I've got to agree, 10.4 is amazing. It's a really, really great Desktop Unix system.
That being said, I'm a SuSE fanboy. The latest SuSE revisions are very solid.
I used to be one of those people who would go Windows->Linux->Frustration->Back to Windows.
SuSE can stopped me at step 2. In *every* way, I find SuSE 9.3 superior to Windows. Mac OS X continues to beat it in many regards, but unlike yourself, I find myself desiring to play Windows games every now and then (World of Warcraft comes to mind), and Transgaming's Cedega is really fantastic.
I've also grown to like many of the newer KDE's features, and as SuSE is a KDE distro, the integration and presentation is very good.
I *love* being able to use the fish:// protocol. Nothing like it on OS X. I can fish:// to any system I know of running SSH and get a Konqueror Filebrowser window of my home directory.
That is *super* cool. KDE is also much more network capable. I can use ftp in my save/load dialogues. Heck, I can even use fish in my save/load dialogues. The problem is you have to continuously muck around with underlying settings; KDE is beautiful on top of all that garbage.
SuSE fixes the garbage.
Not to mention that my SuSE systems are a far better value proposition performance/dollar than Apple systems.
I've got 2 sets of systems. My Apple systems, and my Linux boxes. I've got a Mac mini and my Powerbook, both of which I use primarily for Adobe Creative Suite (lots of illustrator work). I've got my AMD64 desktop, which is a real beast (and cheaper than my 12" powerbook:( ), and can handle the latest and greatest Windows games under Cedega. I've also setup several of Browsing/Email/Light work desktops for my office. (Much cheaper than Mac Minis.)
All I'm saying is, if you've got a system thats got hardware supported by SuSE, give 9.3 a try. It's really come a long way since the old days, and somehow managed to surpass all the elegant distributions like Debian.
Flash just works out-of-box. Java just works out-of-box. Heck, Beagle does Spotlight-like searches out-of-box.
Hehe. I hate to be a fanboi, but I think the printer situation has improved markedly lately.
At least with my trusted SuSE, things seem to work very nicely.
All HPs are supported out-of-box.
All-in-ones with scanners *included*. I've had great experiences with my new, cheapo Samsung color laser (don't remember the model number, but they only sell one), as well as with my Brother MFC-8500 (all-in-one laser fax). Both have Linux drivers avaliable on their website, and although the drivers have a ugly Tk interface, they work quite nicely and show up automagically in CUPS. SuSE is setup so that all your Cups printers show up correctly in the gnome printing utility, Kprinter, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (now version 2.0 in SuSE 9.3). Plus, you can always point any program that uses lpr -> kprinter, and everything works swimmingly.
This is a markedtly improved situations from even last year. Given that you find a vendor that supports Linux (not hard, I believe everyone but Lexmark does (Brother, HP, Samsung, Epson, Canon), its just as easy to get your printer running as it is in Windows.
The place where Linux *really* shines vis-a-vis Windows is Printing over the network. At work, we've got a couple linux desktops, a linux laptop, and two mac minis. All of them automatically discover all the printers on the network.
*SWEET*. No more \\\ Select Printer driver in Windows.
Everything popups up automatically. I take my Powerbook home, and it finds my home printers, and removes the work printers from the list. It is *super-duper* slick.
I have to admit, though, that the CUPS printer interface (the web one) is a bit clunky. The SuSE yast interface, although not quite as pretty as the Windows XP interface (there are fewer icons in the dialogues) is much more functional, and doesn't ever 'stall' while searching for something, such as the way XP Builds driver indexes, or Browses the network, or this, that, and/or the other.
I really, sincerely, believe that SuSE has gotten Linux for the Desktop/Laptop correct, as long as you tier 1 linux hardware (vendor support AND distro support).
I used to be one of those people that would try Linux, and then go back to windows for real work, because I couldn't get 2 sounds to play at the same time, or no matter how much I messed with my printer settings something just wasn't right. No longer; my linux setup is much slicker and easy to work with than Windows ever was, and comes very, very close to OS X.
