Sounds like your luck with this has been far better than mine.
I picked my Athlon 64 integrated motherboard based on a positive Linux review based on a slightly earlier version (my motherboard has an AM2 socket, it had a 939) I even upgraded from FC3 to FC6 (i.e. had to reinstall all the major apps) figuring that the drivers I needed would not be available on FC3. Well and good, until I actually installed the motherboard.
The motherboard would NOT run X on Fedora Core 6 after a week of trying and inquiries on various Linux forums. Though it ran OK with a vesa driver on Knoppix, and a Debian user who happened to see my post said "Debian Etch uses the same installer Knoppix does".
This system works perfectly now. . . on Debian Etch. This motherboard upgrade has cost me about a month in work time (remember, I had to reload my data files and reinstall major apps TWICE) I couldn't afford.
Check around, there's probably an installer script for your distro that'll find and install just about everything, including the "forbidden" w32codecs, etc. Fedora Frog is very good, Automatix (Debian and presumably Ubuntu) needs a bit of updating.
Yes, it probably will take an hour plus even on broadband, but once you click the entries choosing what software to install, the computer will have no further need for your assistance during the install phase, find yourself something else to do that's non-computer related for an hour or two.
The bad news... I don't get to sell any more multimedia how-to pieces for Linux. But this is a problem I really prefer to have solved, especially if I am the one installing a new distro from scratch.
Why don't distros come with these scripts as part of the default installation, sitting on the Desktop ready for use?
Anybody around here try both Ubuntu and the Debian it's based on? I'm running Debian Etch on what at best, is a midrange box. (Biostar GeForce 6100 AM2 motherboard, Athlon 3500+, 1G DDR2 533/dual channel)
This setup is running fast enough that my planned next upgrade step, an x2 Athlon processor upgrade and another 2G of DDR2 is on indefinite hold, even with Opera for Linux with a couple dozen open windows and VMWare Server running Windows right now.
Is Ubuntu that much slower than the Debian it's based on? If so, why?
is trivial at this point. Use K3b, as I am doing right now. (I'm burning the second DVD-R of a 10-disk backup volume) I haven't had trouble with setting it up since Fedora Core 2.
Why nonsense like this gets modded (Score 5:Insightful) is beyond my ability to understand.
Any PR agency or in-house organization who isn't paying people to astroturf on controversial public issues simply isn't doing their job.
You wonder why some people seem to be here at least 8 hours a day, almost as if somebody was paying them?
Perhaps somebody is.
Ever noticed how whenever something that threatens a group of tards with money instantly attracts posters parroting their Party Line?
Examples being stories about the RIAA, MPAA, Microshit, and anything that embarrasses the Bush Administration in areas where the polls tell us there really isn't significant public support for their position, but their supporters somehow manage to find this place and materialize whenever there's a topic they can troll.
I actually don't object to this, as long as the "bloggers" post their sponsors in their sigs. But that's going to take Federal law.
Admittedly, it's hard to tell an astroturfer from somebody who's unusually stupid and sincerely deluded.
"cast iron is unacceptible" has saved me trouble. It means I don't have to bother with anything the writer's got to say about cooking any more than I need to bother with what anyone who says "hydrogen is the future of energy". . . either way, the writer's a tard.
to shut down the gas supply. Find the valve going into the building, turn it to a right angle from wherever it was. Miller time. (unless you for some unaccountable reason, like real beer)
and it didn't. At least not on FC6, I couldn't make nv, vesa, kmod-nvidia, or the Nvidia binary work. Knoppix ran immediately in vesa. As did Debian Etch (hardly surprising, uses the same installer) Luckily, somebody told me about Etch. And I now have a working box several times the speed of the old one.
As for preinstalled Windows, the last time I had one of those was on a 286 box I was given after my homebrew MacPlus died.
I make a living on this box writing Linux how-to articles, so 10 days of downtime because an installer couldn't get my computer to a Desktop certainly qualifies as a disaster from my point of view. I would have waited until after I'd finished my article in progress if I'd known how bad it was going to be.
