I understand what you're saying. Yes, over the last few releases bugs have crept in and have been left unfixed. This is partly because the codebase has grown, partly because we've all been very busing trying to fill in the gaps and partly because we're all limited in the amount of time we have to code. So now its time we started to focus on quality a little more, and that begins with making what we have stable. Most of these bugs are only an hour or so's work to fix, but they mount up! Syllable will be a much nicer place to be with the release of 0.4.5:)
Syllable is however in development, so new features are still being added. I don't see a problem with fixing old bugs while we add new features:) If we had declared the system stable and then started adding features, then I would agree with you. As it is, these features we hope to have in 0.4.5 have been planed for some time, and are required for the core functionality of the OS. The Registrar is one of these, for example.
So yeah, while we do not have a definite feature list for Syllable 1.0 yet, we do have a good idea of what is clearly going to be needed now. I've exercised my bonevelent dictatorship and picked the ones that best suit our goals, and I shall be more than happy to accept them into the codebase for Syllable 0.4.5.
We shall also have a proper roadmap and featureset for 1.0 before we start on the 0.5.x versions.
Sadly not. The best I can offer are the Doxygen docs of the GUI API That, the code itself and asking questions on the Syllable-Developer mailing list is the best way to find out how it works.
Kurt started developing AtheOS before the first BeBoxes shipped. AtheOS was already a lively project before OpenBeOS (& B.E.O.S and all the other BeOS clones) started. Syllable is simply a continution of AtheOS.
Ah. Your perception of Syllable is incorrect I'm glad to report.
While a large part of the kernel has been written from scratch, there is nothing wrong with that. For the effort Kurt put into writing it, we have a kernel with a kernel space ELF loader and runtime linker, written with SMP support from day one, with an efficient micro kernel IPC mechanism. At the same time, he used code from Linux were it was beneficial. The allocator is essentially from Linux for example.
The terminal emulator (ATerm) was written by the author of AtheOS as well. It is not a lot of code and can be maintained by one person. The AEdit text editor was my very first application for Syllable, so that was hardly a huge time sink. The Web Browser uses Khtml as its rendering engine; way before Apple started on Safari!
A large majority of drivers come from Linux and X, along with some BSD and even Be Sample Code.
The appserver, GUI API and associated support applications are all written from scratch, yes. A lot of the lower level stuff is GNU or GPL'd software, we use a version of Glibc and the entire GNU toolchain for development, run Bash as the shell and offer the same basic toolset as Linux (E.g. GNU fileutils, textutils, shellutils, Perl, Python etc.)
So a large amount of stuff is reused. We only re-write were it makes sense to do so:)
The Syllable API (And of course, the AtheOS API before that) was often compared to the BeOS API. It is not a clone and there are no plans to turn it into one, but it is certainly similiar. An application is built by deriving from a toolkit of C++ classes, which in turn talk to an application server.
So it is a lot like OpenBeOS in that respect, except that Syllable has much more development behind it and works now. We are also not trying to clone BeOS API by API; if it suits our purpose we can and will use something completely different (For example, BeOS had a user-space TCP stack. AtheOS and Syllable have always had a modular kernel space stack)
Syllable is also mostly under the [L]GPL, whereas OpenBeOS is MIT. Apart from the various idological reasons that don't interest me, Syllable can also draw on a large base of drivers available in E.g. Linux. Which is nice.
Why, then, is Syllable an ugly looking, instable OS?
Because Syllable is a development, alpha version. Ugly can and will be fixed in time. We inherited the GUI from AtheOS and thats how it looks. Why spend time and effort changing the look of the GUI when the GUI isn't complete?
Instability is inherent in the development process. Yes, we are very poor at testing before release, but that is because it is alpha quality. I don't have a release schedule, and there certainly are not enough users to form a FreeBSD style release team.
Release testing generally consists of me trying out common actions for about half an hour after a build. As we finalise and stablise API's we can build automated test harnesses and formalise a testing plan for new releases.
Nice example of moderator abuse. O.K, this time I'll repost it logged in, with my +1 bonus intact. I hate having to moan about moderators, because now it makes me look like a whinger. Bah!
