Most of the stories people tell are merely that - anecdotal stories of their experience (the blantant anti-MS trolls aside). You'll notice that most a lot of people write that "windows runs fine as long as you don't put all that shareware crap on it" and so on.
I think one of the reasons you see a lot of people on slashdot talking about how unstable windows is for them is the fact that they put a lot of stress on their computers. For instance, right now I've got about 25 windows open, including two browsers, an irc client, an icq client, a newsreader, the GIMP, a gnutella client, an image viewer with a couple thousand images loaded, and several terminals.
Windows doesn't like this - one of the reasons I switched to linux in the first place was because windows couldn't handle doing all these things at once gracefully (granted, when I started using linux, 95 was the current version of windows). NT is better - I had to admin a bunch of NT servers and run NT on my workstation for a couple years on a large military network - but I still had some problems with locking or parts of the OS dying out on me. Couldn't tell you about 2000 - I only used it for a short while for some ASP programming, and with all the "your configuration has changed, please call microsoft" crap I hear about, I'll never use XP.
I used to have a 98 partition on my drive that I would use for multimedia stuff (ATI only made 98 drivers for my rage fury maxx... argh) and it drove me insane when I used it. Over the course of a year (only using it maybe 3 days a month or so) I had to reinstall it three times. I've got the same debian sid installation now that I did over two years ago.
As you can see, windows stability is highly dependant on what you use it for and how you use it. That's why you'll see so many varied stories about it.
dunno about "gnu", but linux certainly recognizes multiple controllers. Check out devfs - for example, my cdrom is/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target6/lun0/cd.
It is more annoying to type than/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 though.
The largest problem is human in nature, not system. While SIPR does a good job of keeping the classified data safe, that doesn't help when some master sergeant from an intel unit decides to email classified stuff to people. I can't count the number of times we had to clean the file and email servers because of that...
However, the security on the unclass side is just plain silly. Any script kiddie could get into most installations. What I can't figure out is why they'll hire trained contractors to do damn near everything in the military, but leave system security to enlisted people who they won't give adequate training to. It's not that way everywhere, but I know a few examples.
I have no idea for sure, since I don't work for microsoft, but I'd imagine there's a compatability layer in there that adds to the bloat. They probably use mostly the same codebase and just add a layer on top to translate the win32 api calls.
But I'm just guessing. IE5 ran a bit slower than NS4 on my ultra 1. Now it doesn't run at all for some reason... Need to fix that - that's the only machine I can test my webpages in IE with:)
95 runs all right on a 486. 98 is pretty damn slow - at least it seemed that way to me way back in the day when it first came out and I tried it on an AMD 133MHz 486.
If you ran gnome/kde from back then, it would run pretty fast. X itself of course has no problem with it - it would run just fine with 4 megs of ram on a 386. GNOME/KDE just push your resources, that's all.
I mean, think about it - you wouldn't run XP or 2000 on a 486, so why would you run a modern DE on one?
If I remember right (I used bb when it first came out, but was more interested in gnome, so I could be wrong here) bb was more or less written by a guy who wanted his own window manager for himself that was really fast, and something to teach him X programming. He was rather adamant about not adding any features to it that weren't absolutely necessary.
Totally agree with you on the afterstep 1.0 stuff though - I was a huge fan back in the day. After they broke the steprc into multiple files it just started getting weird, so I switched back to fvwm.
After I get another hard disk on my sparc perhaps I'll install fvwm again - I kind of miss its simplicity.
In the long run, about 15 years, I predict Microsoft will be toppled. Let's face it, their software just plain sucks!
I agree that they will be toppled, but my main interest is in what becomes of them afterward.
IBM used to be the big bad guy. The intel-based systems could be considered crap (they were definately considered weird back in the day). Then they lost their power to microsoft and the clone manufacturers.
Nowdays I very rarely hear of anyone badmouth IBM - most admins I've met who know what they're talking about sing the praises of IBM. Few people will say IBM makes crap products nowdays (well, some people say that about AIX, but I've not used it so I dunno).
I wonder if microsoft will end up in a similar state once they're done?
As long as people keep porting drivers, I wouldn't mind in the least.
If being mature means linux has to be dumbed down and lose half its functionality, then I'd just as soon all those people crying about linux being so hard go off and run OS X. Linux ain't supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be powerful.