I was expecting the same kind of new hardware install you described. I now know that it just doesn't always work that way in Linux.
I AM running Debian Etch, I didn't need to create any symlinks, I just installed it via aptitude.
But it took basically everything I've learned over the last 3 years of using Fedora Core Linux to turn Debian into my customary desktop environment just to figure out what to install, and to track down dependencies not handled by Debian installers. If I knew then what I knew now, maybe I would have gone with Kubuntu.
I switched because I couldn't get FC6 to run my new Biostar GeForce6100 (Nvidia chipset) AM2 integrated motherboard video. And if you're using FC6. . . please, no more suggestions, assume that I've tried anything you can think of and it blew out with the same FPEexception message. Debian got the video working on the first try with vesa (NOT nv), and the second time around, the Debian-modified Nvidia driver worked just fine.
I'm surprised the article author didn't notice that under the hood, Lin/Freespire is Debian, too.
You want the masses to migrate to Linux? Make application installations "point and click" operations, including all necessary dependency checks and library installations as part of that initial click of the mouse button. Installing apps has to be that easy.
Agreed. Personally, I don't know why the community hasn't gone to static packages with all library dependencies installed with the program. It's not like disk space or broadband availability is a problem anymore. I'd rather put up with a longer download and waste disk space than have to install Yet Another Package from source.
and ONLY if the hardware is 100% supported by your distro. Otherwise, "easy" turns into trainwreck.
Checking in advance for hardware compatibility is NOT guaranteed to work, but it's the only thing you can really do. A slightly older version of my Biostar GeForce 6100 (939 socket, mine's an AM2) got a good review on one of the Linux compatibility sites.
I spent a frustrating week of online research and Linux forum posts trying to get the Nvidia video running in Fedora Core 6 (which I spent weeks upgrading to specifically to get access to the latest and greatest drivers), only being able to get to the Web or use my computer in any other way via a Knoppix liveCD. I must have tried a hundred different variations on installing kmod-nvidia, the nvidia binary, and modifying xorg.conf , only to get the same FPEexception error every time.
The fix. . . change to Debian Etch, which uses the same installer the Knoppix LiveCD does. Presumably, a Kubuntu install would have worked equally well, but by the time I figured that out, the computer was already running.
Easy install? More like the most difficult hardware installation I've ever done... on a motherboard on which Windows would probably have run straight out of the box.
If your motherboard or video is a couple or so years old, you probably won't have any problem. People who run AMD3500+, dual channel DDR2, and a slightly behind the curve video chipset shouldn't be penalized for trying to run this with Linux, but that's not the situation we've got.
If you don't know, if they were public, go to http://www.sec.gov/ and check their filings via EDGAR (something every IT pro needs to get a clue about. . . if you're dubious about a vendor. . . or about the future, if any, of the place you're working at. . . this is one place where companies are compelled to tell the truth.
It isn't about network efficiency, it's about the bottom line. Show that a company with draconian IT policy is more profitable, if you can. If anarchy is more profitable, it might be more cost-effective for a company to simply add to network bandwidth and hire a few more IT pros to clean up the messes.
A place where an IT pro can get "personal services" for not reporting mistakes made with a company computer is obviously a place where the balance of power is way off. If an ITer can't get a date, the company doesn't exist to solve that problem.
IT exists to make a company more efficient. One way it does this is by making it possible for users to hook up with the services required to permit users to communicate with each other and with the outside world and to gather information. Some of the new technologies used for this are not well understood by IT departments. Figuring them out and how to secure them is part of a sysadmin's job description. At least if that sysadmin wants to keep working.
If industry pros are using, for instance, an IM network to communicate business related things, it's IT's job to make sure they can do so safely. If a top salesperson's using an IM network and a sysadmin locks it out, who's going to have more leverage when the salesman complains to the VP of Marketing? And that's as it should be, the network exists to make the company money, not serve as an isolated node of network purity.