Yes, I do realise that and I find it sad, but not all that surprising. Who wants to take all that time to read the licence and understand the issues? They want to watch a movie, or play Counter Strike. The MTV generation has an attention span of 3 seconds, and more than make up for it with an over abundence of apathy.[1]
I'll happilly tell you that back when Napster was new and exciting, I downloaded MP3's. When I got my Cable Modem, the first thing I did was to leech DivX;-)'s from Usenet. Then I realised that what I was doing was wrong, and as I was writing more and more GPL'd stuff, it was also hypocritical. I stopped doing all of that years ago.
I agree with you, though. It is easy to download warez, music and movies that you are not legally entitled to. Its a poor attitude, and it doesn't help that many people use the same argument as the grandparent poster, who attempts to justify theft with smoke and mirrors.
Sigh. Steal This Book indeed.
[1]: Now I feel like an old git! I'm 23, soon to be 24. Do I worry too much? I don't know...
As a wise man said, "threads and stupid people attract each other."
Indeed:) However when you're dealing with a desktop user, they generally want a computer to respond quickly. Most users don't care too much if that Word document takes an extra second to open, though. So its a tradeoff, and obviously you have to balance it towards the target audience. Syllable chooses to favour response times over raw processing ; Linux generally chooses the inverse.
Does ABrowse support all the standards that Mozilla does? Just the amount of processing that it has to do was substantially responsible for slowdowns in earlier versions.
ABrowse is based on an (Older) Khtml engine which has been wrapped to make it a native application. As it was originally a Qt application, and Qt isn't thread safe, all the code is syncronised around a single mutex anyway. So there is no advantage to the threaded model there. Still, ABrowse is fast and can happilly render Slashdot just as fast as Mozilla does on Linux. As I said though, I'm biased:)
As for NT, well that was originally a "pure" microkernel design. Even the kernel uses object and messages internally. Syllable doesn't bother with all that, but it does provide a set of calls that userspace stuff can use. I've also had very few problems with the threaded and rentrent model of both the kernel and the user space library. One golden rule is that if you're not sure, lock;)
Anyway, enough of that. Slashdot is not the best place for time-lagged discussions; I encourage you to use the forums on the website or the mailing lists if you're interested in the Syllable architecture; the link is in my sig:)
The AtheOS get_msg_x(), send_msg_x() IPC has a much lower overhead than UNIX sockets, thats for certain. However, that is not the deciding facter in making the GUI more responsive than X; the kernel, appserver and libatheos are all heavily threaded, and the OS is tuned to suit a desktop user (E..g low latency at the expense of more context switches).
As I'm posting this from a Syllable box with ABrowse, I can only really say that it feels much faster and more responsive than X. I am subjective and heavily biased however, so please take that with as many sacks of salt as you require;D I would certainly be interested in seeing some real objective comparisions between Message Ports and UNIX Sockets, though.
Well if I'm going to have to point everything out in excruiating detail, yes, thanks. Before Mandrake I used Redhat (5.1, 6.0 and 6.1). Now as it happens, Redhat (As late as 6.1) did have trouble detecting my SB Live!, and it certainly never managed to get my Logitech QuickCam working.
So yes, I'm well aware of where Mandrake got Kudzu from. My point is, of course, that Mandrake seems to have got the process working far better than Redhat have (had?), and that there is no reason why Redhat cannot have Kudzu working just as well themselves.
As for shooting fish in a barrel, I remember the pain of using sndconf in Redhat 5.1 to set up my AWE32, and having to resort to the non-Free OSS driver (Paid for, of course) in order to get it working.
So once again, thanks. I know what its like to deal with unreliable hardware detection and drivers. There is no reason for it to be unreliable these days, though.
Indeed. Which is why I'm so puzzled by Hetz's complaint that installing an SBLive! or Logitech QuickCam under RedHat is difficult. Unless RedHat has managed to break its own device management tool, a RedHat system should work just as well as I have described.
I'm sat in front of a box that formally had an SBLive!, and still has a Logitech QuickCam Express plugged into it.
Mandrake 8.0 detected both, installed the correct modules, and both worked perfectly well from the very first boot.
The same applied when I removed the SB Live! and re-enabled the onboard Via audio (Don't ask). Kudzu detected the change, removed the emu10k1 module, and loaded up the via82cxx module.
I see no reason why, if Mandrake can do this, the others (E.g. Redhat and SuSe) can't.
