Remember there are lots of countries where talking about certain things is illegal (france/germany: nazis, china: democracy).
For our suboptimally educated friends: It is not illegal to talk about Nazis in either France or Germany. It is illegal to promote Nazi ideas and distribute propaganda (public display of Nazi insignia like the Swastika and SS- or Sig runes falls under this category as well).
Otherwise, you can put ALL of that on one DVD, and install it with no more than few reboots. All you need is program like UltraISO, and a guide like this. You know, you CAN slipstream SP2, and all the latest patches and drivers into Windows installation. And use simple unattend.txt file to set defaults to most installation options (CD key, keyboard setting, resolution, time zone).
The real question is, why does a user have to do this? It's pointless and a waste of time, since the software supplier should have already done that for you. The same goes for updates. Tracking security updates from 30 different vendors is idiotic, it should a one command/click thing, very much like apt-get or yum.
Parent is marked as funny, goes to show the level of maturity of the mods here.
You posting this statement here says something about you as well, doesn't it?
I use XP at work, my box is up for about 20 days now, I even installed MSDE (the lite version of SQL Server) withouth having to reboot.
Wow, impressive, a desktop box running without a reboot for 20 days and you didn't even have to reboot it to install some "lite" database system.
A couple of pointers:
1. Real Men don't brag about uptime until it can be measured in years.
2. A Real System is never rebooted.
Viruses or spyware? Never had any, but I know when to delete that "cute screensaver", instead of cliking thorough.
What are viruses and spyware, and what is this screensaver stuff anyway? BTW, the fact that you have to worry about stuff like "cute screensaver" tells a lot about MS's security approach, don't you think?
People bash MS a bit too much around here, IMHO.
Actually MS is not bashed enough for the amount of crap they produce and the headaches they induce, IMHO.
Proper CD recording support because the makers understand the need for backwards compatibility, and don't go around breaking APIs just because they feel like it.
At a time when Russia is just becoming a functioning democracy, I think this is actually pretty ironic.
Since when is Russia becoming a functioning democracy? I guess it all depends on your definition of democracy, after all East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, and hence a democracy (they had elections). But, what is generally referred to as democracy in western industrialised countries is called liberal democracy, and it is sad to say, Russia is nowhere near it.
Judged by these standards, it is frightening to observe (since it is the largest economic and military power), that the US is moving away from liberal democracy.
There is a crucial difference between OSS and MS support on the net: With OSS you often get the original developer to fix a bug for you or a workaround that actually works. Compare that with MS support forums where most people are almost as clueless as the guy looking for help. More than once did I receive help from a project's core developer. This may be because they take more pride in their work or generally understand that end user support is crucial to developing a successful application. Of course it helps to understand the jargon and culture of the developer community.
Another reason is the difficulty of remote support for GUI environments. It is far easier to just post a configuration file than explaining the clickety steps in a GUI.
I nevertheless agree with you on the quality of Mac support on the net, which may be explained by the sheer ignorance of the Unix environment displayed by many Mac users. Maybe it's that GUI culture thing, I don't know.
I stand corrected. I had similar problems, albeit with a non-slipstreamed copy, and was assuming that SP2 comes with driver support for almost everything to get it going in a way that it is usable. I feel your pain in this regard, especially when Windows leaves you without network capabilities. Burning a CD to just install such a basic feature is definitely a show stopper. BTW, I have only recently switched to Sarge and there is absolutely no looking back to Fedora and SuSE. Running apt natively (as opposed to apt4rpm) is so nice (and fast) and d-i is a tremendous improvement (I don't really need graphics during the install).
Actually, WinXP doesn't detect my gigabit ethernet card, nor does it detect my on-board SATA controller or drives and about a half-dozen other (but minor) devices - this makes setting XP up a huge pain in the arse, requiring a floppy with drivers for my SATA card on installation and a copy of my ethernet drivers on my USB memory stick post-install (I access the internet over my LAN, so I can't just download them from the Gigabyte site). Debian/Sarge otoh automagically detects all my hardware (including an obscure TV card) and sets it all up for me with no fuss,...