If IT "pros" are so busy locking down "their" networks that they forget that end users have legitimate purposes for using the company network, when the time comes to discuss offshoring their gigs to Bangalore, don't expect anybody you've gone Stalinist at to support you.
If you don't like "whiny user complaints", find another career.
is going to be written to specifically disallow the kind of intellectual property deal Novell made with M$hit.
This cuts them off from anything the community will do that's licensed under GPLv3... i.e. probably everything Novell doesn't write in-house. No more kernel upgrades, and probably no more major applications or upgrades. The only people who'll stay with GPLv2 are going to be Novell employees and SUSE loyalists. What's Novell worth if it's just been unplugged from the Open Source Community? What MS just paid them and whatever can be extracted from the turnip which is SCO.
I'm just glad I found out about this in time, I was forced to change distros from FC6 to have something which would run on my new motherboard. So I went with Debian. Painful transition, but worth it.
Other than that, the head of the SAMBA team will defect to google at the end of the month. Hopefully, taking with him anybody who's good who's working on SAMBA on the Novell payroll with him.
Novell is suddenly cut off from any Linux software it doesn't write in house under a non-GPL license, and their stuff doesn't get integrated into new Open Source releases. What's their value to either MS or Novell investors after that happens?
The other point is that the head of the SAMBA development team just defected to Google, hopefully to be followed by everyone else working on SAMBA who's any good currently drawing a Novell paycheck.
I speak as a person who gets mod points occassionally. Who else uses anonymous moderators picked out via usage profile that doesn't run a copy of the slashdot blogging software? Nobody.
I strongly suspect that it discriminates in favor of astroturfers. Who else can afford to spend entire working days hanging out here posting and getting enough usage credits to trigger mod points on a more or less regular basis?
The main reason I still hang out here despite my belief that the stories that get rejected for publication here are probably better than the ones we see, instead of digg, is that the information volume on digg is higher than I choose to deal with.
it's amazing how few of the MS-fanboy wingnuts around here understand that this is how science is supposed to work. When new facts come in, theoretical frameworks are supposed to be revised to fit the facts.
Our interest in this is tens or hundreds of bucks per year as individuals. The consumer technology industry has hundreds of billions per year at stake, in fact, they have far more at stake financially than Hollywood does.
So why aren't they telling their lobbyists to tell Hollywood's politicians "back the fuck off or else?" Why aren't they buying new politicians and getting ready to go to the mattresses?
They're still hypnotized with the same delusions they had a few years ago. Hollywood told them that if they give them everything they want with respect to content restrictions, that Hollywood would make all its content accessible to it and everybody would go onto a future of infinite profit together.
It's the same smoke and mirrors that goes into their movies... but targeted at CEOs who really ought to know better by now. Who's gotten nailed by this? Steve Jobs and the other Apple stockholders. . . whose iTunes would be a money-loser if it weren't being cross-subsidized by iPod sales instead of a stand-alone profit center adding to Apple's bottom line as it should be given the service it provides.
The latest sucker? Steve Ballmer, who let Hollywood turn his MS iPod killer into the Zune (snicker) via the side effects of content restrictions so heavy that one can't use the Zune with some content previously purchased from Microsoft. . . which is sinking without trace in the retail market. Hmmm... didn't he let Hollywood kill off "Microsoft Media Center" as well? Is he capable of learning from experience? (thinking about Vista) Well, maybe not.
All we can do as consumers is buy used, encourage up-and-coming musicians to sell their own music over the Net as CDs and tracks (and get an honest $5/CD instead of 20 cents after the label gets whatever its accountants say its cut is). . . buy used, and to buy music as tracks and live from non-RIAA musicians.
If you're a major stockholder or C-level at a consumer technology company. . . ask the others at the top of the tree "why the fuck are we letting a bunch of low-rent Hollywood companies tell us what we can sell consumers?"
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like your luck with this has been far better than mine.
I picked my Athlon 64 integrated motherboard based on a positive Linux review based on a slightly earlier version (my motherboard has an AM2 socket, it had a 939) I even upgraded from FC3 to FC6 (i.e. had to reinstall all the major apps) figuring that the drivers I needed would not be available on FC3. Well and good, until I actually installed the motherboard.
