This was exactly my suggestion, but a couple of others already seem to be suggesting it. Let's not mince words: "Knoppix Rocks!"
You get REAL desktop/user Linux, including StarOffice. On ThinkPad t20's and 600X's and recent Dell Inspirons I have had full video/audio support, and instant 802.11b with zero configuration effort!
USB drives work great for data, and are detected on boot. The Inspiron has FireWire and works too.
I have graduated to a slightly more complex setup - I use a 48MB PCMCIA "FlashDisk" to store rsa keys and persistant scripts. I can add my local user, and mount shares via AFS and ssh-tunnel after the desktop comes up - or not!
Here's a good question for Knoppix fans: Knoppix is obviously a great forensics and security tool, with all the bundled utilities and default ro mounting of all discovered local partitions. Net security is cool too. There is tcpdump, netcat, ethereal, iptraf, even nessus/nessusd! But why no snort!
It's not hard to build your own customized Knoppix (heck, it's Debian.) My next step is doing this, to ditch the scirpts on flash - move 'em into a local rc andinclude snort!
Everytime The Gimp gets mentioned on/. in the last 6 months or so, the threads get polluted with Photoshop Trolls/Zealots with multi-post missives about how Gimp is a toy, good only for SourceForge Logos, and how it is considered by them to be a UI trainwreck.
Well, next time, link 'em back to this posting.
There is a professional and sophisticated use for The Gimp as a high-end tool, which doesn't require proprietary colour-space models, or CYMK matching printed output.
I really don't think that translating platform-specific CR->LF chars in an ASCII formatted file is high-up as a "dangerous, unsupported hack" in the list of data integrity risks.:-)
fox news bland? are you kidding? it's the only cable news network that isn't completely dominated by left wing liberals.
You think other U.S. Media is dominated by Liberals? You live in a domestic bubble, where Clinton is considered "left." Try www.guardian.co.uk - Now look at the absurdity of your statement.
No, Fox is no different: More pseudo-expertise presenting asertion and opinion as commentary. More bias-minus-analysis. Just more fodder to sell product to those already in agreement. No attempt to advance the general level of awareness and discourse by and for an informed public. More "McThought."
Frankly, this "content" is bland McContent. You want the definition of "lowest common denominator" - look at TW or Fox. Where is real news and commentary? There is little to find in any mainstream U.S. outlet. The quality of "analysis" is largely mere opinion.
Stories unreported in the U.S., including about internal matters are better found from outlets in India, U.K., Germany and Israel.
I don't advocate being a "paper candidate", but a cert or two can establish your creds as a Net Admin, and will do NOTHING to hurt your general tech marketability.
Net+ is a lightweight course of study, and is reasonable to get quickly.
I would aim for Cisco CCNA. If you understand OSI and TCP/IP well enough to mentally calculate subnets, be able to describe how sequence numbers are synched, and know the mechanics of ARP and RIP... You are half-way to certification already. Now add Cisco-specific stuff. I would recommend the Sybex CCNA study guide. Simple, and complete. This will lend additional credibility to a resume re-write, where you put a network "spin" on all of your existing experience.
Next, you might look at Cisco's CCNP - the network planner cert. Depends on how much you get out of certification, and how it's valued by your employers.
Your management at work, if your company is not really dysfunctional, should be able to help. With a good manager at work, you should be able to outline your longterm career interests, and get some support and direction to make this kind of move. This is what weekly one-on-ones are for - supposing a good manager!
it is impossible for people to learn how to use open source if there is no standardized environment.
You speak a world of ignorance here.
If one, standard GUI were enough to propel an OS to desktop stardom, then OS/2, BeOS - and dare I say - Amiga, would all have run Winders off the map.
There is nothing more standard than the set of API's that comprise the 80% of the Free Software iceberg, all submerged beneath the desktop waterline.
POSIX, Berkeley Net 4.x, X11 and RFC after RFC - with a HIGH degree of compliance.
A little secret you can share with your friends: The future does not belong to general-purpose desktop computing. Small, purpose specific devices are smarter and better suited for the highly-connected future, and will be where most of the consumer and knowledge-worker action will migrate over the next ten years.
Technologists and content creators will rely on their workstations - but more people will be interfacing with general-purpose computers on the back-end. This is a space where almost any standards-based system has worlds of advantages over MS - and Free Software crushes price and performance.
This is India. I'd love to see the Windows Pocket Edition competitor to the Simputer... A machine who's guiding ethos in its design included altruism.
MS is really viable as a monopoly only in a world where the consumers can be convinced of the need for a PC or two on every desk, and in every home, and the PC golden age is waning. Edit home videos? If you have that kind of disposable income for such a marginally material life activity, you can buy a Mac - which becomes in effect, a purpose-specific device, with e-mail as a sidleline benefit.