I can guarantee that if linux ever lost the power and became a pretty little useless macintoy clone all of us who have been using it since the old days before anyone started this whole "desktop OS" crap would jump ship. But it won't happen - we didn't fight to get linux this far just to lose it to a bunch of lusers who don't want to RTFM.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but some friends of mine recently started running mandrake and all of it's distro-specific config utilities make it hell to customize. Gee, sounds like windows...
There's two different protocols for cut/paste. I'm not an X developer, but I know one of 'em is the old offix protocol, and I'm not sure what the other is.
Um, dunno about other people, but I don't see people bitching about the fact that microsoft charges for it's products. They're usually complaining that the products either don't live up to the quality promised by microsoft or that the closed source model microsoft uses prevents quick bugfixes and security patches.
Now people _do_ bitch about microsoft abusing the monopoly, which of course is to make money, but the money making isn't so much the issue as the fact that other companies are driven under by this.
Personally, the way I look at it, if microsoft wants to make money, fine - doesn't matter to me since I don't run their products (except IE5 on my ultra). Ximian provides great services for GNOME, so I hope they are successful (although I think they should work out some kind of corporate vs. home deal - home users won't pay this much). I won't buy it because I run debian, slackware, and solaris - apt-get does everything I need on debian, I compile what I need on slackware, and I go to sun for updates on solaris.
Might be true in most cases, but I'd say if you're running debian, #debian on openprojects does. Quite a few of the developers hang out there (at least they used to - haven't been there in ages).
Most commercial applications I've seen revolve around redhat. They do have support, and while I've never called them (rpm gives me the hives), I've heard wonderful things about them. They seem to go the extra mile, which is highly in contrast to other companies who outsource they tech support and pay _by the call_ - that only makes the company want to get you off the phone - fixed or not - as soon as possible. I know, I used to support the DEC Starion at an outsourced tech support place, and was explicitly told by management that fixing the problem comes _second_ to low talk times.
Also, there's other good examples of directly getting through to qa and the developers - for instance, if you're having kernel problems, the LKML is read by the kernel developers. Granted, don't post there unless you're _sure_ it's a kernel problem:) There's mailing lists for most other software commonly used in corporate environments, and the developers almost always read them, even in the rare cases where they're not active participants.
I think it's just a perception problem, really - people _think_ there's no support for linux, but it's not true. Corporate players can buy it, and anyone can usually talk directly with the developers if needs be. An admin's _primary_ skill should be the ability to find information quickly, through any means possible. If an admin can't find linux help, it's probably time to get a new admin.
Just offhand, while I agree mozilla kicks much ass, the thing that puts me off with it is that on my system text input is _slow_. I mean type a sentence and wait 10-20 seconds for it to show up. I have a weblog I wrote that doesn't like netscape 4.x and barely update it for this reason.
Hope that's fixed soon... the next couple of releases are supposed to improve performance.
It's possible they might write a driver. They did release a modified tulip driver with their ethernet cards, because the kernel included driver at the time didn't support them (from what I hear anyway - by the time I bought one the kernel driver had no problems with them).
Granted that many hardware manufacturers don't do much more than pay lip service to linux (and many do less), but companies that do networking have a lot more to gain with the linux market, since linux's strength is in its server capabilities.
It's been that way on many linux irc channels for a long time. back when I was learning linux (I was using slackware 3.3, which was brand new) most of the #linux channels I checked out were full off assholes.
Eventually I discovered openprojects, which had some very helpful channels. I don't go there often though 'cause nowdays if I'm having a problem it's usually something obscure and no one in the channel knows how to fix it, so I don't know what it's like now. You might check it out though - irc.openprojects.net. I used to hang out on #linpeople - don't even know if it's still there anymore though.
If you use debian, #debian there is helpful though - I've been there a couple times in the last few months for debian-specific problems, and they were great.
Just keep in mind though that irc or USENET should be your last resource. If you jump in there and start asking questions that the answers show up on the first page of a google search, the people inside will be less likely to help you. One of the requirements of a good sysadmin is the ability to quickly locate answers to any problems that arise. If you're going to run linux, make sure you develop this ability - it not only helps you running linux, but will help you find stuff on the 'net in general.
I would have loved debian/w32 if it had come out a year or two ago.
I used to work at the network control center for a military base in japan. I had cygwin, and early versions of the X port to cygwin installed on my NT box. I gotta tell you, it was great. But whereas at home, I prefer to compile my own stuff, at work I didn't have the time. Just putting cygwin on the machine required me to come in after hours.
