When it comes to installing it, PHP beats mod_perl quite easily. Also, PHP is available on more platforms and most providers install it as default these days.
However, it is far too easy to point at Bertelsmann and as you already noted, it was Michael's speculation that he simply presented as fact.
"Stupid German media legislation? Let's see. Bertelsmann is German, right? They must be responsible!"
Yes, Bertelsmann is *one* of the many companies behind this idea, but basically, all the German media content companies are supporting it and here in Germany, Bertelsmann is not singled out as the one company responsible for all stupid media legislation.
Also, this kind of "tax" has been very common in Germany since decades for music records. The system is called "GEMA" and they collect money from every sale of a record, from every public concert performance of a song and from every public broadcast of a song on radio or TV. This money is then given to the authors and composers of that song. While this approach is *very* bureaucratic and scary, it works surprisingly well (I am affected by this as a pseudo-professinal musician).
There is a similar fee on copiers, fax machines and scanners. If I am not mistaken, this is what they are now trying to extend on other "copying devices".
Yes, Bertelsmann is big, it is scary, I certainly don't like them either and I don't like this idea of "taxing" computers as digital copying devices. But still, this is not "the Bertelsmann tax".
For what it's worth, Carver in the movie was an international media mogul who owned media outlets in many countries, including Germany. But I think that the movie never mentions Carver's nationality or his company's corporate headquarter location.
(Hamburg, one of Germany's major media city, was used as a filming location to please the many Bond fans here. I am told that Germany is the major non-US market for Hollywood.)
I've been *extremely* happy with Matrox cards in the past.
- They support their products for a *long* time (I still get updated drivers for the old Matrox cards in my other computers!)
- Their Windows 9x drivers so far have always been rock solid, at least on my rather unusual self-built machine (unlike many other graphics card manufacturers I tried in the past).
- 2D image quality: Yes, it is indeed that good as other people here already stated. And this is one of my main concerns when working with computers. Just ask the many computer store clerks I drove insane just by the way I check a computer screen before I buy it...:-)
- They were among the first to release specs to the XFree folks. The Matrox products used to be the fastest 2D cards on Linux and back then, it was one of the reasons why I switched.
- The G400 double head support is a *very* good thing. Sure, Macs had it for more than a decade, but you can't appreciate it unless you tried it yourself. It is also nice to play games on a TV set with the G400.
To sum up, anyone who is working with his machine most of the time and is also a casual gamer (as myself), the Matrox card is *the* one to buy.
I have played a few 3D games on it (Freespace 1 & 2, Descent 3, Halflife, Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper 2) and wasn't disappointed. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind better game support. If Matrox came out with a more Gamer-oriented card that still has all the "office & business" qualities mentioned above, I'd buy it!
Sometimes I think that there should be an anonymous counting mechanism included with the distributions.
Similar to pine's anonymous user counter (for those who don't know about it: The first a new user starts pine on a fresh system, it asks you wether it may send an anonymous mail to the pine developers, just so that they have a rough idea about their user base).
Or similar to Debian's popularity contest (it reports the list of installed packages to the developers, so that they can see what is used most-often and thus deserves additional work over a rarely used software package).
Just imagine if every Linux distribution would do something like this after its first run of the installation:
"Have your new machine counted! May I send a one-time message to the Linux user counter for you?"
It might even be an incentive for the distributions to do so if the user share of the different flavours of Linux were counted that way.
> Why can't they say something like,
> "Well, it looks like they weren't
> really trying to take our trademark;
> why don't we just be friendly and
> understanding and work something out?"
> Instead of, "Ha ha ha ha! We're
> going to sue your fucking ass!"
Exactly.
*This* is the big question in the current debate about a number of similar incidents over here in Germany.
In fact, people are trying to proof in two particular cases that these brand names were registered solely to make money from the sueing that follows. One was "Explorer", the other was "Webspace".
This is part of an ongoing problem here in Germany. I am not a lawyer, so here's my layman's summary.