Admittedly, all of this is a bit of a kludge, and as we can see, the results differ across distributions. Maybe someone else can do it better?;)
Well, I agree with your point concerning "It works for me". I consider it one of the most braindead responses one can offer for an argument. However, we clearly have very different experiences regarding Mandrake. The box I was sat at when I checked for sh-utils was a custom install, granted, but I do not remember ever explictly having to tell it to install sh-utils. Obviously, something is broken with Mandrakes dependency management.
As for SuSE, well, I've tried it once or twice at various versions, and I've never really felt comfortable with it. The fact that YaST2 is non-free bothers me somewhat, and I've also had issues with hardware detctection and driver configuration when I last tried SuSE. Inertia is also an important point; I already have Mandrake installed, and I find switching to a new system a painful experience at the best of times.
Thank you for support of Syllable. Hopefully we can build a usable system, and then I can abandon Linux all together and stop having to keep track of all these slightly different distributions!:)
Ah, fair enough, you raise some good points. If you're looking for a Linux which is as close to Unix as you can get it, clearly Mandrake isn't for you. Yes, some things are broken, but the bits that work far outweigh the bits that are broken. I don't have many test applications that allocate memory in 4k chunks in a while(1) loop, for example...
As for POSIX.2, fair enough. As I said, the list was last updated in 1993, so I wouldn't expect it to have still been in progress (O.K. its a standards body, but over 10 years would be a bit much). I won't be reviewing the standard just yet, though, unless I can get a copy for cheap!
sh-utils is there, by the way
rpm -q sh-utils<br> sh-utils-2.0-13mdk
I'm well aware of what RedHat and Mandrake did with GCC, and yes I am well aware of why it isn't really 2.96, thanks though. Thats the version it reports back, though, and we both know what we're talking about when I say gcc-2.96.
Still, I'll stick with Mandrake (Why don't I use Windows XP? Because I don't like Windows XP. All I really want is an RPM based distro that ships with KDE; Mandrake has that). At least until Syllable is a little better, than I can start using something I'm far more comfortable with.
All of the flaws you highlight (Real or imagined) are an issue with the Mandrake build and test process, and are nothing to do with Mandrake being an easy to use distribution.
I certainly understand your frustrations, though. You are clearly far more comfortable with a different distribution, and fair enough, whatever makes you happy. However, that does not make me an idiot, or a clueless user, simply because I choose to use Mandrake.
I use Mandrake because it is trivial to install, supports my hardware well, and it uses KDE (Which I prefer) but does not also insist in installing Gnome (As Redhat does), which I don't want.
If I do a Custom install, I can choose to install just the servers I want (I want to run sshd, but not sendmail, wuftpd, telnetd etc. etc.) Mandrake allows me to do all of this, without being too fiddly or complicated in the process.
Just a couple more points, though:
Huge sections of the POSIX shell environment are missing.
Which sections? I have not noticed any differences between Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat. I have not seen any missing tools. Also, which POSIX standard are you refering too? My copy of POSIX Programmers Guide only shows P1003.2 (Definition of a standard command shell language) as "in progress". Admitedly, the list was compiled in 1993, but I'm not aware of any official POSIX standard that defines the shell?
a compiler which produced segfaulting executables with the most trivial code, such as a C program which simply allocated memory in a while(1) loop.
I'm not aware of these issues with gcc-2.96 (The version I have here, in Mandrake 8.0). I've tried a simple application, as you outline* and I see no segfault. Naturally, leaving a malloc(); inside of a while(1) loop will eventually cause undesirable behaviour, but you can't blame the compiler for that.
As for documentation, I have the man pages & google. Not to mention, I've done most of it plenty of times before:)
Why is it that people must label Mandrake as some sort of "Linux for idiots" distribution? So its easy to use, so what, thats bad somehow? What, I have to installing & configure everything by hand to be a "proper" Linux user?
Look, get over it. I've been using Linux since Redhat 5.1 (Whats that, 5 years?). I've written my own dialup scripts, I've configured Xf96config by hand, I've upgraded, installed, built, re-built and hacked on Linux until my eyes bled. So please, don't try and tell me I don't know how to use Linux.
You know what, though? After doing all of that, I became sick and tired of it. All I want to do is get my work done, deal with my email and use the web 95% of the time. So I use Mandrake, which at least lets me do most of it without anoying me.
Oh, not that Mandrake is anything like perfect. Far from it, in fact. Its just the least sucky of the bunch, for me.