Cygwin is great, and I loved it, but without a good package management system I couldn't take advantage of its full potention. If I'm ever stuck in a win32 shop again (which I hope never to be) I'll devinately be checking this out.
The US government already as a private internet, at least where the military is concerned. MILNET's only connected in a few places to the rest of the internet, and is designed to function just fine with those routers turned off. They recently held meetings on whether to shut off commercial access or not, and decided to keep it.
If you're talking about the secure network, well, I won't talk about how it works except to say that IPv6 wouldn't give it any benefits. The system they were using before that has been in service for almost 40 years, and after the new one is wholly in place they will want it to last another 40 years before they change it again. Hopefully the rest of the internet will be IPv6 40 years from now:)
Hmm, if I had paid attention to lj's reccomendations on distros, I'd be using mandrake and having headaches from removing all the user-friendly and non-admin friendly crap they put in there instead of slackware and debian. You don't know how fun it is to have to telnet into a friend's machine because he doesn't know how to remove their braindead ICS and install a proper script-based firewall.
Never used suse, since rpm pisses me off. I've used mandrake and redhat, dunno how different thay are.
What's up with all the emphasis on installers anyway? How often do you people reinstall your OS? Damn, I've got 5 machines running in here and haven't installed any OS in months.
My only problem with the solaris 8 installer is that it's freakin' slow. But then again, I've only installed it on sparcstations and my ultra-1, so I've not tried it on a fast system.
But then again, I once installed it on my ultra over the serial port. You don't know pain until you try that...
Erg, that's what I get for posting when I'm tired.
I didn't mean that libraries should go in/usr/share, it was just part of the example of why programs couldn't just be all put in their own directories.
What I meant about/usr/share was that it seems pretty well set up for what it does. I just wish that it was more standardized in the way that/usr/share/backdrops would be a good place for background images,/usr/share/icons a good place for icons, etc. As it is I have to hunt down a few things when I want to use them, but it's not bad at all.
Of course libraries wouldn't go in/usr/share, that would be silly:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think one of the reasons you see a lot of people on slashdot talking about how unstable windows is for them is the fact that they put a lot of stress on their computers. For instance, right now I've got about 25 windows open, including two browsers, an irc client, an icq client, a newsreader, the GIMP, a gnutella client, an image viewer with a couple thousand images loaded, and several terminals.
Windows doesn't like this - one of the reasons I switched to linux in the first place was because windows couldn't handle doing all these things at once gracefully (granted, when I started using linux, 95 was the current version of windows). NT is better - I had to admin a bunch of NT servers and run NT on my workstation for a couple years on a large military network - but I still had some problems with locking or parts of the OS dying out on me. Couldn't tell you about 2000 - I only used it for a short while for some ASP programming, and with all the "your configuration has changed, please call microsoft" crap I hear about, I'll never use XP.
I used to have a 98 partition on my drive that I would use for multimedia stuff (ATI only made 98 drivers for my rage fury maxx... argh) and it drove me insane when I used it. Over the course of a year (only using it maybe 3 days a month or so) I had to reinstall it three times. I've got the same debian sid installation now that I did over two years ago.
As you can see, windows stability is highly dependant on what you use it for and how you use it. That's why you'll see so many varied stories about it.
#!/bin/bash
find
find
dunno about "gnu", but linux certainly recognizes multiple controllers. Check out devfs - for example, my cdrom is /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target6/lun0/cd.
/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 though.
It is more annoying to type than
The largest problem is human in nature, not system. While SIPR does a good job of keeping the classified data safe, that doesn't help when some master sergeant from an intel unit decides to email classified stuff to people. I can't count the number of times we had to clean the file and email servers because of that...
However, the security on the unclass side is just plain silly. Any script kiddie could get into most installations. What I can't figure out is why they'll hire trained contractors to do damn near everything in the military, but leave system security to enlisted people who they won't give adequate training to. It's not that way everywhere, but I know a few examples.
I have no idea for sure, since I don't work for microsoft, but I'd imagine there's a compatability layer in there that adds to the bloat. They probably use mostly the same codebase and just add a layer on top to translate the win32 api calls.
:)
But I'm just guessing. IE5 ran a bit slower than NS4 on my ultra 1. Now it doesn't run at all for some reason... Need to fix that - that's the only machine I can test my webpages in IE with
95 runs all right on a 486. 98 is pretty damn slow - at least it seemed that way to me way back in the day when it first came out and I tried it on an AMD 133MHz 486.