It is possible to register the commercial use of a product name for a certain business category. This is a good thing, of course, since this is meant to help you protect your trademark. Once you have registered your product's name, you can sue anyone who abuses this product name.
E.g., as in this case, there is a company who owns the right to use the product name "Samba" with computer-related services, and thus, they can threaten to sue anyone who abuses "their" product name in the same category.
However, they cannot go after any dance school here in Germany that happens to be named "School of Samba" or something like this. It's a different business category.
Now, the government agency that is registering these names is obviously rather clueless, as are several courts here in Germany.
A few years back, a (very) controversial German lawyer started to sue any computer reseller who mentions the "Triton" motherboard chipset in his ads or price lists, because he was defending a client's rights to the product name "Tricon". Strangely enough, because of the "striking name similarity", this lawyer has won several times.
Right now, this lawyer is helping another client defend his rights to the computer-services related product "Explorer".
Yes, if your product is named "Explorer" and you sell or distribute it in Germany, you'll have to pay a hefty fee to this company. "To distribute" also means linking to it(!) and this lawyer is sending out numerous bills to website owners running a list of Shareware links to products such as "FTP Explorer".
Yes, it is claimed that Microsoft has paid a fee to be "allowed" to use the word "Explorer" in Germany, too.
This is a big major pain in the *ss here in Germany and an obvious abuse of German law. They are going after the little guys by sending their bills to site owners and those who merely mirror a site. Recently, c't, a major German computer magazine, put a few applicates which used "Explorer" in their name on a CD-ROM that came with the magazine. This has promptly started a legal battle which began by threats to sue every single newspaper shop in Germany selling c't.
This lawyer has become a bit of a persona-non-grata in the German net community, but he himself really enjoys this fame and status and brags a lot about his new "Explorer"-related court cases in the German usenet groups de.soc.recht.misc or de.soc.recht.datennetze. In fact, I am sure that he'd love to know that folks talk about him on a foreign forum.
Anyway, all this madness has lead to a disturbing trend of everyone threatening anyone else to sue about a product name. Try to search for "Abmahnung" on Dejanew or in the Heise Newsticker.
To use SSL, you must buy a certificate. You can run a site with a self-built test certificate (the openssl documentation explains how to do it), but you'd only want to use that for internal work or for testing, as a non-official certificate will ring all the alarm bells of your browser...
Send Adobe a letter. Not an email, a written letter on actual paper. Mention that you have been a paying customer since 199x since Photoshop version x.x. Tell them that you want a Linux version of Photoshop. And tell everyone you know who is doing graphics and uses Linux to do the same if they support this idea.
Well, that was me. I really thought that the iMac looked cheesy, stupid, childish. And above all, it looked like *cheap* plastic. It really seemed like a very very bad idea to me.
Then there was one machine for real at the local Apple shop. Hmm, not bad. Those photographs weren't just to the real thing, this machine actually looks quite nice. Still a bit childish, but those Apple designers do have a point, somehow. This really is a new idea.
Then, suddenly, the new iMac translucent coloured plastic design appeared everywhere. There were iMac lookalikes, iMac-styled mice, CD boxes, whatever. And most of them sucked, while Apple's original design still looked superiour compared to the copycats.
And good, affordable USB devices started popping up everywhere. Designed for the Mac, working on a Wintel-PC, as well (not the other way round, for a change). My x86-machine's current trackball was made for the iMac. Apple left a mark, technology wise, by fully embracing a technology that hadn't been supported seriously in the x86 world until then.
Started to think about buying an iMac for my parents, who still run their company billing on an old 486. They are smart, but they don't care for technology. And mum is crazy for good design. Perfect examples of the target consumer group. Didn't buy one, since no affordable financial software for Macs was available that supports our local German billing rules.
Then, the iMacs without a fan started to appear. That really sparked my interest. The loud machine currently standing on my desktop, I really hate it, just for its noise. I want a silent workstation computer above all, I use a server for performance-critical applications.
Now that Linux runs on it, I am thinking about buying an iMac, too. And the most frightning reason: One of the main reasons for wanting to buy an iMac is that they now feature my favourite colour!