The motherboard would NOT run X on Fedora Core 6 after a week of trying and inquiries on various Linux forums. Though it ran OK with a vesa driver on Knoppix, and a Debian user who happened to see my post said "Debian Etch uses the same installer Knoppix does".
This system works perfectly now. . . on Debian Etch. This motherboard upgrade has cost me about a month in work time (remember, I had to reload my data files and reinstall major apps TWICE) I couldn't afford.
Check around, there's probably an installer script for your distro that'll find and install just about everything, including the "forbidden" w32codecs, etc. Fedora Frog is very good, Automatix (Debian and presumably Ubuntu) needs a bit of updating.
Yes, it probably will take an hour plus even on broadband, but once you click the entries choosing what software to install, the computer will have no further need for your assistance during the install phase, find yourself something else to do that's non-computer related for an hour or two.
The bad news... I don't get to sell any more multimedia how-to pieces for Linux. But this is a problem I really prefer to have solved, especially if I am the one installing a new distro from scratch.
Why don't distros come with these scripts as part of the default installation, sitting on the Desktop ready for use?
Anybody around here try both Ubuntu and the Debian it's based on? I'm running Debian Etch on what at best, is a midrange box. (Biostar GeForce 6100 AM2 motherboard, Athlon 3500+, 1G DDR2 533/dual channel) This setup is running fast enough that my planned next upgrade step, an x2 Athlon processor upgrade and another 2G of DDR2 is on indefinite hold, even with Opera for Linux with a couple dozen open windows and VMWare Server running Windows right now. Is Ubuntu that much slower than the Debian it's based on? If so, why?
is trivial at this point. Use K3b, as I am doing right now. (I'm burning the second DVD-R of a 10-disk backup volume) I haven't had trouble with setting it up since Fedora Core 2.
people who are using a Linux distro and running Windows in the same box (either via VMware Server or dual boot)
Any PR agency or in-house organization who isn't paying people to astroturf on controversial public issues simply isn't doing their job.
You wonder why some people seem to be here at least 8 hours a day, almost as if somebody was paying them?
Perhaps somebody is.
Ever noticed how whenever something that threatens a group of tards with money instantly attracts posters parroting their Party Line?
Examples being stories about the RIAA, MPAA, Microshit, and anything that embarrasses the Bush Administration in areas where the polls tell us there really isn't significant public support for their position, but their supporters somehow manage to find this place and materialize whenever there's a topic they can troll.
I actually don't object to this, as long as the "bloggers" post their sponsors in their sigs. But that's going to take Federal law.
Admittedly, it's hard to tell an astroturfer from somebody who's unusually stupid and sincerely deluded.
"cast iron is unacceptible" has saved me trouble. It means I don't have to bother with anything the writer's got to say about cooking any more than I need to bother with what anyone who says "hydrogen is the future of energy". . . either way, the writer's a tard.
to shut down the gas supply. Find the valve going into the building, turn it to a right angle from wherever it was. Miller time. (unless you for some unaccountable reason, like real beer)
actually, the subject is all I actually had to say.
would like a tank full of hash oil.
The real answer is that back East, heating oil is frequently how people heat their homes, and that oil is kept in x-hundred gallon tanks.
and it didn't. At least not on FC6, I couldn't make nv, vesa, kmod-nvidia, or the Nvidia binary work. Knoppix ran immediately in vesa. As did Debian Etch (hardly surprising, uses the same installer) Luckily, somebody told me about Etch. And I now have a working box several times the speed of the old one.
As for preinstalled Windows, the last time I had one of those was on a 286 box I was given after my homebrew MacPlus died.
I make a living on this box writing Linux how-to articles, so 10 days of downtime because an installer couldn't get my computer to a Desktop certainly qualifies as a disaster from my point of view. I would have waited until after I'd finished my article in progress if I'd known how bad it was going to be.