The 3 SuSE printing caveats (The first two are security compromises).
1. CUPS admin password for using the web interface over the network is *not* your root password. You've got to set it with lppadmin -g sys -a root. It popups a big message saying this at the end of your install, but its easy to just keep clicking next while your doing the install. This is what you need to do to be able to remotely administer your printers. 2. SuSE is setup that by default the only system with access permissions to your printer queues is 127.0.0.1. In YaST2, under printer setup, you have to click permissions, and under the topic "/ (root)", Add either your network (192.168.0.255), or your interface (eth0). I believe you can also add all (255.255.255.255). This is clearly outlined in the administration guide that comes with the box setup. Under network printing. Once you do this, all Linux systems and all Mac OS X systems on your network will autodiscover your printers. 3. It's a German product, so the default page size for each new printer queue is A4, not Letter. This means that your printouts will not be centered correctly on the page unless you fix this. The correct way to fix this is in YaST2, under printer settings. When you are setting up a new queue, go to Default Queues Settings; Page Size. Select Letter (or whatever you want Legal, etc. ..).
These 3 caveats I find to be more than acceptable.
Oh, and if you are trying to print from a Windows machine on your Linux box,
AFAIK, HP sells laptops under which Linux is fully fuctional.
My Dell Inspiron 8200 uses an Nvidia card, and has automagic software audio mixing under SuSE 9.3.
The miniPci card that is avaliable through dell is either a prism2 (802.11b), or acx110 (802.11g).
I've heard that the new dell 9700's (and XPS) have similar configuration. SuSE is also known for particularly good ACPI support. So yes, this is an option for laptops. Just pick the right laptop. Either one that the manufacturer certifies as linux compatible, or one that has just the right hardware.
The newest Mandrake, SuSE, and Fedora Core 4 all have dmix setup automagically for soundcards that do not support hardware mixing.
Soundcards that do support hardware mixing will play multiple sounds already.
What's next on the list, chief?:)
I think you'll find that most of the 'problems' that exist on desktop linux already have solutions out there, but it takes time for distro makers to take a proper solution (like, say, dmix for alsa) and implement it in a working fashion. It is absolutely not the job of the alsa project to make using dmix easy; that's the realm of distro managers. Thankfully, they've gone and made it standard now.
OS X works well on a tightly controlled set of hardware.
Linux is broken when I try to install it on my toaster after I shoved this soundcard I found in the bargain bin inside.
If you tightly control the hardware you install Linux on, and pick a *good* distribution (read SuSE 9.3), your Linux experience is quite similar to your OS X experience. I.e. you install, everything is autodetected during install, and then your ready to go.
OS X 10.0, in my mind, wasn't very nice at all. I didn't like it anyways.
Sorry, Linux/BSD/Open Source guys - someone built a better mousetrap, one good enough that I wanted to pay several thousands of dollars to get it. "Selling out" on the freedom is balanced by not wasting my fucking time messing around inside the fucking hardware or the fucking configuration. I'm all grown up now, and while I know how to fix stuff, I don't get off doing it all the fucking time to save a few bucks or to show off my 133t skilllzzz anymore.
While I do like Tiger 10.4, might I suggest that you just tried really crappy linux distributions? You're not the first IT expert I've suggested this to. Most people are quite impressed when I show them a newer SuSE.
As long as you've got appropriate hardware, 9.3 is easy to install, easy to use, and easy to configure. Most of it will work correctly out of box.
If Apple had to deal with the same variety of hardware as Linux did, you'd have the same problems. Rather, if you limit the hardware that you'll run Linux on to a small subset of well-supported stuff, everything will work nicely and out of box.
1. I was wrong. Newest SuSE, Mandrake, and Fedora now include software mixing out of box.
2. On Linux, the Nvidia hardware is siginifcantly faster than equivalent ATI lines.
3. I'm a Mac OS X fan, but it is significantly cheaper to build a linux box with easy to setup hardware than it is to get a OS X box with equivalent hardware.
Plus, I'm not impressed with Mac performance in gaming. My fairly cheap AMD64 mid-range box smokes my Dual G5 2.5 with a geforce 6800Gt in World of Warcraft.