This should confirm
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Actually reading through the articles (Shock!) gives a very positive image of Linux and the various Linux projects overall. Galeon, Gaim, even Pine, have all got nice, positive reviews. KDE take a bit of a kicking, but then its a review, and someone has be the winner!
Some hackers out there might want to take note of the sorts of things the Forbes reviewers found important; things like a clear user interface that doesn't shove big, glossy, eye-candy in your face, basically. They all rate intuitive, uncluttered user interfaces as a priority.
Oh, and before anyone starts flaming about "Point and drool" or some other nonsense along those lines; remember that they liked Pine.
Not only that, it seems I have missed the point of the entire article. It seems to me to simply be Debian good! Like Debian! apt-get good! Like apt-get! Ohhh, Debian good!
I can get that here on Slashdot, day in, day out. Seriously, was there some underlying sub-theme to the article that I should find interesting?
O.K, I can see you really do hate the Zinf "My Music" manager, thats fine. I still believe that the My Music way of doing things is too different for people to quickly adjust too, although it is better.
And faster than I could even FIND the retarded window for either player.
This is my point; once you have learnt to the "new" way of doing things, I can queue a new playlist with Zinf faster and with less keystrokes & mouse clicks than you can with Xmms or WinAMP. All I have to do is click "My Music", right-click the playlist in the tree, and select "Add to Playlist" (Or depending on your options, "Add to Playlist and Play Now") It really is that easy.
Zinf doesn't do anything worse than any other player when it comes to "Integration" either; all it does in Windows is associate itself with the different file extenstions it handles (.m3u,.pls,.mp3,.ogg etc.). You don't have to do that if you don't want to, and you can stop it asking with a checkbox.
Its horses for courses though; some people prefer the Xmms/WinAMP way of doing it, some prefer the Zinf way of doing it. I'm a Zinf man!
Slashdot Mirror
I understand what you're saying. Yes, over the last few releases bugs have crept in and have been left unfixed. This is partly because the codebase has grown, partly because we've all been very busing trying to fill in the gaps and partly because we're all limited in the amount of time we have to code. So now its time we started to focus on quality a little more, and that begins with making what we have stable. Most of these bugs are only an hour or so's work to fix, but they mount up! Syllable will be a much nicer place to be with the release of 0.4.5 :)
:) If we had declared the system stable and then started adding features, then I would agree with you. As it is, these features we hope to have in 0.4.5 have been planed for some time, and are required for the core functionality of the OS. The Registrar is one of these, for example.
Syllable is however in development, so new features are still being added. I don't see a problem with fixing old bugs while we add new features
So yeah, while we do not have a definite feature list for Syllable 1.0 yet, we do have a good idea of what is clearly going to be needed now. I've exercised my bonevelent dictatorship and picked the ones that best suit our goals, and I shall be more than happy to accept them into the codebase for Syllable 0.4.5.
We shall also have a proper roadmap and featureset for 1.0 before we start on the 0.5.x versions.
Sadly not. The best I can offer are the Doxygen docs of the GUI API That, the code itself and asking questions on the Syllable-Developer mailing list is the best way to find out how it works.
Kurt started developing AtheOS before the first BeBoxes shipped. AtheOS was already a lively project before OpenBeOS (& B.E.O.S and all the other BeOS clones) started. Syllable is simply a continution of AtheOS.
:)
So its the other way around I'm afraid
Ah. Your perception of Syllable is incorrect I'm glad to report.
:)
While a large part of the kernel has been written from scratch, there is nothing wrong with that. For the effort Kurt put into writing it, we have a kernel with a kernel space ELF loader and runtime linker, written with SMP support from day one, with an efficient micro kernel IPC mechanism. At the same time, he used code from Linux were it was beneficial. The allocator is essentially from Linux for example.
The terminal emulator (ATerm) was written by the author of AtheOS as well. It is not a lot of code and can be maintained by one person. The AEdit text editor was my very first application for Syllable, so that was hardly a huge time sink. The Web Browser uses Khtml as its rendering engine; way before Apple started on Safari!
A large majority of drivers come from Linux and X, along with some BSD and even Be Sample Code.
The appserver, GUI API and associated support applications are all written from scratch, yes. A lot of the lower level stuff is GNU or GPL'd software, we use a version of Glibc and the entire GNU toolchain for development, run Bash as the shell and offer the same basic toolset as Linux (E.g. GNU fileutils, textutils, shellutils, Perl, Python etc.)