If you ran gnome/kde from back then, it would run pretty fast. X itself of course has no problem with it - it would run just fine with 4 megs of ram on a 386. GNOME/KDE just push your resources, that's all.
I mean, think about it - you wouldn't run XP or 2000 on a 486, so why would you run a modern DE on one?
If I remember right (I used bb when it first came out, but was more interested in gnome, so I could be wrong here) bb was more or less written by a guy who wanted his own window manager for himself that was really fast, and something to teach him X programming. He was rather adamant about not adding any features to it that weren't absolutely necessary.
Totally agree with you on the afterstep 1.0 stuff though - I was a huge fan back in the day. After they broke the steprc into multiple files it just started getting weird, so I switched back to fvwm.
After I get another hard disk on my sparc perhaps I'll install fvwm again - I kind of miss its simplicity.
I agree that they will be toppled, but my main interest is in what becomes of them afterward.
IBM used to be the big bad guy. The intel-based systems could be considered crap (they were definately considered weird back in the day). Then they lost their power to microsoft and the clone manufacturers.
Nowdays I very rarely hear of anyone badmouth IBM - most admins I've met who know what they're talking about sing the praises of IBM. Few people will say IBM makes crap products nowdays (well, some people say that about AIX, but I've not used it so I dunno).
I wonder if microsoft will end up in a similar state once they're done?
Installed everything you ever needed and never bought software again?
As long as people keep porting drivers, I wouldn't mind in the least.
If being mature means linux has to be dumbed down and lose half its functionality, then I'd just as soon all those people crying about linux being so hard go off and run OS X. Linux ain't supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be powerful.
I can guarantee that if linux ever lost the power and became a pretty little useless macintoy clone all of us who have been using it since the old days before anyone started this whole "desktop OS" crap would jump ship. But it won't happen - we didn't fight to get linux this far just to lose it to a bunch of lusers who don't want to RTFM.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but some friends of mine recently started running mandrake and all of it's distro-specific config utilities make it hell to customize. Gee, sounds like windows...
There's two different protocols for cut/paste. I'm not an X developer, but I know one of 'em is the old offix protocol, and I'm not sure what the other is.
Problem comes up when one application only supports one, and another application supports the other. It's quite annoying, and I agree - it does suck. For instance I was trying to get a copyright (©) symbol in gimp today, but couldn't paste one out of the gnome character map (which is odd, you'd think gimp and gnome would use the same protocol).
Not sure what's being done to resolve this, but I do know many apps are being developed that support both.
Oh? And what OS works for everything?
Um, dunno about other people, but I don't see people bitching about the fact that microsoft charges for it's products. They're usually complaining that the products either don't live up to the quality promised by microsoft or that the closed source model microsoft uses prevents quick bugfixes and security patches.
Now people _do_ bitch about microsoft abusing the monopoly, which of course is to make money, but the money making isn't so much the issue as the fact that other companies are driven under by this.
Personally, the way I look at it, if microsoft wants to make money, fine - doesn't matter to me since I don't run their products (except IE5 on my ultra). Ximian provides great services for GNOME, so I hope they are successful (although I think they should work out some kind of corporate vs. home deal - home users won't pay this much). I won't buy it because I run debian, slackware, and solaris - apt-get does everything I need on debian, I compile what I need on slackware, and I go to sun for updates on solaris.
Might be true in most cases, but I'd say if you're running debian, #debian on openprojects does. Quite a few of the developers hang out there (at least they used to - haven't been there in ages).
:) There's mailing lists for most other software commonly used in corporate environments, and the developers almost always read them, even in the rare cases where they're not active participants.
Most commercial applications I've seen revolve around redhat. They do have support, and while I've never called them (rpm gives me the hives), I've heard wonderful things about them. They seem to go the extra mile, which is highly in contrast to other companies who outsource they tech support and pay _by the call_ - that only makes the company want to get you off the phone - fixed or not - as soon as possible. I know, I used to support the DEC Starion at an outsourced tech support place, and was explicitly told by management that fixing the problem comes _second_ to low talk times.
Also, there's other good examples of directly getting through to qa and the developers - for instance, if you're having kernel problems, the LKML is read by the kernel developers. Granted, don't post there unless you're _sure_ it's a kernel problem
I think it's just a perception problem, really - people _think_ there's no support for linux, but it's not true. Corporate players can buy it, and anyone can usually talk directly with the developers if needs be. An admin's _primary_ skill should be the ability to find information quickly, through any means possible. If an admin can't find linux help, it's probably time to get a new admin.