I was expecting the same kind of new hardware install you described. I now know that it just doesn't always work that way in Linux.
installer package most certainly does work. . . I couldn't make the FC6 installer work (as in result in working video) after a week of trying.
Debian Etch uses the same installer the current Knoppix does.
So drop in a Knoppix LiveCD and if it boots to the Desktop, go ahead with Etch.
Following this helpful hint is what got my desktop Linux box video working.
But it took basically everything I've learned over the last 3 years of using Fedora Core Linux to turn Debian into my customary desktop environment just to figure out what to install, and to track down dependencies not handled by Debian installers. If I knew then what I knew now, maybe I would have gone with Kubuntu.
I switched because I couldn't get FC6 to run my new Biostar GeForce6100 (Nvidia chipset) AM2 integrated motherboard video. And if you're using FC6. . . please, no more suggestions, assume that I've tried anything you can think of and it blew out with the same FPEexception message. Debian got the video working on the first try with vesa (NOT nv), and the second time around, the Debian-modified Nvidia driver worked just fine.
I'm surprised the article author didn't notice that under the hood, Lin/Freespire is Debian, too.
Agreed. Personally, I don't know why the community hasn't gone to static packages with all library dependencies installed with the program. It's not like disk space or broadband availability is a problem anymore. I'd rather put up with a longer download and waste disk space than have to install Yet Another Package from source.
and ONLY if the hardware is 100% supported by your distro. Otherwise, "easy" turns into trainwreck.
Checking in advance for hardware compatibility is NOT guaranteed to work, but it's the only thing you can really do. A slightly older version of my Biostar GeForce 6100 (939 socket, mine's an AM2) got a good review on one of the Linux compatibility sites.
I spent a frustrating week of online research and Linux forum posts trying to get the Nvidia video running in Fedora Core 6 (which I spent weeks upgrading to specifically to get access to the latest and greatest drivers), only being able to get to the Web or use my computer in any other way via a Knoppix liveCD. I must have tried a hundred different variations on installing kmod-nvidia, the nvidia binary, and modifying xorg.conf , only to get the same FPEexception error every time.
The fix. . . change to Debian Etch, which uses the same installer the Knoppix LiveCD does. Presumably, a Kubuntu install would have worked equally well, but by the time I figured that out, the computer was already running.
Easy install? More like the most difficult hardware installation I've ever done... on a motherboard on which Windows would probably have run straight out of the box.
If your motherboard or video is a couple or so years old, you probably won't have any problem. People who run AMD3500+, dual channel DDR2, and a slightly behind the curve video chipset shouldn't be penalized for trying to run this with Linux, but that's not the situation we've got.
You're supposed to drink the Kool-Aid. Not inhale it.
ob pedantic: Jim Jones actually used Flavor-Aid on his people.
more efficient and profitable?
If you don't know, if they were public, go to http://www.sec.gov/ and check their filings via EDGAR (something every IT pro needs to get a clue about. . . if you're dubious about a vendor. . . or about the future, if any, of the place you're working at. . . this is one place where companies are compelled to tell the truth.
It isn't about network efficiency, it's about the bottom line. Show that a company with draconian IT policy is more profitable, if you can. If anarchy is more profitable, it might be more cost-effective for a company to simply add to network bandwidth and hire a few more IT pros to clean up the messes.
A place where an IT pro can get "personal services" for not reporting mistakes made with a company computer is obviously a place where the balance of power is way off. If an ITer can't get a date, the company doesn't exist to solve that problem.
for existence.
IT exists to make a company more efficient. One way it does this is by making it possible for users to hook up with the services required to permit users to communicate with each other and with the outside world and to gather information. Some of the new technologies used for this are not well understood by IT departments. Figuring them out and how to secure them is part of a sysadmin's job description. At least if that sysadmin wants to keep working.
If industry pros are using, for instance, an IM network to communicate business related things, it's IT's job to make sure they can do so safely. If a top salesperson's using an IM network and a sysadmin locks it out, who's going to have more leverage when the salesman complains to the VP of Marketing? And that's as it should be, the network exists to make the company money, not serve as an isolated node of network purity.