Yes, Apple's design strategy has convinced me now.
I wish that an x86 company would come up with a box that is as good and as complete as the iMac. There are possible competitors by Fujitsu, by HP and by IBM among others, but still, none of those machines seems to be as well thought out as the iMac.
(Trying to remember those old lessons they gave me as an army medic.)
It is perfectly normal for young people to hear the high-pitched frequencies of a cathod ray tube, but as you grow older, your hearing inevitably will go worse on this noise. This is nothing to worry about.
As an army medic testing new army recruits every 3 months, I *did* see the results of club music however. The current generation's hearing abilities are indeed worse than the average results of previous young folks.
I myself am not using the Linux version of StarOffice, since I use Windows for most of my daily desktop stuff (yeah, flame me).
Since Version 4.0, I have been using StarOffice (on Windows) as my only Word Processor. I had a lot of problems with it back then, but then again, anyone using MS Word around me was cursing even louder than I was.
All in all, I am very pleased by using it and since 5.x, it has become a real productivity tool. I mostly use it for Word Processing and as a Spreadsheet and we intend to install it here in our 6-person company as a distributed scheduler (StarOffice comes with a PalmPilot synch). I also did a number of presentations in University with it and it worked just fine.
I had a very few crashes of the application here and then, but never lost any data.
My opinion: Good, but not exactly top-notch. But hell, it certainly is *good* enough for the kind of Office work I do on my computer.
I use Suse on the desktop and found it to be *very* practical. But mostly, the question "what distribution shall I use?" comes down to "that's a matter of taste".
There are differences in their target audience, of course. Corel Linux is targeted mainly at beginners, while RedHat, Suse, Mandrake and Caldera try to be useful "for everyone" (they all can be installed and used by dummies but they all offer features for the pros, too). Debian is a little different because unlike the previous distributions, it doesn't offer automated configuration scripts. Again, it is solely a matter of taste if you like Suse's "yast" to mangle your configuration files for you (I do) or if you prefer to edit them by hand. Those people using Debian tell me that they are very happy with it (especially with its easy upgrade process and its security model).
Installing on auto-pilot...
BTW, if your machines are 2500 identical hardware setups, you could easily create one reference linux setup and copy the entire harddisk across the network, using a simple custom bootdisk and the "dd" command. Also, all distributions offer automated install features (ask their support about it) so that you just put in the CD and they auto-install your custom setup.
Centralization...
Reading from your requirement list, you may want to hire a Unix (semi-)professional for the setup. I mean, 2500 machines!
There are a number of Unix features that can make life easier in such a situation, so it's good to have someone who knows how to setup things like that...
Here are a few ways of centralizing things in the Unix world. Each step means a bit more centralization and means that the server must be more powerful and vice versa that the client doesn't have to be a powerful, fast machine anymore.
- You can use a centralized NIS/YP server for the user and password administration, which will make life a lot easier for your admin. I have never done this myself, but I worked with such a setup at University and it was incredibly practical.
- How about setting up a central file server for the user's home directories? If all user-related information is mounted via NFS, your workstations can easily be replaced and employees can easily move offices. Just login on someone else's machine and your personal files are right there.
- Next, you could setup a central file server that contains all the application binaries. This makes updates easy and avoids the need to upgrade your workstations' harddisks.
- And the final step would be to make all those machines pure X-Terminals that only run the X-Server and a local window manager, while the applications run on a central server. I don't know if this is for you, since this requires buying new powerful servers. On the other hand, since 32 MB is more than enough for an X-Terminal, you can avoid buying RAM for 2500 machines.
Some more thoughts on memory...
If you want all the applications to run locally, you should choose a minimalistic window manager (not KDE and not Gnome, both work with 32 MB, but ask for more) and Applixware. I have tried Applixware and it runs fine on a small machine, but I mostly use StarOffice now. StarOffice is a memory hog, though, so it isn't an alternative for you. (I have not tried Word Perfect, so I cannot judge about it.)
Finally...