What do you mean there is a need for Government funding of research?
Don't you know that there is no legitimate role for Government in the marketplace? Advances in Science and Technology come from the heroic vision of lone entrepreneurs, willing to risk all they have.
</sarcasm>
The market always provides the solutions to the problems that they persuade us we have.
Watch out. If ou continue to disseminate this kind of obvious, clear-thinking information, you find yourself held incommunicado as an enemy combattant - or become an ex-Marine General in the Millenium Cahallenge 2002!
This is obviously what Sun wants to do - with the Sun Ray series, and the new Desktop Linux package they are rolling out.
RedHat or SuSe could beat them at this - with a server-client pair that ships together for commodity hardware.
The client shold have a small kernel that runs a little, almost embedded system - with local device support. This should support the grsecurity patches, etc. The desktop environment can be loaded as a User Mode Linux machine which can be tailored to suit the class of user. A developer's desktop could have TWO UML machines - one a "free-for-all" box which is connected only to an isolated dev backend, the other a typical office "lockdown", for doing ordinary the business of e-mail, office documents, etc.
Bundle this with wizards for the LDAP and Kerb5 software, plus network security through K5 integration with IPSec AH something Win2K got right... They could make Terminal Services and Citrix Metaframe look like the high-price, feature-weak alternative.
Why is it everyone wants to replace Windows wth Linux as a Desktop OS?
I think Linux belongs on the desktop - done RIGHT! This means thin installations to support local peripheral access, and a remote set of standard filesystems and applications under central management.
Every moron shouting-down Linux TCO envisions Linux deployments forced to reproduce the design limitations of desktop Windows. Three good Unix admins could manage the application environment for a couple thousand end-users this way. And this is still cheaper than any Win2K terminal services setup - Software AND personnel costs.
You centralize configuration management, security administration and log/audit, malware control, etc. Monolithic installs are for your laptop users.
Perhaps a good starting place would be the chapter on X in the Unix-Haters Handbook. That's been around for some time; is there a definitive discussion/refutation of it somewhere?
See my earlier posting, where I refer to JZW's scathing criticism... It refers mostwise to Xlib, and the quality of the toolkits which referenced it.
the bulk of Unix-Hater's Handbook dates to the mid 80's to early 90's, and is culled from the relevant USENET groups of the time. Most of this is a time-capsule that relates to Unix implementations of that vintage, and were produced by staunch MULTICS adherents and by DEC-heads, who didn't "get" Unix, any more than Berkeley folk didn't "get" VMS.
I feel one major pitfall of X is the inability to change the resolution of the X-Server without shutting it down.
CTL-ALT-+
That said, this is an implementation specific limitation, not an intrinsic barrier established by X11. In fact, X11's high degree of display-device independance ensures rendering on-the-fly at all kinds of resolutions.
I can access my 1600-1280 capable SGI Octane from a crappy, 1024-768 laptop with Exceed on Winders, and the Desktop is sized for the target display, without alteration of the layout. DPS is necessary for the IndigoMagic features, but Exceed does this, too.
Switch Windows resolution to 640x480, then back to 1280x1024. What happened to your icon placement, window sizes, etc? I leave it to you to perform the comparitive exercise.
I wish to god that people who so easily denegrate X would take the time to learn what it is and is not.
PicoGui is really cool - and designed for a good niche - not a genreal purpose windowing system. Good features from Pico, which can be implemented on XFree, will certainly find their way into XFree. The reverse has certainly happened. Viva la Source Libre!
They've been at it for almost 20 years... 20 more years and it will be acceptably small and fast..
"They?"
You got complaints with XFree development, then "throw your stone into the soup," with your own ineffable coding skills -- or hold your criticism. To work a weary truism, you look a gift horse in the mouth!
The XFree86 effort is about 10 years old. Twenty years ago (I was there) we had dedicated, proprietary VECTOR graphics terminals, one per PDP-11, please! Raster graphics were a dream, waiting for advances in (gasp!) bubble-memory... Never happened that way.
The XFree VOLUNTEERS took the X11r5-6 standard and reproduced it for free commodity systems. In six or seven years, they equaled proprietary vendor efforts, without the benefit of proprietary access to hardware! In the past three years, these developers have been working to advance X11 beyond any earlier realization.