That's because Windows XP is essentially a 4 year old distro, while Debian/Sarge is current, and hence includes support for recent hardware. A non-slipstreamed Windows XP install (ie. without SP2) can't support hardware that wasn't on the market when it was released. The same is true for a 4 year old OSS distro (without updated installer). That's why you can't really make this comparison.
The point is I strongly believe it's wrong for a Linux distro to have so much (if any!) bundled applications.
That, of course, doesn't mean you are right, and your arguments don't stand up to closer scrutiny.
1) Adobe will have much less chance of making money on the Linux market, because the Gimp is preinstalled on so many machines.
Assuming that The Gimp is on par with Photoshop, which, if you ask a serious graphics manipulation expert, is not (yet) true. One could in fact argue that both applications are currently targeting two different market segments: professional and printing (Photoshop) and OSS enthusiast/web graphics (The Gimp).
This breaks the 3rd party market on Linux machines.
How so? If a proprietary application (what you call 3rd party) had the exact same value proposition as an OSS tool than yes, it would break it. But what's your point? This is true in every market. If you can't compete, get out.
Having said that, there still seems to be a market for 3rd party (ie. non-OSS) software if you consider enterprise level applications like DB2, Oracle, SAP and the like. They are doing just fine although distros come with competing OSS applications like PostgreSQL and MySQL for example. Albeit, these OSS applications don't offer the same value to many enterprises, hence the market still exists.
This also has the implication that 3rd party developers (e.g. Adobe/MacroMedia, discreet, etc) have less reasons to support free OSs and more and more reasons to support MS only and eventually Apple.
That is at the 3rd party developers' discretion. As long as they don't perceive the OSS distros as a viable market for their applications they won't develop them to run in these environments. It can be argued that this has more to do with historical developments rather than what kind of software is bundled with the distros. Graphic artists and designers historically have a tendency towards Apple and are reluctant to switch to OSS, hence Adobe/Macromedia apps are primarily targeted at that platform. If OSS distros and bundled apps were to pose a threat to this market, we would see this (inaptly named) 3rd party software for Linux.
2) MS will never be able to compete with that just because (rightly) it cannot bundle applications in the OS.
Wrong. Microsoft could bundle the same abundance of OSS applications with their distros. The lock-in argument wouldn't count as these are not Microsoft products and leave the customer with choice. That's not necessarily in Microsoft's interest. They do want to create lock-in, which is why they are not allowed to bundle only their products.
Your third point is completely useless so we can ignore it.
If you doubt bundling is a problem, answer this question..
How many people buy Opera on Linux when they have Firefox, Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and another 5 o 6 browsers all preinstalled ?
At least, on Windows, IE is so fu**ed up that someone will buy it anyway..
Bundling is not the problem. Nothing whatsoever prevents any distro user (whether it's OSS or Windows doesn't really matter) from buying and installing Opera on any distro. The reason why so few in fact do it, is because Opera's value propositions (and business model) sucks. The bundled applications allow you to do essentially the same as Opera. Why pay for something that you can have for free? And, just because IE on Windows is so fucked up, doesn't mean that a Windows user will prefer Opera over Firefox. Both are a download away.
So, bundling is only a problem in case you are left without a choice, which is not the case with OSS distros, but is a problem for Microsoft as long as they only bundle their applications with their distro, especially when making it difficult to unbundle it (ie. IE).
For regular Debian stable users, this doesn't mean too much: a simple apt-get upgrade is all it will take to 'upgrade' to Sarge.
Not quite. The very first thing you want to do is 'apt-get install apt' because you may experience difficulties without Sarge's apt version, you also want to install the discover packages before you go and reboot a newly upgraded distro remotely, because you may find yourself without a network as happened to me when I tested this. In addition 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or 'aptitude dist-upgrade' (as suggested in another post) is the way to go. Check the manpage for further info.
...which you'd think would mean pretty much all the features were in place right now, but kind of buggy.
You are describing the condition at the point of release. Currently they still have to rip out a couple of new features, which are still in a "crashesthebloodymachineallthetime" state. Of course they still talk about these features since other OSs already have them or have had them for ages.