Good luck for your project, but please expect a few weeks, possibly even months of time before everything works smoothly. The sheer size of your network is a true challenge.
Don't laugh, the same question has recently been asked in a German Linux newsgroup. As pointed out by the MS knowledge base, this isn't actually a problem of the operating system, but even advanced users are scared by a system suddenly playing music or other "warning" sounds. (I saw an advertisement recently, there's a "talking" mainboard out there, calling for "help" when something is wrong. Now that's what I would call scary.)
> Do you feel that the Linux community has > fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant > public relations? Since Linus Torvalds > has joined Transmeta, everyone has > become aware of Transmeta's entire > product line...
Yes and no.
I was just as excited about the PowerPC chips when they were new on the market and hoped for affordable PowerPC hardware that could replace the vanilla Wintel box on my desktop. And the PowerPC chip wasn't tied to "one famous person", at least not for me.
I remember discussions years ago with my co-students during computer science classes about how great this chip would be and how it would be a *true* alternative to the Intel product line.
However, Apple killed off the clones and PRPC (or whatever the non-Apple Power PC hardware setup was called) was stomped before it really took off.
So here I sit now, waiting for the next contestant. The iMac is interesting, but then again, Transmeta looks like the better idea to me now. See my other post in this thread about that...
I registered with Transmeta's product mailing list some time ago, yet I still haven't received a single message from them about upcoming products. What's going on there?
If someone from Transmeta's PR department is reading this: Hello?/please/ get your act together!
That said, I look forward to a Transmeta-powered product, I really do. Not having a car and spending most of my travelling on bicycles, in buses, on trains, I always bought ultra-light computers for my work.
Raw CPU speed never was a *big* issue for me while on the road, but portability and more than that battery time (!) are (I wrote the Battery Powered Linux Mini-Howto sometime in 1997, you can still find it in your/usr/local/howto:-) but it has now been superseded by Werner Heuser's excellent Laptop Howto).
I also want a Transmeta-powered desktop mini-workstation, running silent without a fan, with minimal footprint on the desk and little power consumption.
I want a mini-server that serves as a home network file server, ISDN router, fax, answering machine and MP3 player that I can leave running all day and that doesn't consume a few dozen watts while idle.
These products are literally what I have been waiting for since a few years. I have been watching the Megahertz and 3D graphics cards race of the market with disgust and hoped for a sign of sanity in all this useless power- and feature-sucking.
Transmeta, here's a possible client. Please don't disappoint me.:-)
Isn't that how games are being developed? I mean, they literally spend years on development and when it comes out, it is still too much for most of today's hardware.
The I-Opener was "sold" at a loss and the Netpliance folks expected people to use the pre-configured OS with the pre-configured ISP. Because of a hole in the contract, people could buy the I-Opener, then do with it whatever they wanted (including modifications such as running a different OS and not using the ISP).
Reading from their site, the Virgin Webplayer is rented at 50$ per month for three years. After that period, the machine belongs to you.
You could cancel the contract immediatly, but in that case, you'd have to return it or buy it (for 500$ in the first year). The price tag doesn't really make the device interesting.
To sum up, the Webplayer's contract doesn't seem to have any obvious holes (they probably learned from the I-Opener fiasco).
I wonder if Virgin Interactive allows their users to install a different OS on the rented machine while still using their online service. In that case, if I were in the US, I'd certainly get this machine.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to installing it, PHP beats mod_perl quite easily. Also, PHP is available on more platforms and most providers install it as default these days.
(This by a guy who prefers mod_perl.)
------------------
However, it is far too easy to point at Bertelsmann and as you already noted, it was Michael's speculation that he simply presented as fact.
"Stupid German media legislation? Let's see. Bertelsmann is German, right? They must be responsible!"
Yes, Bertelsmann is *one* of the many companies behind this idea, but basically, all the German media content companies are supporting it and here in Germany, Bertelsmann is not singled out as the one company responsible for all stupid media legislation.
