If you can abide with simpler alternatives, try Abi Word and Gnumeric.
Abi Word does not provide all the features you may expect from a word processor, but is quite useful IMHO. Gnumeric is a fairly advanced replacement for Excel and it keeps improving at an amazing pace. Give'em a try.
Visual Studio - kdevelop (works fairly well with GNOME) or XEmacs/GNU Emacs (though they require quite a bit of learning, though) gnomba - for browsing SMB shared resources. ICQ - gnomeICU (pretty simple, but pretty effective and compatible)
I wouldn't assume the crowd at Linux shows is mostly the "converted". I see many people coming to these expos genuinely looking for information/guidelines etc having virtually no experience with the beast, at most having had a system installed by a friendly guru.
Perhaps that is what accounts for the low presence and attendance of Linux folk at this particular expo. May it be that the Penguin world has outgrown its niche position of unexpensive NT/Novell replacement for small enterprises and has established a market for itself, complete with dedicated expos?
I hate to concur with the multitude of Katz bashers, but this excerpt is ludicrous (and I'm not talking about poor grammar here). Quoth Jon:
Along with innumerable medical benefits the genetic map may also create staggering social divisions between people who can afford to use it to manipulate the birth and process -- the child-obsessed, highly competitive Boomers come to mind -- and the vast majority of the world who won't have access to it for years, if ever.
I may be way off base here (if , e.g. my understanding of the term is incorrect), but aren't "boomers" in general past the reproduction age and therefore cannot reap the benefits of genetical manipulation of offspring (for good or for worse)?
But hey, what's a little chronological accuracy between friends?
"Actually, what I think he means is the United States of America as opposed to, say, the United States of Brazil."
There is no such country, perhaps you mean the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) or the Federative Republic of Brazil (República Federativa do Brasil). Take your pick.
In colonial times, people on Great Britain called colonials "americans", and so did the Spaniards in reference to their colonials. America was then just a synonym for the New World.
That subsequently the US took hold of the name used for the whole New World to name itself casts a lot of light on how the so-called Founding Fathers viewed the rest of the Continent. The former Spanish colonies having splintered into a number of smaller coutries didn't help much either.
Are you too dim to understand the difference between Glosasalia (ecstatic tongues as I referred to in my post) and the ability to speak in an unknown foreign language through apparently supernatural means?
Are you so dense you cannot learn to spell glossolalia right, even though it was already spelled out for you in my previous post? And why the bogus capitalization, we're not writing German here. Now, looking over the fact that you can't even spell right the name of a linguistic (or rather, psychological) phenomenon that you purport to know, I feel obliged to remind you that the second phenomenon you referred to (known as xenoglossia) was never observed to be genuine, except under externally induced hypgnosis. But perhaps you have some references to counter that, right?
It is apparent that you have acquired all your "knowledge" of the subject from Snow Crash.
It is evident that you acquired all your knowledge of the subject from Snow White.
As for Western Christianity -- that's a common designation. It doesn't mean Catholicism. go do some research.
Where is that 'common', Joe? What then, in Heaven's name, do you mean by it, if not the opposition between Western rites (Roman) and Eastern rites (Orthodox)? Do I really have to make you aware of the fact that Pentecostal Protestantism (what you probably think of when you say Christian) is not prevalent anywhere else but in the good ole' USofA? Do you think the 'West' (however you define it) is restricted to Uncle Sam? If so, then why not call it by its proper name, damn it? You go do some research, because not only you need a clue desperately, but you also seem to be the one who's still in high school.
I wouldn't call this "corporate espionage", since they're not after trade secrets or the like. This is just a private investigation into the methods a hostile organization is using to twist public opinion in its favor. Its perfectly legal and legitimate. And it would also be OK IMHO if M$ did it, for instance, to come up with evidence that Sun or Netscape pulled strings with officials to prop up the DOJ lawsuit, as so may astroturfers here are fond of telling us.
In fact, I think they wouldn't have hesitated at doing so. The fact that they come up with no compelling evidence of this is quite telling...
I am somewhat at this separation of WAN traffica (care to cite references?) between ERP and "Internet"... Transactions between separate branches routed via TCP/IP count as ERP or Internet? How do you define what is ERP and what is Internet? Careful when comparing those apples and oranges...
If you think glossolalia (speaking tongues) is a big miracle, you are even more naïve than I figured. Could anybody present at the miracle scene indentify the language that was miraculously spoken? How can you be certain they weren't just mumbling gibberish? Or having an epileptic fit, for that matter?