BTW, don't you just love the headings for detailed view while you have chosen icon view as shown in this screenshot.
With new distros like Centos 4 (free RHEL 4 clone), Debian is getting less attractive as the server of choice. And this is someone who hated RHEL 3.
I made the mistake of installing Sarge thinking that it was only a couple months away from release--that was last year...and I have to pin Testing with Unstable branch just to get all the security updates in a timely fashion--it defeats the purpose using Debian as a server...
Man, what's your problem? You are preferring over unsupported distro of another. Debian Sarge is reliable and secure for most purposes and has been for a while. I have not seen a show stopping bug in ages. It has been (almost I have to admit) feature frozen for quite some time now and everything that's coming in are either security or bug fixes. Compare that to Centos (or Whitebox or Tao or whatever the RHEL clone of the day is), which is basically a rebuild of RHEL sources. Fixes are lagging behind the official distro.
Pinning Sarge and Unstable on a server to get security updates, now where did you get this idea from?
Besides, you might be interested in comparing this with this.
...my shop recently switched back to Windows from Linux desktops (about 40 people), why? Because the new CEO (and me too), were sick and tired of people trying to get things to work together properly.
Obviously, something is seriously wrong at your company if the CEO is "trying to get things to work together properly" on your IT systems. And you are probably not the admin, or at least not a good one.
Excellent, finally there is binary versioning. That's what they should use for the kernel, it would make Usenet discussions with newbies far more interesting.
It's not logging in that he is concerned about, it's click N run. Apt won't install under non root user.
I would think that it would take some serious hacking to allow apt to install software into your own home directory but it would probably be a worthwhile effort.
Fercryinoutloud, why? On a single user desktop machine this doesn't make any sense whatsoever, it would just break compatibility with other distros (ie. Debian) and LSB. On a multi-user machine it would become an instant maintenance and, quite possibly, security nightmare.
Click'n'run installation is about the most idiotic thing ever devised for IT systems. As a system's administrator, you don't need this at all. Modern distros give you a centralised point of software installation (eg. YaST, yum or apt and various frontends). These systems will check for package integrity and authenticity and will keep track of dependencies and your system in a healthy state. Click'n'run installation can't do that for you (yet). Of course you can break these mechanisms in Debian, RedHat and SuSE by installing arbitrary software off the net, but it's not exactly encouraged.
Active-X is quite an important standard - it's the way most users expect things to work.
I see your point, but what good is this standard in particular, if every IT news outlet recommends turning it off for security reasons and the technology's provider (MS) turns it off in their browser to get somewhat secure defaults?
As with regard to users expecting things to work the ActiveX way: How many users actually know that they are running ActiveX? Exactly. They only care about a technology when it's either not working or doing something that it shouldn't. And then they only want to know how to disable or get rid of it entirely.
Clearly, some people value Geek cred over broader adoptability, which is a shame.
And no, it's not about geek cred, but rather marketing. Many flaws in IE are ActiveX related, which is why it gets bad press and furthermore it's why people migrate towards Firefox. If developers were to implement this technology into Firefox, the browser would be associated with the bad press ActiveX is getting.
If RMS had his way, software would be open (good), free (good), and nobody would be able to make a living writing software (bad).
*Sigh* After almost two decades of Free (OS) Software, you still don't get it. Even considering the fact that most FOSS programmers (who are writing software after all) are still around and so far haven't starved to death, you, amongst so many others, still believe that it's impossible to make a living out of it.
Who do you think is most qualified to deliver (meaningful) support, fixes and enhancements to any kind of software? Right, the original developers. While everybody may look at the (open) source code, the original developers are most qualified to do anything with it in a timely fashion. This one alone opens up possibilities for revenue creation.
What about hardware drivers? IBM does pay their developers to work on (GPL'd) Linux drivers so that that it can sell it to their customers, no? Or do you really think that Big Blue tells its software engineers that they will have to work for free while hacking FOSS drivers?
Just because you are too daft to figure out a viable business model doesn't mean it can't be done.