Also, this kind of "tax" has been very common in Germany since decades for music records. The system is called "GEMA" and they collect money from every sale of a record, from every public concert performance of a song and from every public broadcast of a song on radio or TV. This money is then given to the authors and composers of that song. While this approach is *very* bureaucratic and scary, it works surprisingly well (I am affected by this as a pseudo-professinal musician).
There is a similar fee on copiers, fax machines and scanners. If I am not mistaken, this is what they are now trying to extend on other "copying devices".
Yes, Bertelsmann is big, it is scary, I certainly don't like them either and I don't like this idea of "taxing" computers as digital copying devices. But still, this is not "the Bertelsmann tax".
------------------
For what it's worth, Carver in the movie was an international media mogul who owned media outlets in many countries, including Germany. But I think that the movie never mentions Carver's nationality or his company's corporate headquarter location.
(Hamburg, one of Germany's major media city, was used as a filming location to please the many Bond fans here. I am told that Germany is the major non-US market for Hollywood.)
------------------
Let me say "me too!".
:-)
I've been *extremely* happy with Matrox cards in the past.
- They support their products for a *long* time (I still get updated drivers for the old Matrox cards in my other computers!)
- Their Windows 9x drivers so far have always been rock solid, at least on my rather unusual self-built machine (unlike many other graphics card manufacturers I tried in the past).
- 2D image quality: Yes, it is indeed that good as other people here already stated. And this is one of my main concerns when working with computers. Just ask the many computer store clerks I drove insane just by the way I check a computer screen before I buy it...
- They were among the first to release specs to the XFree folks. The Matrox products used to be the fastest 2D cards on Linux and back then, it was one of the reasons why I switched.
- The G400 double head support is a *very* good thing. Sure, Macs had it for more than a decade, but you can't appreciate it unless you tried it yourself. It is also nice to play games on a TV set with the G400.
To sum up, anyone who is working with his machine most of the time and is also a casual gamer (as myself), the Matrox card is *the* one to buy.
I have played a few 3D games on it (Freespace 1 & 2, Descent 3, Halflife, Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper 2) and wasn't disappointed. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind better game support. If Matrox came out with a more Gamer-oriented card that still has all the "office & business" qualities mentioned above, I'd buy it!
------------------
I'd like to note that this was a *great* interview and I'd love to see more interviews done by Mihai.
:-)
There are so many wannbe tech journalists out there that it's good to read an interview conducted by someone who know the subject's favourite subject.
Yes, I am aware that Brian did most of the talking. But hey, only the right questions trigger interesting answers.
So thanks Mihai. If your career in research fails, consider making interviews with the heroes of computer science.
------------------
Sometimes I think that there should be an anonymous counting mechanism included with the distributions.
Similar to pine's anonymous user counter (for those who don't know about it: The first a new user starts pine on a fresh system, it asks you wether it may send an anonymous mail to the pine developers, just so that they have a rough idea about their user base).
Or similar to Debian's popularity contest (it reports the list of installed packages to the developers, so that they can see what is used most-often and thus deserves additional work over a rarely used software package).
Just imagine if every Linux distribution would do something like this after its first run of the installation:
"Have your new machine counted! May I send a one-time message to the Linux user counter for you?"
It might even be an incentive for the distributions to do so if the user share of the different flavours of Linux were counted that way.
------------------
Over here in Germany, you are usually referred to as "US Americans", which neatly resolves the problem.
------------------
IBM's and HP's lawyer is named Amanda? :-)
------------------
> Why can't they say something like,
> "Well, it looks like they weren't
> really trying to take our trademark;
> why don't we just be friendly and
> understanding and work something out?"
> Instead of, "Ha ha ha ha! We're
> going to sue your fucking ass!"
Exactly.
*This* is the big question in the current debate about a number of similar incidents over here in Germany.
In fact, people are trying to proof in two particular cases that these brand names were registered solely to make money from the sueing that follows. One was "Explorer", the other was "Webspace".
------------------
This is part of an ongoing problem here in Germany. I am not a lawyer, so here's my layman's summary.