But there's another curious point in your post: the term Western Christianity. It sure doesn't ring familiar with me, unless you're talking about the split between the Roman creed and the Orthodox (Oriental) creed. Yes, we're talking about Catholicism here (remember, not all Catholics are Roman Catholics). If what you meant, on the other hand (and using a really long stretch of imagination), was to refer to the miriad sects of Pentecostal Protestantism that thrive in present day USA, then my friend, I have to tell you the term is meaningless, because this is a very localized phenomenon, and it is still minoritary, considering the whole of Christianity.
Despite your calling me a dick, it's been really interesting debating with you, dude. But I still remain unconvinced. For one thing, most of the posts one see following this article are of the "Slack rulez! Redhat suck0rz" chest-thumping nature that is really content-free and annoying to grown-ups. Let me just add incidentally, that I used a lot of distros in my time (Slack, Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Yggdrasil for chrissake!) and the only things that bother me about Slack (apart from the attitude of its evangelists) are its BSDish nature (but that is mostly a question of taste), its lack of a decent package management facility and its tendency to be on the conservative side, rather than on the cutting-edge side.
I guess that's because I'm mostly a programmer, not a sysadmin. I like new features. I like keeping track with the latest and greatest, even if it means it's still a little on the buggy side of the spectrum. Do you think the linux kernel was born stable? Do you think if people's reception to bleeding edge was so timid as Slackware advocates it would have progressed so fast? No, right?
You got me totally wrong on the "quality vs quantity" debate. It's not that I think Redhat is better because it provides more packages, but rather because it provides more new things. RPM is just one example of it, but RH still pays Alan Cox to do kernel development, at one time employed Rasterman of Enlightenment fame, and contributes a lot to GNOME and a lot of other packages. In all good faith, I see no commitment of Slackware to new developments and advancement, but boy, sure they deliver a rock solid system.
All in all, I'm against distro holy wars as much as yourself, but we have to concur that the most childish attitude (as can be seen from a number of posts here) is generally shown by the Slackware camp.
Getting back to "moot" points, the contention that Redhat somehow makes it difficult to delve into the system is really bizarre. A GUI program can do the editing for you, but what's to stop you if you want to do so? What's to stop you from upgrading and recompiling your kernel (which I do often)? What's to stop you from installing the source RPM and modifying sendmail to your hearts content or installing the offensive fortune(6) cookies that the powers that be at Redhat (TM) left out for the sake of corporate prudence? What's tying your hands? What is a more "generic" Linux (or as another poster put UNIX-like) experience? You don't even have to use the graphical intall if you don't want. How's that for freedom of choice?
To finish it off, I don't consider myself to be a distribution bigot. Instead, all my ranting is directed at fighting bigotry and ignorance. I ran Slackware once. Today I run RH (at the office) and Debian (ah, the joy!) at home. How many Slackers can claim such lack of prejudice? So be consistent with your unbiased way of thinking and blow the horn when you see another AC claim that "RH is for lamers".
Good for you, I prefer the overzealous approach of avoiding fucking up the most I can (though I sure have done my share of it). I just think it is more prudent, but different folks, different strokes. The notion of the fatality of a failure is very realtive also, the system you just rm -rf/ the living soul out of, may be an unimportant spare box that nevertheless has a complete, recent backup, who knows? Not every cat has nine lives, though.
Not really so. OK, I agree, I have only one body to use as a learning workstation and a production system). Bu why can you not be able to learn that rm -rf/ is probably a bad idea without ever having to actually do so (as another poster suggested)? To prove that, you will have to prove that screwing your system is the only to learn how not to screw your system. A difficult proposition, at best.
After all, the point of RTFM is to learn how to do what you have to do, and not recovering from a shot in your foot, after a misguided attempt at doing it.
Ha, glad you took in good humor the "spouting BS" thing, I got a little carried away. The trouble is that I get really annoyed at this hardcore Slackware macho thing, all people who use other distros are weenies... It's all free, it's all Linux, GNU etc after all.
To answer your question: do I really need all 706 packages? Not really, but:
I got disk space to spare (13G, baby!);
I install a lot of things just to check them out (Kdevelop, Gnapster etc);
It took me less time to install 706 packages on tonga than it took you to compile 227 on farside (unless it is a Bowulf cluster:-)
Even though I really don't use ed(1) all that much, it's nice to know it is there if I need it (God forbid!)
The irony of all that, is that the piece of software I use the most (by far) is Emacs, which I pluck from the CVS tree, configure and compile by myself. Go figure. It is, at least, a lot more fun than compiling and configure sendmail:-).