X is a good design, and extensible enough to be with us still today. Sure, I would have been ecstatic if NeWS had prevailed politically in the 80's Unix wars, or that NeXT's DP had grown up - but the DEC committee won out for openness, and number of players invited to the table. The downside of comittee design: Xlib sucked, and every toolkit ontop of Xlib perprtrated the crimes. It's still just a library - better ones are here and arriving - if nonstandard. Even JZW's famous excoriation of X11 is based on Xlib and Motif toolkits, not X11 architecture or design features. These are not dismissable any easier than is Unix.
Paraphrasing the truism, I would advance that "Those ignorant of X11 are doomed to re-invent it -- badly."
Slashdot Mirror
It may be another SlashBot typo, but I LOVE it!
I'm UNSTATISFIED!
This was exactly my suggestion, but a couple of others already seem to be suggesting it. Let's not mince words: "Knoppix Rocks!"
You get REAL desktop/user Linux, including StarOffice. On ThinkPad t20's and 600X's and recent Dell Inspirons I have had full video/audio support, and instant 802.11b with zero configuration effort!
USB drives work great for data, and are detected on boot. The Inspiron has FireWire and works too.
I have graduated to a slightly more complex setup - I use a 48MB PCMCIA "FlashDisk" to store rsa keys and persistant scripts. I can add my local user, and mount shares via AFS and ssh-tunnel after the desktop comes up - or not!
Here's a good question for Knoppix fans: Knoppix is obviously a great forensics and security tool, with all the bundled utilities and default ro mounting of all discovered local partitions. Net security is cool too. There is tcpdump, netcat, ethereal, iptraf, even nessus/nessusd! But why no snort!
It's not hard to build your own customized Knoppix (heck, it's Debian.) My next step is doing this, to ditch the scirpts on flash - move 'em into a local rc and include snort!
Well, next time, link 'em back to this posting.
There is a professional and sophisticated use for The Gimp as a high-end tool, which doesn't require proprietary colour-space models, or CYMK matching printed output.
Let's try the experiment, people. Worth a look, no matter what your predjudice on the issue.
I really don't think that translating platform-specific CR->LF chars in an ASCII formatted file is high-up as a "dangerous, unsupported hack" in the list of data integrity risks. :-)
"Just show up, to be the first on our list!
Let's call it Galeon!
No, Fox is no different: More pseudo-expertise presenting asertion and opinion as commentary. More bias-minus-analysis. Just more fodder to sell product to those already in agreement. No attempt to advance the general level of awareness and discourse by and for an informed public. More "McThought."
Stories unreported in the U.S., including about internal matters are better found from outlets in India, U.K., Germany and Israel.
You know, people who can find Iraq on a map! ;-)
Net+ is a lightweight course of study, and is reasonable to get quickly.
I would aim for Cisco CCNA. If you understand OSI and TCP/IP well enough to mentally calculate subnets, be able to describe how sequence numbers are synched, and know the mechanics of ARP and RIP... You are half-way to certification already. Now add Cisco-specific stuff. I would recommend the Sybex CCNA study guide. Simple, and complete. This will lend additional credibility to a resume re-write, where you put a network "spin" on all of your existing experience.
Next, you might look at Cisco's CCNP - the network planner cert. Depends on how much you get out of certification, and how it's valued by your employers.
Your management at work, if your company is not really dysfunctional, should be able to help. With a good manager at work, you should be able to outline your longterm career interests, and get some support and direction to make this kind of move. This is what weekly one-on-ones are for - supposing a good manager!
If one, standard GUI were enough to propel an OS to desktop stardom, then OS/2, BeOS - and dare I say - Amiga, would all have run Winders off the map.
There is nothing more standard than the set of API's that comprise the 80% of the Free Software iceberg, all submerged beneath the desktop waterline.
POSIX, Berkeley Net 4.x, X11 and RFC after RFC - with a HIGH degree of compliance.
A little secret you can share with your friends: The future does not belong to general-purpose desktop computing. Small, purpose specific devices are smarter and better suited for the highly-connected future, and will be where most of the consumer and knowledge-worker action will migrate over the next ten years.
Technologists and content creators will rely on their workstations - but more people will be interfacing with general-purpose computers on the back-end. This is a space where almost any standards-based system has worlds of advantages over MS - and Free Software crushes price and performance.
This is India. I'd love to see the Windows Pocket Edition competitor to the Simputer... A machine who's guiding ethos in its design included altruism.
MS is really viable as a monopoly only in a world where the consumers can be convinced of the need for a PC or two on every desk, and in every home, and the PC golden age is waning. Edit home videos? If you have that kind of disposable income for such a marginally material life activity, you can buy a Mac - which becomes in effect, a purpose-specific device, with e-mail as a sidleline benefit.
TinTin will be like Indiana Jones, only with the Nazi-collaborrators as the heroes!
Where?