It is possible to register the commercial use of a product name for a certain business category. This is a good thing, of course, since this is meant to help you protect your trademark. Once you have registered your product's name, you can sue anyone who abuses this product name.
E.g., as in this case, there is a company who owns the right to use the product name "Samba" with computer-related services, and thus, they can threaten to sue anyone who abuses "their" product name in the same category.
However, they cannot go after any dance school here in Germany that happens to be named "School of Samba" or something like this. It's a different business category.
Now, the government agency that is registering these names is obviously rather clueless, as are several courts here in Germany.
A few years back, a (very) controversial German lawyer started to sue any computer reseller who mentions the "Triton" motherboard chipset in his ads or price lists, because he was defending a client's rights to the product name "Tricon". Strangely enough, because of the "striking name similarity", this lawyer has won several times.
Right now, this lawyer is helping another client defend his rights to the computer-services related product "Explorer".
Yes, if your product is named "Explorer" and you sell or distribute it in Germany, you'll have to pay a hefty fee to this company. "To distribute" also means linking to it(!) and this lawyer is sending out numerous bills to website owners running a list of Shareware links to products such as "FTP Explorer".
Yes, it is claimed that Microsoft has paid a fee to be "allowed" to use the word "Explorer" in Germany, too.
This is a big major pain in the *ss here in Germany and an obvious abuse of German law. They are going after the little guys by sending their bills to site owners and those who merely mirror a site. Recently, c't, a major German computer magazine, put a few applicates which used "Explorer" in their name on a CD-ROM that came with the magazine. This has promptly started a legal battle which began by threats to sue every single newspaper shop in Germany selling c't.
This lawyer has become a bit of a persona-non-grata in the German net community, but he himself really enjoys this fame and status and brags a lot about his new "Explorer"-related court cases in the German usenet groups de.soc.recht.misc or de.soc.recht.datennetze. In fact, I am sure that he'd love to know that folks talk about him on a foreign forum.
Anyway, all this madness has lead to a disturbing trend of everyone threatening anyone else to sue about a product name. Try to search for "Abmahnung" on Dejanew or in the Heise Newsticker.
------------------
To use SSL, you must buy a certificate. You can run a site with a self-built test certificate (the openssl documentation explains how to do it), but you'd only want to use that for internal work or for testing, as a non-official certificate will ring all the alarm bells of your browser...
------------------
Send Adobe a letter. Not an email, a written letter on actual paper. Mention that you have been a paying customer since 199x since Photoshop version x.x. Tell them that you want a Linux version of Photoshop. And tell everyone you know who is doing graphics and uses Linux to do the same if they support this idea.
That's the only way you can convince them.
------------------
Do you remember that first post back in the first Slashdot report about the iMac? The one that said nothing but "yikes, how ugly"?
Well, that was me. I really thought that the iMac looked cheesy, stupid, childish. And above all, it looked like *cheap* plastic. It really seemed like a very very bad idea to me.
Then there was one machine for real at the local Apple shop. Hmm, not bad. Those photographs weren't just to the real thing, this machine actually looks quite nice. Still a bit childish, but those Apple designers do have a point, somehow. This really is a new idea.
Then, suddenly, the new iMac translucent coloured plastic design appeared everywhere. There were iMac lookalikes, iMac-styled mice, CD boxes, whatever. And most of them sucked, while Apple's original design still looked superiour compared to the copycats.
And good, affordable USB devices started popping up everywhere. Designed for the Mac, working on a Wintel-PC, as well (not the other way round, for a change). My x86-machine's current trackball was made for the iMac. Apple left a mark, technology wise, by fully embracing a technology that hadn't been supported seriously in the x86 world until then.
Started to think about buying an iMac for my parents, who still run their company billing on an old 486. They are smart, but they don't care for technology. And mum is crazy for good design. Perfect examples of the target consumer group. Didn't buy one, since no affordable financial software for Macs was available that supports our local German billing rules.
Then, the iMacs without a fan started to appear. That really sparked my interest. The loud machine currently standing on my desktop, I really hate it, just for its noise. I want a silent workstation computer above all, I use a server for performance-critical applications.