Not really, I was just warming up. The expression "rock solid" doesn't mean robust, bug-free and fault tolerant per se, if you read/. carefully. It usually conveys a judgement of value of one piece of software (say, Slackware) in comparison to another (say, Redhat). As such, it is simply a propaganda term not any more meaningful than the lower TCO that is built from the ground up in NT, according to the Micro~1 marketing machine.
Thus, and to the same effect, proponents of Slackware (and the Slackware creators themselves) parrot this and similar expressions whilst comparing both distributions, solely for their propaganda value. Sure, an argument can be made that Slackware packagers are more careful in their package selection and the testing of said packages, but considering that most of what is shipped by each distribution is composed of the same software packages (which incidentally are not created by either Slackware or Redhat), this is really a moot point.
So what is really fair when comparing distributions? IMHO it's what they aggregate (package management systems, new packages etc), and in that respect, Redhat produces more and better software than Slackware.
Kudos to you, Alan (nice name BTW,:-) you summed up my toughts and experience about this whole distro war shenanigan.
I too have tinkered with Slack and a miriad installation floppies, and having a boot floppy and a root floppy and manually configuring PPP, X and compiling a thousand packages over and again. These days, I like the fact that when I insert a CD in the drive it is automounted and a file manager window pops up.
That leaves me more time to compile and configure Emacs to my heart's content:-)
Conversely, it is not a negative thing to use a system where you don't have edit these settings manually (even though you know how to do it). Like I said, what prevents the poster from totally ignoring the advice in block letters and proceed to edit/etc/resolv.conf,/etc/fstab,/etc/inittab or whatever his li'l heart wishes?
And it is not a negative thing to learn and to avoid doing mistakes. I learned how to swim without ever having to drown, what about yourself?
About the only potyion in your post that is right is that many people prefer SysV. Many people also prefer windows98, perhaps many of the same people...
Like Sun, IBM or SGI engineers? Like all the rest of the Linux distributions?
BSD lacks Netscape? Hmm/usr/ports/www and/usr/ports/editors tells a different story. Maybe before you make claims, you should bother checking to make sure you arent spreading fud
Fight fire with fire, I say. If people spout FUD and what is essentially meaningless words ("rock solid" this, "UNIX like" that) why should I retract from spreading FUD about *BSD and Slackware? Anyways, I'll pull the Netscape mention, but I stand by StarOffice...
There is no doubt that redhat tries to be all things to all people, and fails being anything to anyone.
I fail to see how Redhat tries to be all things to all people. They simply try to to package the easiest, most featureful distribution in the Linux world, and try to "play nice" with the community. Not that I think that they deliver the best distro IMHO, my preference leans towards Debian, but I think they do a good job of it.
There also is very little doubt that slackware is closer to freebsd than it is to solaris.
My thoughts exaclty, but that doesn't mean it is good or bad. Make of that what you may.
That you can work around redhat's misfeatures is not really relevant. That you can work around slackware's misfeatures is not really relevant, wait, you can't. Need to upgrade packages? Sorry, no can do! Need to uninstall first.
Pray tell us, what exactly are Redhat's misfeatures? A buggy package? You can download the source RPM and apply a patch, just as you would with a Slackware package. Ooh, sendmail and a chuck load of services are started by default! Like its great trouble to shut'em.
Ah, I got it! I don't know how to use rpm. Well, whatever happened to good ole RTFM?
I got it now! When my car runs out of gas it is "rock solid" too: its position in my garage is "stable" and it is not prone to crashes or accidents. Glad you clarified that for me...
Slashdot Mirror
And (OK I know it's a "joke") what makes you think that Lima, of all places, has an honest-to-goodness "Westerner go home" attitude?
Abi Word does not provide all the features you may expect from a word processor, but is quite useful IMHO. Gnumeric is a fairly advanced replacement for Excel and it keeps improving at an amazing pace. Give'em a try.
I honestly hope you're trying to be humorous...
gnomba - for browsing SMB shared resources.
ICQ - gnomeICU (pretty simple, but pretty effective and compatible)
And don't forget to check the source.
Perhaps that is what accounts for the low presence and attendance of Linux folk at this particular expo. May it be that the Penguin world has outgrown its niche position of unexpensive NT/Novell replacement for small enterprises and has established a market for itself, complete with dedicated expos?
Along with innumerable medical benefits the genetic map may also create staggering social divisions between people who can afford to use it to manipulate the birth and process -- the child-obsessed, highly competitive Boomers come to mind -- and the vast majority of the world who won't have access to it for years, if ever.