Sorry if this sounds too harsh for you, but you made a fine example of not getting IT.
I completely agree with you that you want to run something like Whitebox or CentOS if one of your apps needs a RH variant to run at all. But the cost argument you are making is flawed and unfortunately all too common:
$20,000 over a five year period != $20,000 now
When appraising investment alternatives you _must_ discount future cash flow, otherwise you are making wrong decisions. So, the (discounted) present value of $20,000 over a five year period is in fact much less than $20,000.
Having said that, if there is no need for RH support, the cost argument becomes irrelevant, since there is no need for the investment after all (assuming that admin cost for RH and Whitebox or CentOS are equal, which is fair IMHO).
You can't really demonstrate a technique without showing that it's potentially useful.
Why not? I can come up with some technology that I think is cool but has no obvious (to me) usabilty. Then you come along with an idea to use it. It's not like every inventor also figures out the inventions final use.
Well, I run an Athlon64 3200+ with accelerated NVidia drivers but I can't drag or resize an opaque window smoothly. I can't do it under WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME or even E17, and the problems are in the X Server
I have the same hardware and experience no sluggishness whatsoever. Maybe you should to add this
Slashdot Mirror
It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye.
For our suboptimally educated friends: It is not illegal to talk about Nazis in either France or Germany. It is illegal to promote Nazi ideas and distribute propaganda (public display of Nazi insignia like the Swastika and SS- or Sig runes falls under this category as well).
The real question is, why does a user have to do this? It's pointless and a waste of time, since the software supplier should have already done that for you. The same goes for updates. Tracking security updates from 30 different vendors is idiotic, it should a one command/click thing, very much like apt-get or yum.
You posting this statement here says something about you as well, doesn't it?
I use XP at work, my box is up for about 20 days now, I even installed MSDE (the lite version of SQL Server) withouth having to reboot.
Wow, impressive, a desktop box running without a reboot for 20 days and you didn't even have to reboot it to install some "lite" database system.
A couple of pointers:
1. Real Men don't brag about uptime until it can be measured in years.
2. A Real System is never rebooted.
Viruses or spyware? Never had any, but I know when to delete that "cute screensaver", instead of cliking thorough.
What are viruses and spyware, and what is this screensaver stuff anyway? BTW, the fact that you have to worry about stuff like "cute screensaver" tells a lot about MS's security approach, don't you think?
People bash MS a bit too much around here, IMHO.
Actually MS is not bashed enough for the amount of crap they produce and the headaches they induce, IMHO.
Joerg Schilling, is that you?
Since when is Russia becoming a functioning democracy? I guess it all depends on your definition of democracy, after all East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, and hence a democracy (they had elections). But, what is generally referred to as democracy in western industrialised countries is called liberal democracy, and it is sad to say, Russia is nowhere near it.
You can find more about it, on Wikipedia's page on democracy.
Judged by these standards, it is frightening to observe (since it is the largest economic and military power), that the US is moving away from liberal democracy.
Here you can find a summary of the mplayer-debian status.
Another reason is the difficulty of remote support for GUI environments. It is far easier to just post a configuration file than explaining the clickety steps in a GUI.
I nevertheless agree with you on the quality of Mac support on the net, which may be explained by the sheer ignorance of the Unix environment displayed by many Mac users. Maybe it's that GUI culture thing, I don't know.
I stand corrected. I had similar problems, albeit with a non-slipstreamed copy, and was assuming that SP2 comes with driver support for almost everything to get it going in a way that it is usable. I feel your pain in this regard, especially when Windows leaves you without network capabilities. Burning a CD to just install such a basic feature is definitely a show stopper. BTW, I have only recently switched to Sarge and there is absolutely no looking back to Fedora and SuSE. Running apt natively (as opposed to apt4rpm) is so nice (and fast) and d-i is a tremendous improvement (I don't really need graphics during the install).
That's because Windows XP is essentially a 4 year old distro, while Debian/Sarge is current, and hence includes support for recent hardware. A non-slipstreamed Windows XP install (ie. without SP2) can't support hardware that wasn't on the market when it was released. The same is true for a 4 year old OSS distro (without updated installer). That's why you can't really make this comparison.