If IT "pros" are so busy locking down "their" networks that they forget that end users have legitimate purposes for using the company network, when the time comes to discuss offshoring their gigs to Bangalore, don't expect anybody you've gone Stalinist at to support you.
If you don't like "whiny user complaints", find another career.
is going to be written to specifically disallow the kind of intellectual property deal Novell made with M$hit.
This cuts them off from anything the community will do that's licensed under GPLv3... i.e. probably everything Novell doesn't write in-house. No more kernel upgrades, and probably no more major applications or upgrades. The only people who'll stay with GPLv2 are going to be Novell employees and SUSE loyalists. What's Novell worth if it's just been unplugged from the Open Source Community? What MS just paid them and whatever can be extracted from the turnip which is SCO.
I'm just glad I found out about this in time, I was forced to change distros from FC6 to have something which would run on my new motherboard. So I went with Debian. Painful transition, but worth it.
Other than that, the head of the SAMBA team will defect to google at the end of the month. Hopefully, taking with him anybody who's good who's working on SAMBA on the Novell payroll with him.
Novell is suddenly cut off from any Linux software it doesn't write in house under a non-GPL license, and their stuff doesn't get integrated into new Open Source releases. What's their value to either MS or Novell investors after that happens?
The other point is that the head of the SAMBA development team just defected to Google, hopefully to be followed by everyone else working on SAMBA who's any good currently drawing a Novell paycheck.
I strongly suspect that it discriminates in favor of astroturfers. Who else can afford to spend entire working days hanging out here posting and getting enough usage credits to trigger mod points on a more or less regular basis?
The main reason I still hang out here despite my belief that the stories that get rejected for publication here are probably better than the ones we see, instead of digg, is that the information volume on digg is higher than I choose to deal with.
If Metallica didn't permit themselves to be used for anti-P2P RIAA propaganda, people wouldn't believe the "lie" that they're anti-MP3.
it's amazing how few of the MS-fanboy wingnuts around here understand that this is how science is supposed to work. When new facts come in, theoretical frameworks are supposed to be revised to fit the facts.
the plate?
Our interest in this is tens or hundreds of bucks per year as individuals. The consumer technology industry has hundreds of billions per year at stake, in fact, they have far more at stake financially than Hollywood does.
So why aren't they telling their lobbyists to tell Hollywood's politicians "back the fuck off or else?" Why aren't they buying new politicians and getting ready to go to the mattresses?
They're still hypnotized with the same delusions they had a few years ago. Hollywood told them that if they give them everything they want with respect to content restrictions, that Hollywood would make all its content accessible to it and everybody would go onto a future of infinite profit together.
It's the same smoke and mirrors that goes into their movies... but targeted at CEOs who really ought to know better by now. Who's gotten nailed by this? Steve Jobs and the other Apple stockholders. . . whose iTunes would be a money-loser if it weren't being cross-subsidized by iPod sales instead of a stand-alone profit center adding to Apple's bottom line as it should be given the service it provides.
The latest sucker? Steve Ballmer, who let Hollywood turn his MS iPod killer into the Zune (snicker) via the side effects of content restrictions so heavy that one can't use the Zune with some content previously purchased from Microsoft. . . which is sinking without trace in the retail market. Hmmm... didn't he let Hollywood kill off "Microsoft Media Center" as well? Is he capable of learning from experience? (thinking about Vista) Well, maybe not.
All we can do as consumers is buy used, encourage up-and-coming musicians to sell their own music over the Net as CDs and tracks (and get an honest $5/CD instead of 20 cents after the label gets whatever its accountants say its cut is). . . buy used, and to buy music as tracks and live from non-RIAA musicians.
If you're a major stockholder or C-level at a consumer technology company. . . ask the others at the top of the tree "why the fuck are we letting a bunch of low-rent Hollywood companies tell us what we can sell consumers?"
He makes a lot more sense than the jackass he's responding to does.