So a large amount of stuff is reused. We only re-write were it makes sense to do so
The Syllable API (And of course, the AtheOS API before that) was often compared to the BeOS API. It is not a clone and there are no plans to turn it into one, but it is certainly similiar. An application is built by deriving from a toolkit of C++ classes, which in turn talk to an application server.
So it is a lot like OpenBeOS in that respect, except that Syllable has much more development behind it and works now. We are also not trying to clone BeOS API by API; if it suits our purpose we can and will use something completely different (For example, BeOS had a user-space TCP stack. AtheOS and Syllable have always had a modular kernel space stack)
Syllable is also mostly under the [L]GPL, whereas OpenBeOS is MIT. Apart from the various idological reasons that don't interest me, Syllable can also draw on a large base of drivers available in E.g. Linux. Which is nice.
Why, then, is Syllable an ugly looking, instable OS?
Because Syllable is a development, alpha version. Ugly can and will be fixed in time. We inherited the GUI from AtheOS and thats how it looks. Why spend time and effort changing the look of the GUI when the GUI isn't complete?
Instability is inherent in the development process. Yes, we are very poor at testing before release, but that is because it is alpha quality. I don't have a release schedule, and there certainly are not enough users to form a FreeBSD style release team.
Release testing generally consists of me trying out common actions for about half an hour after a build. As we finalise and stablise API's we can build automated test harnesses and formalise a testing plan for new releases.
Nice example of moderator abuse. O.K, this time I'll repost it logged in, with my +1 bonus intact. I hate having to moan about moderators, because now it makes me look like a whinger. Bah!
Yes, I do realise that and I find it sad, but not all that surprising. Who wants to take all that time to read the licence and understand the issues? They want to watch a movie, or play Counter Strike. The MTV generation has an attention span of 3 seconds, and more than make up for it with an over abundence of apathy.[1]
I'll happilly tell you that back when Napster was new and exciting, I downloaded MP3's. When I got my Cable Modem, the first thing I did was to leech DivX;-)'s from Usenet. Then I realised that what I was doing was wrong, and as I was writing more and more GPL'd stuff, it was also hypocritical. I stopped doing all of that years ago.
I agree with you, though. It is easy to download warez, music and movies that you are not legally entitled to. Its a poor attitude, and it doesn't help that many people use the same argument as the grandparent poster, who attempts to justify theft with smoke and mirrors.
Sigh. Steal This Book indeed.
[1]: Now I feel like an old git! I'm 23, soon to be 24. Do I worry too much? I don't know...
As a wise man said, "threads and stupid people attract each other."
:) However when you're dealing with a desktop user, they generally want a computer to respond quickly. Most users don't care too much if that Word document takes an extra second to open, though. So its a tradeoff, and obviously you have to balance it towards the target audience. Syllable chooses to favour response times over raw processing ; Linux generally chooses the inverse.
:)
;)
:)
Indeed
Does ABrowse support all the standards that Mozilla does? Just the amount of processing that it has to do was substantially responsible for slowdowns in earlier versions.
ABrowse is based on an (Older) Khtml engine which has been wrapped to make it a native application. As it was originally a Qt application, and Qt isn't thread safe, all the code is syncronised around a single mutex anyway. So there is no advantage to the threaded model there. Still, ABrowse is fast and can happilly render Slashdot just as fast as Mozilla does on Linux. As I said though, I'm biased
As for NT, well that was originally a "pure" microkernel design. Even the kernel uses object and messages internally. Syllable doesn't bother with all that, but it does provide a set of calls that userspace stuff can use. I've also had very few problems with the threaded and rentrent model of both the kernel and the user space library. One golden rule is that if you're not sure, lock
Anyway, enough of that. Slashdot is not the best place for time-lagged discussions; I encourage you to use the forums on the website or the mailing lists if you're interested in the Syllable architecture; the link is in my sig
The AtheOS get_msg_x(), send_msg_x() IPC has a much lower overhead than UNIX sockets, thats for certain. However, that is not the deciding facter in making the GUI more responsive than X; the kernel, appserver and libatheos are all heavily threaded, and the OS is tuned to suit a desktop user (E..g low latency at the expense of more context switches).
