hat would have to budget more money for support of KDE, or else just say it isn't supported... in other words, push GNOME and ignore KDE.
So it looks like the only way the KDE guys will be happy is if Red Hat goes out of their way to increase their support costs. Let's face it, if it is going to cost money to keep the KDE guys happy, Red Hat isn't going to do it!
P.S. Calling the Red Hat version of KDE "crippleware" isn't helpful. Red Hat isn't trying to hurt KDE; they are a business, and how does hurting KDE make money for them?
Any bugs Red Hat introduces to KDE will increase their support costs. People who buy Red Hat call Red Hat when they have trouble.
Red Hat is doing this so that a user can run KDE apps or GNOME apps without really caring which is which. Some of the KDE guys are complaining that Red Hat will make KDE look bad. The idea is that no one will even notice whether they are using KDE or not.
steveha