I may be way off base here (if , e.g. my understanding of the term is incorrect), but aren't "boomers" in general past the reproduction age and therefore cannot reap the benefits of genetical manipulation of offspring (for good or for worse)?
But hey, what's a little chronological accuracy between friends?
Yep, it looks funny, but that's actually the way Indians write crores and lakhs.
There is no such country, perhaps you mean the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) or the Federative Republic of Brazil (República Federativa do Brasil). Take your pick.
In colonial times, people on Great Britain called colonials "americans", and so did the Spaniards in reference to their colonials. America was then just a synonym for the New World.
That subsequently the US took hold of the name used for the whole New World to name itself casts a lot of light on how the so-called Founding Fathers viewed the rest of the Continent. The former Spanish colonies having splintered into a number of smaller coutries didn't help much either.
Are you so dense you cannot learn to spell glossolalia right, even though it was already spelled out for you in my previous post? And why the bogus capitalization, we're not writing German here.
Now, looking over the fact that you can't even spell right the name of a linguistic (or rather, psychological) phenomenon that you purport to know, I feel obliged to remind you that the second phenomenon you referred to (known as xenoglossia) was never observed to be genuine, except under externally induced hypgnosis. But perhaps you have some references to counter that, right?
It is apparent that you have acquired all your "knowledge" of the subject from Snow Crash.
It is evident that you acquired all your knowledge of the subject from Snow White.
As for Western Christianity -- that's a common designation. It doesn't mean Catholicism. go do some research.
Where is that 'common', Joe? What then, in Heaven's name, do you mean by it, if not the opposition between Western rites (Roman) and Eastern rites (Orthodox)? Do I really have to make you aware of the fact that Pentecostal Protestantism (what you probably think of when you say Christian) is not prevalent anywhere else but in the good ole' USofA? Do you think the 'West' (however you define it) is restricted to Uncle Sam? If so, then why not call it by its proper name, damn it?
You go do some research, because not only you need a clue desperately, but you also seem to be the one who's still in high school.
That's OK, but what would really strike me as odd would be if you told us that some of the most courageous people you ever met were ACs.
In fact, I think they wouldn't have hesitated at doing so. The fact that they come up with no compelling evidence of this is quite telling...
I am somewhat at this separation of WAN traffica (care to cite references?) between ERP and "Internet"... Transactions between separate branches routed via TCP/IP count as ERP or Internet? How do you define what is ERP and what is Internet? Careful when comparing those apples and oranges...
But there's another curious point in your post: the term Western Christianity. It sure doesn't ring familiar with me, unless you're talking about the split between the Roman creed and the Orthodox (Oriental) creed. Yes, we're talking about Catholicism here (remember, not all Catholics are Roman Catholics). If what you meant, on the other hand (and using a really long stretch of imagination), was to refer to the miriad sects of Pentecostal Protestantism that thrive in present day USA, then my friend, I have to tell you the term is meaningless, because this is a very localized phenomenon, and it is still minoritary, considering the whole of Christianity.
Preacher-turned-conman is a redundant term, at least if you judge by the crop of televangelists in the US...
I guess that's because I'm mostly a programmer, not a sysadmin. I like new features. I like keeping track with the latest and greatest, even if it means it's still a little on the buggy side of the spectrum. Do you think the linux kernel was born stable? Do you think if people's reception to bleeding edge was so timid as Slackware advocates it would have progressed so fast? No, right?
You got me totally wrong on the "quality vs quantity" debate. It's not that I think Redhat is better because it provides more packages, but rather because it provides more new things. RPM is just one example of it, but RH still pays Alan Cox to do kernel development, at one time employed Rasterman of Enlightenment fame, and contributes a lot to GNOME and a lot of other packages. In all good faith, I see no commitment of Slackware to new developments and advancement, but boy, sure they deliver a rock solid system.
All in all, I'm against distro holy wars as much as yourself, but we have to concur that the most childish attitude (as can be seen from a number of posts here) is generally shown by the Slackware camp.
Getting back to "moot" points, the contention that Redhat somehow makes it difficult to delve into the system is really bizarre. A GUI program can do the editing for you, but what's to stop you if you want to do so? What's to stop you from upgrading and recompiling your kernel (which I do often)? What's to stop you from installing the source RPM and modifying sendmail to your hearts content or installing the offensive fortune(6) cookies that the powers that be at Redhat (TM) left out for the sake of corporate prudence? What's tying your hands? What is a more "generic" Linux (or as another poster put UNIX-like) experience? You don't even have to use the graphical intall if you don't want. How's that for freedom of choice?