;D I would certainly be interested in seeing some real objective comparisions between Message Ports and UNIX Sockets, though.
As I'm posting this from a Syllable box with ABrowse, I can only really say that it feels much faster and more responsive than X. I am subjective and heavily biased however, so please take that with as many sacks of salt as you require
Syllable is a fork of AtheOS. Syllable.
I have no idea why it is refered to as "Syllable OS", because the name is just "Syllable". Ah well.
The version in that list is out of date now, too. We're on 0.4.1, with plenty of changes going into CVS for 0.4.2 in about a months time...
Well if I'm going to have to point everything out in excruiating detail, yes, thanks. Before Mandrake I used Redhat (5.1, 6.0 and 6.1). Now as it happens, Redhat (As late as 6.1) did have trouble detecting my SB Live!, and it certainly never managed to get my Logitech QuickCam working.
So yes, I'm well aware of where Mandrake got Kudzu from. My point is, of course, that Mandrake seems to have got the process working far better than Redhat have (had?), and that there is no reason why Redhat cannot have Kudzu working just as well themselves.
As for shooting fish in a barrel, I remember the pain of using sndconf in Redhat 5.1 to set up my AWE32, and having to resort to the non-Free OSS driver (Paid for, of course) in order to get it working.
So once again, thanks. I know what its like to deal with unreliable hardware detection and drivers. There is no reason for it to be unreliable these days, though.
Indeed. Which is why I'm so puzzled by Hetz's complaint that installing an SBLive! or Logitech QuickCam under RedHat is difficult. Unless RedHat has managed to break its own device management tool, a RedHat system should work just as well as I have described.
I'm sat in front of a box that formally had an SBLive!, and still has a Logitech QuickCam Express plugged into it.
;)
Mandrake 8.0 detected both, installed the correct modules, and both worked perfectly well from the very first boot.
The same applied when I removed the SB Live! and re-enabled the onboard Via audio (Don't ask). Kudzu detected the change, removed the emu10k1 module, and loaded up the via82cxx module.
I see no reason why, if Mandrake can do this, the others (E.g. Redhat and SuSe) can't.
Admittedly, all of this is a bit of a kludge, and as we can see, the results differ across distributions. Maybe someone else can do it better?
Well, I agree with your point concerning "It works for me". I consider it one of the most braindead responses one can offer for an argument. However, we clearly have very different experiences regarding Mandrake. The box I was sat at when I checked for sh-utils was a custom install, granted, but I do not remember ever explictly having to tell it to install sh-utils. Obviously, something is broken with Mandrakes dependency management.
:)
As for SuSE, well, I've tried it once or twice at various versions, and I've never really felt comfortable with it. The fact that YaST2 is non-free bothers me somewhat, and I've also had issues with hardware detctection and driver configuration when I last tried SuSE. Inertia is also an important point; I already have Mandrake installed, and I find switching to a new system a painful experience at the best of times.
Thank you for support of Syllable. Hopefully we can build a usable system, and then I can abandon Linux all together and stop having to keep track of all these slightly different distributions!
As for POSIX.2, fair enough. As I said, the list was last updated in 1993, so I wouldn't expect it to have still been in progress (O.K. its a standards body, but over 10 years would be a bit much). I won't be reviewing the standard just yet, though, unless I can get a copy for cheap!
sh-utils is there, by the way
I'm well aware of what RedHat and Mandrake did with GCC, and yes I am well aware of why it isn't really 2.96, thanks though. Thats the version it reports back, though, and we both know what we're talking about when I say gcc-2.96.
Still, I'll stick with Mandrake (Why don't I use Windows XP? Because I don't like Windows XP. All I really want is an RPM based distro that ships with KDE; Mandrake has that). At least until Syllable is a little better, than I can start using something I'm far more comfortable with.
I certainly understand your frustrations, though. You are clearly far more comfortable with a different distribution, and fair enough, whatever makes you happy. However, that does not make me an idiot, or a clueless user, simply because I choose to use Mandrake.
I use Mandrake because it is trivial to install, supports my hardware well, and it uses KDE (Which I prefer) but does not also insist in installing Gnome (As Redhat does), which I don't want.
If I do a Custom install, I can choose to install just the servers I want (I want to run sshd, but not sendmail, wuftpd, telnetd etc. etc.) Mandrake allows me to do all of this, without being too fiddly or complicated in the process.