Now that Linux runs on it, I am thinking about buying an iMac, too. And the most frightning reason: One of the main reasons for wanting to buy an iMac is that they now feature my favourite colour!
Yes, Apple's design strategy has convinced me now.
I wish that an x86 company would come up with a box that is as good and as complete as the iMac. There are possible competitors by Fujitsu, by HP and by IBM among others, but still, none of those machines seems to be as well thought out as the iMac.
------------------
(Trying to remember those old lessons they gave me as an army medic.)
It is perfectly normal for young people to hear the high-pitched frequencies of a cathod ray tube, but as you grow older, your hearing inevitably will go worse on this noise. This is nothing to worry about.
As an army medic testing new army recruits every 3 months, I *did* see the results of club music however. The current generation's hearing abilities are indeed worse than the average results of previous young folks.
------------------
I myself am not using the Linux version of StarOffice, since I use Windows for most of my daily desktop stuff (yeah, flame me).
Since Version 4.0, I have been using StarOffice (on Windows) as my only Word Processor. I had a lot of problems with it back then, but then again, anyone using MS Word around me was cursing even louder than I was.
All in all, I am very pleased by using it and since 5.x, it has become a real productivity tool. I mostly use it for Word Processing and as a Spreadsheet and we intend to install it here in our 6-person company as a distributed scheduler (StarOffice comes with a PalmPilot synch). I also did a number of presentations in University with it and it worked just fine.
I had a very few crashes of the application here and then, but never lost any data.
My opinion: Good, but not exactly top-notch. But hell, it certainly is *good* enough for the kind of Office work I do on my computer.
------------------
On the question of distributions...
I use Suse on the desktop and found it to be *very* practical. But mostly, the question "what distribution shall I use?" comes down to "that's a matter of taste".
There are differences in their target audience, of course. Corel Linux is targeted mainly at beginners, while RedHat, Suse, Mandrake and Caldera try to be useful "for everyone" (they all can be installed and used by dummies but they all offer features for the pros, too). Debian is a little different because unlike the previous distributions, it doesn't offer automated configuration scripts. Again, it is solely a matter of taste if you like Suse's "yast" to mangle your configuration files for you (I do) or if you prefer to edit them by hand. Those people using Debian tell me that they are very happy with it (especially with its easy upgrade process and its security model).
Installing on auto-pilot...
BTW, if your machines are 2500 identical hardware setups, you could easily create one reference linux setup and copy the entire harddisk across the network, using a simple custom bootdisk and the "dd" command. Also, all distributions offer automated install features (ask their support about it) so that you just put in the CD and they auto-install your custom setup.
Centralization...
Reading from your requirement list, you may want to hire a Unix (semi-)professional for the setup. I mean, 2500 machines!
There are a number of Unix features that can make life easier in such a situation, so it's good to have someone who knows how to setup things like that...
Here are a few ways of centralizing things in the Unix world. Each step means a bit more centralization and means that the server must be more powerful and vice versa that the client doesn't have to be a powerful, fast machine anymore.
- You can use a centralized NIS/YP server for the user and password administration, which will make life a lot easier for your admin. I have never done this myself, but I worked with such a setup at University and it was incredibly practical.
- How about setting up a central file server for the user's home directories? If all user-related information is mounted via NFS, your workstations can easily be replaced and employees can easily move offices. Just login on someone else's machine and your personal files are right there.
- Next, you could setup a central file server that contains all the application binaries. This makes updates easy and avoids the need to upgrade your workstations' harddisks.
- And the final step would be to make all those machines pure X-Terminals that only run the X-Server and a local window manager, while the applications run on a central server. I don't know if this is for you, since this requires buying new powerful servers. On the other hand, since 32 MB is more than enough for an X-Terminal, you can avoid buying RAM for 2500 machines.
Some more thoughts on memory...
If you want all the applications to run locally, you should choose a minimalistic window manager (not KDE and not Gnome, both work with 32 MB, but ask for more) and Applixware. I have tried Applixware and it runs fine on a small machine, but I mostly use StarOffice now. StarOffice is a memory hog, though, so it isn't an alternative for you. (I have not tried Word Perfect, so I cannot judge about it.)