To finish it off, I don't consider myself to be a distribution bigot. Instead, all my ranting is directed at fighting bigotry and ignorance. I ran Slackware once. Today I run RH (at the office) and Debian (ah, the joy!) at home. How many Slackers can claim such lack of prejudice? So be consistent with your unbiased way of thinking and blow the horn when you see another AC claim that "RH is for lamers".
Good for you, I prefer the overzealous approach of avoiding fucking up the most I can (though I sure have done my share of it). I just think it is more prudent, but different folks, different strokes. The notion of the fatality of a failure is very realtive also, the system you just rm -rf / the living soul out of, may be an unimportant spare box that nevertheless has a complete, recent backup, who knows? Not every cat has nine lives, though.
After all, the point of RTFM is to learn how to do what you have to do, and not recovering from a shot in your foot, after a misguided attempt at doing it.
To answer your question: do I really need all 706 packages? Not really, but:
The irony of all that, is that the piece of software I use the most (by far) is Emacs, which I pluck from the CVS tree, configure and compile by myself. Go figure. It is, at least, a lot more fun than compiling and configure sendmail :-).
Great man, you just had to bring "real" religion to a religious war :-)
Not really, I was just warming up. The expression "rock solid" doesn't mean robust, bug-free and fault tolerant per se, if you read /. carefully. It usually conveys a judgement of value of one piece of software (say, Slackware) in comparison to another (say, Redhat). As such, it is simply a propaganda term not any more meaningful than the lower TCO that is built from the ground up in NT, according to the Micro~1 marketing machine.
Thus, and to the same effect, proponents of Slackware (and the Slackware creators themselves) parrot this and similar expressions whilst comparing both distributions, solely for their propaganda value. Sure, an argument can be made that Slackware packagers are more careful in their package selection and the testing of said packages, but considering that most of what is shipped by each distribution is composed of the same software packages (which incidentally are not created by either Slackware or Redhat), this is really a moot point.
So what is really fair when comparing distributions? IMHO it's what they aggregate (package management systems, new packages etc), and in that respect, Redhat produces more and better software than Slackware.
So, how's that for a dick, eh?
I too have tinkered with Slack and a miriad installation floppies, and having a boot floppy and a root floppy and manually configuring PPP, X and compiling a thousand packages over and again. These days, I like the fact that when I insert a CD in the drive it is automounted and a file manager window pops up.
That leaves me more time to compile and configure Emacs to my heart's content :-)
And it is not a negative thing to learn and to avoid doing mistakes. I learned how to swim without ever having to drown, what about yourself?
Like Sun, IBM or SGI engineers? Like all the rest of the Linux distributions?
BSD lacks Netscape? Hmm /usr/ports/www and /usr/ports/editors tells a different story. Maybe before you make claims, you should bother checking to make sure you arent spreading fud
Fight fire with fire, I say. If people spout FUD and what is essentially meaningless words ("rock solid" this, "UNIX like" that) why should I retract from spreading FUD about *BSD and Slackware? Anyways, I'll pull the Netscape mention, but I stand by StarOffice...
There is no doubt that redhat tries to be all things to all people, and fails being anything to anyone.
I fail to see how Redhat tries to be all things to all people. They simply try to to package the easiest, most featureful distribution in the Linux world, and try to "play nice" with the community. Not that I think that they deliver the best distro IMHO, my preference leans towards Debian, but I think they do a good job of it.
There also is very little doubt that slackware is closer to freebsd than it is to solaris.
My thoughts exaclty, but that doesn't mean it is good or bad. Make of that what you may.
That you can work around redhat's misfeatures is not really relevant. That you can work around slackware's misfeatures is not really relevant, wait, you can't. Need to upgrade packages? Sorry, no can do! Need to uninstall first.
Pray tell us, what exactly are Redhat's misfeatures? A buggy package? You can download the source RPM and apply a patch, just as you would with a Slackware package. Ooh, sendmail and a chuck load of services are started by default! Like its great trouble to shut'em.
Ah, I got it! I don't know how to use rpm. Well, whatever happened to good ole RTFM?
I got it now! When my car runs out of gas it is "rock solid" too: its position in my garage is "stable" and it is not prone to crashes or accidents. Glad you clarified that for me...
afc@tonga:~/src/stage$ rpm -qa | wc -l
706
Preview button, here I go...