Just a couple more points, though:
Huge sections of the POSIX shell environment are missing.
Which sections? I have not noticed any differences between Mandrake 8.0 and Redhat. I have not seen any missing tools. Also, which POSIX standard are you refering too? My copy of POSIX Programmers Guide only shows P1003.2 (Definition of a standard command shell language) as "in progress". Admitedly, the list was compiled in 1993, but I'm not aware of any official POSIX standard that defines the shell?
a compiler which produced segfaulting executables with the most trivial code, such as a C program which simply allocated memory in a while(1) loop.
I'm not aware of these issues with gcc-2.96 (The version I have here, in Mandrake 8.0). I've tried a simple application, as you outline* and I see no segfault. Naturally, leaving a malloc(); inside of a while(1) loop will eventually cause undesirable behaviour, but you can't blame the compiler for that.
As for documentation, I have the man pages & google. Not to mention, I've done most of it plenty of times before
* The example:
I'm trying to go one better with Open Source. Hey, you never know, we might just do it.
:)
If not, then who knows?
Its Xf86config with a typo. I'm sure you've noticed how close those pesky 8 and 9 keys are.
Why is it that people must label Mandrake as some sort of "Linux for idiots" distribution? So its easy to use, so what, thats bad somehow? What, I have to installing & configure everything by hand to be a "proper" Linux user?
Look, get over it. I've been using Linux since Redhat 5.1 (Whats that, 5 years?). I've written my own dialup scripts, I've configured Xf96config by hand, I've upgraded, installed, built, re-built and hacked on Linux until my eyes bled. So please, don't try and tell me I don't know how to use Linux.
You know what, though? After doing all of that, I became sick and tired of it. All I want to do is get my work done, deal with my email and use the web 95% of the time. So I use Mandrake, which at least lets me do most of it without anoying me.
Oh, not that Mandrake is anything like perfect. Far from it, in fact. Its just the least sucky of the bunch, for me.
Why not some other Operating System? Time for a blatent plug How about Syllable, an AtheOS fork? We're looking for lots of developers!
Actually reading through the articles (Shock!) gives a very positive image of Linux and the various Linux projects overall. Galeon, Gaim, even Pine, have all got nice, positive reviews. KDE take a bit of a kicking, but then its a review, and someone has be the winner!
Some hackers out there might want to take note of the sorts of things the Forbes reviewers found important; things like a clear user interface that doesn't shove big, glossy, eye-candy in your face, basically. They all rate intuitive, uncluttered user interfaces as a priority.
Oh, and before anyone starts flaming about "Point and drool" or some other nonsense along those lines; remember that they liked Pine.
Never seen it.
Not only that, it seems I have missed the point of the entire article. It seems to me to simply be Debian good! Like Debian! apt-get good! Like apt-get! Ohhh, Debian good!
I can get that here on Slashdot, day in, day out. Seriously, was there some underlying sub-theme to the article that I should find interesting?
The importance of being Debian? Are we going to start some sort of non-Debian using witch hunt now then?
Whats the penalty for not using Debian?
Is it me, or are retarded kids really fucking funny? Its the way their fucking arms are all bent up under their heads, like some fucked up grasshoper.
We should have Spaz Wrestling. I'd pay to see that.
DojoMojoLojo (PS: I am wanking as I write this)
Jamie "Censoring Fuck" McCarthy is a baby raping sheep felcher.
O.K, I can see you really do hate the Zinf "My Music" manager, thats fine. I still believe that the My Music way of doing things is too different for people to quickly adjust too, although it is better.
.pls, .mp3, .ogg etc.). You don't have to do that if you don't want to, and you can stop it asking with a checkbox.
And faster than I could even FIND the retarded window for either player.
This is my point; once you have learnt to the "new" way of doing things, I can queue a new playlist with Zinf faster and with less keystrokes & mouse clicks than you can with Xmms or WinAMP. All I have to do is click "My Music", right-click the playlist in the tree, and select "Add to Playlist" (Or depending on your options, "Add to Playlist and Play Now") It really is that easy.
Zinf doesn't do anything worse than any other player when it comes to "Integration" either; all it does in Windows is associate itself with the different file extenstions it handles (.m3u,
Its horses for courses though; some people prefer the Xmms/WinAMP way of doing it, some prefer the Zinf way of doing it. I'm a Zinf man!