Don't you know that there is no legitimate role for Government in the marketplace? Advances in Science and Technology come from the heroic vision of lone entrepreneurs, willing to risk all they have.
The market always provides the solutions to the problems that they persuade us we have.
Watch out. If ou continue to disseminate this kind of obvious, clear-thinking information, you find yourself held incommunicado as an enemy combattant - or become an ex-Marine General in the Millenium Cahallenge 2002!
This is obviously what Sun wants to do - with the Sun Ray series, and the new Desktop Linux package they are rolling out.
RedHat or SuSe could beat them at this - with a server-client pair that ships together for commodity hardware.
The client shold have a small kernel that runs a little, almost embedded system - with local device support. This should support the grsecurity patches, etc. The desktop environment can be loaded as a User Mode Linux machine which can be tailored to suit the class of user. A developer's desktop could have TWO UML machines - one a "free-for-all" box which is connected only to an isolated dev backend, the other a typical office "lockdown", for doing ordinary the business of e-mail, office documents, etc.
Bundle this with wizards for the LDAP and Kerb5 software, plus network security through K5 integration with IPSec AH something Win2K got right... They could make Terminal Services and Citrix Metaframe look like the high-price, feature-weak alternative.
This is a hollow effort. They will just imprison you - for not surrendering your keys, like in the U.K.
"May I see your travel documents?"
I think Linux belongs on the desktop - done RIGHT! This means thin installations to support local peripheral access, and a remote set of standard filesystems and applications under central management.
Every moron shouting-down Linux TCO envisions Linux deployments forced to reproduce the design limitations of desktop Windows. Three good Unix admins could manage the application environment for a couple thousand end-users this way. And this is still cheaper than any Win2K terminal services setup - Software AND personnel costs.
You centralize configuration management, security administration and log/audit, malware control, etc. Monolithic installs are for your laptop users.
Silicon or not, How does this work into the act without having Teller say something?
You are spoiled. If you cultivate a reputation for ungraciousness, do not expect many good gifts to come yur way - software or otherwise.
the bulk of Unix-Hater's Handbook dates to the mid 80's to early 90's, and is culled from the relevant USENET groups of the time. Most of this is a time-capsule that relates to Unix implementations of that vintage, and were produced by staunch MULTICS adherents and by DEC-heads, who didn't "get" Unix, any more than Berkeley folk didn't "get" VMS.
That said, this is an implementation specific limitation, not an intrinsic barrier established by X11. In fact, X11's high degree of display-device independance ensures rendering on-the-fly at all kinds of resolutions.
I can access my 1600-1280 capable SGI Octane from a crappy, 1024-768 laptop with Exceed on Winders, and the Desktop is sized for the target display, without alteration of the layout. DPS is necessary for the IndigoMagic features, but Exceed does this, too.
Switch Windows resolution to 640x480, then back to 1280x1024. What happened to your icon placement, window sizes, etc? I leave it to you to perform the comparitive exercise.
I wish to god that people who so easily denegrate X would take the time to learn what it is and is not.
PicoGui is really cool - and designed for a good niche - not a genreal purpose windowing system. Good features from Pico, which can be implemented on XFree, will certainly find their way into XFree. The reverse has certainly happened. Viva la Source Libre!
You got complaints with XFree development, then "throw your stone into the soup," with your own ineffable coding skills -- or hold your criticism. To work a weary truism, you look a gift horse in the mouth!
The XFree86 effort is about 10 years old. Twenty years ago (I was there) we had dedicated, proprietary VECTOR graphics terminals, one per PDP-11, please! Raster graphics were a dream, waiting for advances in (gasp!) bubble-memory... Never happened that way.
The XFree VOLUNTEERS took the X11r5-6 standard and reproduced it for free commodity systems. In six or seven years, they equaled proprietary vendor efforts, without the benefit of proprietary access to hardware! In the past three years, these developers have been working to advance X11 beyond any earlier realization.
X is a good design, and extensible enough to be with us still today. Sure, I would have been ecstatic if NeWS had prevailed politically in the 80's Unix wars, or that NeXT's DP had grown up - but the DEC committee won out for openness, and number of players invited to the table. The downside of comittee design: Xlib sucked, and every toolkit ontop of Xlib perprtrated the crimes. It's still just a library - better ones are here and arriving - if nonstandard. Even JZW's famous excoriation of X11 is based on Xlib and Motif toolkits, not X11 architecture or design features. These are not dismissable any easier than is Unix.
Paraphrasing the truism, I would advance that "Those ignorant of X11 are doomed to re-invent it -- badly."
With Volume Management, you can build a RAID-4 volume, with the parity "disk" on a Raid-0+1. Best of many worlds - very EMC2 SAN-style.