Just offhand, while I agree mozilla kicks much ass, the thing that puts me off with it is that on my system text input is _slow_. I mean type a sentence and wait 10-20 seconds for it to show up. I have a weblog I wrote that doesn't like netscape 4.x and barely update it for this reason.
Hope that's fixed soon... the next couple of releases are supposed to improve performance.
It's possible they might write a driver. They did release a modified tulip driver with their ethernet cards, because the kernel included driver at the time didn't support them (from what I hear anyway - by the time I bought one the kernel driver had no problems with them).
Granted that many hardware manufacturers don't do much more than pay lip service to linux (and many do less), but companies that do networking have a lot more to gain with the linux market, since linux's strength is in its server capabilities.
Dunny why not.
You can do this with linux.
.profile/.login to add any directory you want to the library path. You can have libraries out the wazoo in your home directory.
Simply edit your
I dunno how rpm does with it, but if you compile for yourself this is simple.
Yep, been there.
It's been that way on many linux irc channels for a long time. back when I was learning linux (I was using slackware 3.3, which was brand new) most of the #linux channels I checked out were full off assholes.
Eventually I discovered openprojects, which had some very helpful channels. I don't go there often though 'cause nowdays if I'm having a problem it's usually something obscure and no one in the channel knows how to fix it, so I don't know what it's like now. You might check it out though - irc.openprojects.net. I used to hang out on #linpeople - don't even know if it's still there anymore though.
If you use debian, #debian there is helpful though - I've been there a couple times in the last few months for debian-specific problems, and they were great.
Just keep in mind though that irc or USENET should be your last resource. If you jump in there and start asking questions that the answers show up on the first page of a google search, the people inside will be less likely to help you. One of the requirements of a good sysadmin is the ability to quickly locate answers to any problems that arise. If you're going to run linux, make sure you develop this ability - it not only helps you running linux, but will help you find stuff on the 'net in general.
I would have loved debian/w32 if it had come out a year or two ago.
I used to work at the network control center for a military base in japan. I had cygwin, and early versions of the X port to cygwin installed on my NT box. I gotta tell you, it was great. But whereas at home, I prefer to compile my own stuff, at work I didn't have the time. Just putting cygwin on the machine required me to come in after hours.
Cygwin is great, and I loved it, but without a good package management system I couldn't take advantage of its full potention. If I'm ever stuck in a win32 shop again (which I hope never to be) I'll devinately be checking this out.
If you've no idea what I'm talking about, check out rpgworld. It's cool.
The US government already as a private internet, at least where the military is concerned. MILNET's only connected in a few places to the rest of the internet, and is designed to function just fine with those routers turned off. They recently held meetings on whether to shut off commercial access or not, and decided to keep it.
:)
If you're talking about the secure network, well, I won't talk about how it works except to say that IPv6 wouldn't give it any benefits. The system they were using before that has been in service for almost 40 years, and after the new one is wholly in place they will want it to last another 40 years before they change it again. Hopefully the rest of the internet will be IPv6 40 years from now
Hmm, if I had paid attention to lj's reccomendations on distros, I'd be using mandrake and having headaches from removing all the user-friendly and non-admin friendly crap they put in there instead of slackware and debian. You don't know how fun it is to have to telnet into a friend's machine because he doesn't know how to remove their braindead ICS and install a proper script-based firewall.
Never used suse, since rpm pisses me off. I've used mandrake and redhat, dunno how different thay are.
What's up with all the emphasis on installers anyway? How often do you people reinstall your OS? Damn, I've got 5 machines running in here and haven't installed any OS in months.
My only problem with the solaris 8 installer is that it's freakin' slow. But then again, I've only installed it on sparcstations and my ultra-1, so I've not tried it on a fast system.
But then again, I once installed it on my ultra over the serial port. You don't know pain until you try that...
Erg, that's what I get for posting when I'm tired.
/usr/share, it was just part of the example of why programs couldn't just be all put in their own directories.
/usr/share was that it seems pretty well set up for what it does. I just wish that it was more standardized in the way that /usr/share/backdrops would be a good place for background images, /usr/share/icons a good place for icons, etc. As it is I have to hunt down a few things when I want to use them, but it's not bad at all.
/usr/share, that would be silly :)
I didn't mean that libraries should go in
What I meant about
Of course libraries wouldn't go in