That, of course, doesn't mean you are right, and your arguments don't stand up to closer scrutiny.
1) Adobe will have much less chance of making money on the Linux market, because the Gimp is preinstalled on so many machines.
Assuming that The Gimp is on par with Photoshop, which, if you ask a serious graphics manipulation expert, is not (yet) true. One could in fact argue that both applications are currently targeting two different market segments: professional and printing (Photoshop) and OSS enthusiast/web graphics (The Gimp).
This breaks the 3rd party market on Linux machines.
How so? If a proprietary application (what you call 3rd party) had the exact same value proposition as an OSS tool than yes, it would break it. But what's your point? This is true in every market. If you can't compete, get out.
Having said that, there still seems to be a market for 3rd party (ie. non-OSS) software if you consider enterprise level applications like DB2, Oracle, SAP and the like. They are doing just fine although distros come with competing OSS applications like PostgreSQL and MySQL for example. Albeit, these OSS applications don't offer the same value to many enterprises, hence the market still exists.
This also has the implication that 3rd party developers (e.g. Adobe/MacroMedia, discreet, etc) have less reasons to support free OSs and more and more reasons to support MS only and eventually Apple.
That is at the 3rd party developers' discretion. As long as they don't perceive the OSS distros as a viable market for their applications they won't develop them to run in these environments. It can be argued that this has more to do with historical developments rather than what kind of software is bundled with the distros. Graphic artists and designers historically have a tendency towards Apple and are reluctant to switch to OSS, hence Adobe/Macromedia apps are primarily targeted at that platform. If OSS distros and bundled apps were to pose a threat to this market, we would see this (inaptly named) 3rd party software for Linux.
2) MS will never be able to compete with that just because (rightly) it cannot bundle applications in the OS.
Wrong. Microsoft could bundle the same abundance of OSS applications with their distros. The lock-in argument wouldn't count as these are not Microsoft products and leave the customer with choice. That's not necessarily in Microsoft's interest. They do want to create lock-in, which is why they are not allowed to bundle only their products.
Your third point is completely useless so we can ignore it.
If you doubt bundling is a problem, answer this question..
How many people buy Opera on Linux when they have Firefox, Konqueror, Galeon, Mozilla and another 5 o 6 browsers all preinstalled ? At least, on Windows, IE is so fu**ed up that someone will buy it anyway..
Bundling is not the problem. Nothing whatsoever prevents any distro user (whether it's OSS or Windows doesn't really matter) from buying and installing Opera on any distro. The reason why so few in fact do it, is because Opera's value propositions (and business model) sucks. The bundled applications allow you to do essentially the same as Opera. Why pay for something that you can have for free? And, just because IE on Windows is so fucked up, doesn't mean that a Windows user will prefer Opera over Firefox. Both are a download away.
So, bundling is only a problem in case you are left without a choice, which is not the case with OSS distros, but is a problem for Microsoft as long as they only bundle their applications with their distro, especially when making it difficult to unbundle it (ie. IE).
Not quite. The very first thing you want to do is 'apt-get install apt' because you may experience difficulties without Sarge's apt version, you also want to install the discover packages before you go and reboot a newly upgraded distro remotely, because you may find yourself without a network as happened to me when I tested this. In addition 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or 'aptitude dist-upgrade' (as suggested in another post) is the way to go. Check the manpage for further info.
Cheers
You are describing the condition at the point of release. Currently they still have to rip out a couple of new features, which are still in a "crashesthebloodymachineallthetime" state. Of course they still talk about these features since other OSs already have them or have had them for ages.
BTW, don't you just love the headings for detailed view while you have chosen icon view as shown in this screenshot.
I made the mistake of installing Sarge thinking that it was only a couple months away from release--that was last year...and I have to pin Testing with Unstable branch just to get all the security updates in a timely fashion--it defeats the purpose using Debian as a server...