Finally...
Good luck for your project, but please expect a few weeks, possibly even months of time before everything works smoothly. The sheer size of your network is a true challenge.
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Don't laugh, the same question has recently been asked in a German Linux newsgroup. As pointed out by the MS knowledge base, this isn't actually a problem of the operating system, but even advanced users are scared by a system suddenly playing music or other "warning" sounds. (I saw an advertisement recently, there's a "talking" mainboard out there, calling for "help" when something is wrong. Now that's what I would call scary.)
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"Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese! Everybody knows the moon is made of cheese..."
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> Methinks you have forgotten that
> Transmeta has a non-existent PR
> department.
They have a mailing list for product announcements. They should use it, that's all I ask for.
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> Do you feel that the Linux community has
> fallen victim to Transmeta's brilliant
> public relations? Since Linus Torvalds
> has joined Transmeta, everyone has
> become aware of Transmeta's entire
> product line...
Yes and no.
I was just as excited about the PowerPC chips when they were new on the market and hoped for affordable PowerPC hardware that could replace the vanilla Wintel box on my desktop. And the PowerPC chip wasn't tied to "one famous person", at least not for me.
I remember discussions years ago with my co-students during computer science classes about how great this chip would be and how it would be a *true* alternative to the Intel product line.
However, Apple killed off the clones and PRPC (or whatever the non-Apple Power PC hardware setup was called) was stomped before it really took off.
So here I sit now, waiting for the next contestant. The iMac is interesting, but then again, Transmeta looks like the better idea to me now. See my other post in this thread about that...
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I registered with Transmeta's product mailing list some time ago, yet I still haven't received a single message from them about upcoming products. What's going on there?
/please/ get your act together!
/usr/local/howto :-) but it has now been superseded by Werner Heuser's excellent Laptop Howto).
:-)
If someone from Transmeta's PR department is reading this: Hello?
That said, I look forward to a Transmeta-powered product, I really do. Not having a car and spending most of my travelling on bicycles, in buses, on trains, I always bought ultra-light computers for my work.
Raw CPU speed never was a *big* issue for me while on the road, but portability and more than that battery time (!) are (I wrote the Battery Powered Linux Mini-Howto sometime in 1997, you can still find it in your
I also want a Transmeta-powered desktop mini-workstation, running silent without a fan, with minimal footprint on the desk and little power consumption.
I want a mini-server that serves as a home network file server, ISDN router, fax, answering machine and MP3 player that I can leave running all day and that doesn't consume a few dozen watts while idle.
These products are literally what I have been waiting for since a few years. I have been watching the Megahertz and 3D graphics cards race of the market with disgust and hoped for a sign of sanity in all this useless power- and feature-sucking.
Transmeta, here's a possible client. Please don't disappoint me.
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Isn't that how games are being developed? I mean, they literally spend years on development and when it comes out, it is still too much for most of today's hardware.
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Oops, I stand corrected.
Also, I did not notice the part about the advertisement bar on the screen. There goes the chance of installing an alternative OS on the box.
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The I-Opener was "sold" at a loss and the Netpliance folks expected people to use the pre-configured OS with the pre-configured ISP. Because of a hole in the contract, people could buy the I-Opener, then do with it whatever they wanted (including modifications such as running a different OS and not using the ISP).
Reading from their site, the Virgin Webplayer is rented at 50$ per month for three years. After that period, the machine belongs to you.
You could cancel the contract immediatly, but in that case, you'd have to return it or buy it (for 500$ in the first year). The price tag doesn't really make the device interesting.
To sum up, the Webplayer's contract doesn't seem to have any obvious holes (they probably learned from the I-Opener fiasco).
I wonder if Virgin Interactive allows their users to install a different OS on the rented machine while still using their online service. In that case, if I were in the US, I'd certainly get this machine.
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I forgot to say - software packages are also ridiculously oversized here...
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