I'm running WoW on Cedega in Linux, versus a native binary for OS X.
Also, exactly how did I suggest you should downgrade your hardware? Except for the soundcard thing, which is actually a non-issue if your running a latest distro, Nvidia and TI produce top-notch hardware.
SuSE 9.3 is really nice. As in, really, really, really nice.
Everything is documented. Each package has its own documentation with the original package HOWTO, as well as a HOWTO modified by SuSE for the SuSE version.
I find that after I understand the changes SuSE made everything makes sense.
1. Out-of-the-box, more stuff works on SuSE than any other distribution, and random RPMs (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, you name it) actually tend to work! 2. If you like to tear apart the configuration files yourself, you can do that. Almost everything that is configured through a gui can be shut-off in/etc/sysconfig/, and then your own options can be added to/etc/.local 3. SuSE is very practical. When possible, there is as much unification as can be imagined. The gnome and the KDE desktop are the same, for one. Java is setup according to the jpackage rules. Configuration files are being changed from old-style pure SuSE stuff to match the original as much as possible. At the same time, enough compromises are made so that things tend to work out of box. Ndiswrapper is included. Nvidia drivers install themselves on the first update. 802.11 firmware for the various drivers out there (Atmel, ACX110, and some others) download on the first update. Things do *just work*. It's a much better experience than even the latest Ubuntu, or Fedora Core.
Apparently, both the newest Mandrake (Mandriva?), Fedora Core 4, and SuSE 9.3 feature dmix out of the box for soundcards that do not support hardware mixing.
So this is now a non-problem.
Survey says? Stop running Redhat 5. Old linux=PITA. Get a new user-friendly distro.
Oh, you don't want a dumbed-down OS? Than why are you switching to OS X?
Note: I have a powerbook G4, running Tiger, and two mac minis running Tiger. I also have several linux desktops and 2 linux servers. I've got plenty of experience with both platforms.
But SuSE is almost as easy as OS X, and I can run most of my Windows games on SuSE.
I've found that the ALSA dmix plugin works *extremely* well.
The only problem is that it's a total beast to setup, especially if you are used to point and click.
The only real setup instructions for dmix go something like this: "You setup dmix in your.alsarc. That's a config file. Here are some examples to get you started. None of these will work properly on your machine, so keep changing them to get it to work properly. Please try and be conversant with the alsa lingo so that you can figure out what to put where. Best of luck!"
That is *NOT* a help file. I'd write one, but I know very little about alsa, and I do not think I'd be able to write an approrpriate one. Really, distro makers need to come up with a script that writes an.alsarc with the appropriate plugin options setup already.
So I got an Audigy 2 Value, and haven't looked back.
Consquences of a China threatening to invade Taiwan?
The U.S. moves the seventh fleet towards Taiwan.
For those who don't know; The seventh fleet is the world's largest naval armada, and its currently stationed at a port in Japan.
I believe it constitutes *multiple* aircraft carrier battle groups, as includes nuclear armaments. That fleet alone would be enough to level most of Asia, let alone China.
China, although it may threaten, and although it has a nuclear arsenal, does *NOT* have the capability to invade Taiwan. China's *entire* navy consists of the following:
he acquisition of these technologies resulted in China's production of more advanced surface combatants during the past decade-- including a single 6,000-ton Luhai-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG), two Luhu-class DDGs (4,200 tons), and nine Jiangwei-class frigates (2,250 tons). These units are equipped with the HQ-7 or HQ-61 short-range air defense systems that likely will be replaced by a longer-range vertical-launch system within the next three to five years. These ships also have integrated tactical data systems, an improved antisubmarine warfare suite that includes embarked helicopters, and gas turbine propulsion.