Man, what's your problem? You are preferring over unsupported distro of another. Debian Sarge is reliable and secure for most purposes and has been for a while. I have not seen a show stopping bug in ages. It has been (almost I have to admit) feature frozen for quite some time now and everything that's coming in are either security or bug fixes. Compare that to Centos (or Whitebox or Tao or whatever the RHEL clone of the day is), which is basically a rebuild of RHEL sources. Fixes are lagging behind the official distro.
Pinning Sarge and Unstable on a server to get security updates, now where did you get this idea from?
Besides, you might be interested in comparing this with this.
No wonder you are posting AC ;-)
Obviously, something is seriously wrong at your company if the CEO is "trying to get things to work together properly" on your IT systems. And you are probably not the admin, or at least not a good one.
No way, there is apt4exe now? Where can I get it?
Excellent, finally there is binary versioning. That's what they should use for the kernel, it would make Usenet discussions with newbies far more interesting.
What crap? And why would anyone want to remove network transparency?
I would think that it would take some serious hacking to allow apt to install software into your own home directory but it would probably be a worthwhile effort.
Fercryinoutloud, why? On a single user desktop machine this doesn't make any sense whatsoever, it would just break compatibility with other distros (ie. Debian) and LSB. On a multi-user machine it would become an instant maintenance and, quite possibly, security nightmare.
Click'n'run installation is about the most idiotic thing ever devised for IT systems. As a system's administrator, you don't need this at all. Modern distros give you a centralised point of software installation (eg. YaST, yum or apt and various frontends). These systems will check for package integrity and authenticity and will keep track of dependencies and your system in a healthy state. Click'n'run installation can't do that for you (yet). Of course you can break these mechanisms in Debian, RedHat and SuSE by installing arbitrary software off the net, but it's not exactly encouraged.
I see your point, but what good is this standard in particular, if every IT news outlet recommends turning it off for security reasons and the technology's provider (MS) turns it off in their browser to get somewhat secure defaults?
As with regard to users expecting things to work the ActiveX way: How many users actually know that they are running ActiveX? Exactly. They only care about a technology when it's either not working or doing something that it shouldn't. And then they only want to know how to disable or get rid of it entirely.
Clearly, some people value Geek cred over broader adoptability, which is a shame.
And no, it's not about geek cred, but rather marketing. Many flaws in IE are ActiveX related, which is why it gets bad press and furthermore it's why people migrate towards Firefox. If developers were to implement this technology into Firefox, the browser would be associated with the bad press ActiveX is getting.
*Sigh* After almost two decades of Free (OS) Software, you still don't get it. Even considering the fact that most FOSS programmers (who are writing software after all) are still around and so far haven't starved to death, you, amongst so many others, still believe that it's impossible to make a living out of it.
Who do you think is most qualified to deliver (meaningful) support, fixes and enhancements to any kind of software? Right, the original developers. While everybody may look at the (open) source code, the original developers are most qualified to do anything with it in a timely fashion. This one alone opens up possibilities for revenue creation.
What about hardware drivers? IBM does pay their developers to work on (GPL'd) Linux drivers so that that it can sell it to their customers, no? Or do you really think that Big Blue tells its software engineers that they will have to work for free while hacking FOSS drivers?
Just because you are too daft to figure out a viable business model doesn't mean it can't be done.
Sorry if this sounds too harsh for you, but you made a fine example of not getting IT.
$20,000 over a five year period != $20,000 now
When appraising investment alternatives you _must_ discount future cash flow, otherwise you are making wrong decisions. So, the (discounted) present value of $20,000 over a five year period is in fact much less than $20,000.
Having said that, if there is no need for RH support, the cost argument becomes irrelevant, since there is no need for the investment after all (assuming that admin cost for RH and Whitebox or CentOS are equal, which is fair IMHO).
Why not? I can come up with some technology that I think is cool but has no obvious (to me) usabilty. Then you come along with an idea to use it. It's not like every inventor also figures out the inventions final use.
I second that and add that it is also a lot faster than any rpm implementation I have seen so far.
I have the same hardware and experience no sluggishness whatsoever. Maybe you should to add this
to Section "Device" of your Xf86Config.
Cheers