Notwithstanding these improvements, the backbone of the PLA surface fleet remains its 16 aging Luda-class destroyers (3,250 tons) and 30 Jianghu-class frigates (1,425 tons) that are largely inadequate to meet the requirements of modern warfare. The planned acquisition of two 7,940-ton Russian-built Sovremenny-class DDGs in the 2000 to 2001 period will improve the PLAN's surface-combatant capabilities. These units are likely to be equipped with an advanced SAN-7 air-defense system, the KA-28 Helix Helicopter, and SSN-22 cruise-missile technology. The PLAN's HQ-61 and HQ-7 systems are based on the French Crotale land-based surface-to-air missile system, and they do not provide surface units with an effective area-defense capability. This deficiency makes PLAN surface units extremely vulnerable to air attack.
Furthermore, China's airfore consists of 20-30 year old Russia planes in various states of maintenance.
Taiwan's airforce consists of the latest and greatest American military hardware that their economy can purchase. Consider that Taiwan spends about 1/6 of the amount China spends on their military. This is to defend a small island, while the Chinese expenditure must go towards the entire nation.
As of right now, I would not be certain that China had naval superiority over Taiwan *alone*, ignoring that the U.S. navy makes both look incredibly puny. Considering the following facts: 1. No Naval superiority for China 2. Air superiority for Taiwan 3. Massive naval superiority of the U.S. 4. ~$120 billion in trade between TaiwanChina 5. Reluctance of China to employ nuclear weapons
I'd say its *extremely* unlikely that China will seriously consider invading Taiwan over the next 50 years. Saber rattle? Perhaps. Let loose the people's army? No way.
Mitch Stone is quite right to call the "opening" of the IBM PC architecture an urban myth. IBM clearly had no intention of doing so. IBM successfully used litigation techniques to shut down a number of early PC cloners.
However, it is Phoenix and Lloyd's of London, not Compaq, which deserves the credit for first making PC clones possible.
Prior to Phoenix, IBM threw the weight of their enormous legal muscle against anyone who cloned the BIOS in their PC. Phoenix did a clean room design. None of the programmers working on the Phoenix BIOS had ever seen the IBM PC BIOS. In fact, Phoenix went out of their way to hire programmers who had never even worked on the 8088/8086 processor chips used in early IBM PCs.
But that alone might not have sufficed. IBM could have tied them up in legal restraining orders, etc. and watched them go bankrupt while the case inched its way through the US court system.
The real genius, was the Phoenix had a huge legal insurance policy through Lloyd's of London. This gave Phoenix the ability to survive such an attack. As a result IBM didn't sue Phoenix and once the proverbial cat was out of the bag, they didn't sue most other BIOS clone produces unless they were outright copies.
Of course Gates and Microsoft were right there eager to sell DOS and Basic to any clone maker who had an interest.
There was a large company, with a powerful staff of lawyers, who tried very, very, hard to keep other companies from running PC OSs on clone systems.
That didn't work out very well for the large company (IBM), whom I believe is/was far more sophisticated/powerful in terms of its legal staff.
There is a difference this time, of course; Apple's EULA. My guess is, however, that there will be some way to challenge the 'Apple branded machine' requirement in court. If there wasn't, I suspect Apple would have sued the emulator designers by now (PowerPC (pearpc) and 68k (basilisk)).
Honestly, I believe this will happen: 1. Intel Macs will be cheap. Not Dell cheap, but maybe midrange HP cheap. 2. Apple will grab marketshare. 3. Apple will license Mac reference designs to other manufacturers, possibly with Microsoft's blessing. How? They'll buy a Microsoft license to something or other. 4. Once a sufficent marketshare is reached, Apple will sell un-tied versions of Mac OS. These will only be OEM, and will have to be supported by OEM PC manufactuers. Apple will only support the 'Apple' experience.
This is great news. Hopefully, the opensource community and Apple will be able to support and help each other.
In other news: Stop complaining about the Intel switch.
(By the way, I own 2 mac minis, a Dual G5, a powerbook, and have encouraged two other people at our company to switch to powerbooks).
PPC is dog slow! That's the *reality*. Pick any game supported on the Mac. Compare the speed of that game on the *top of the line* dual G5 with the *top of the line* nvidia 6800 ultra video card.
My mid-grade AMD64 system with a Geforce 5900FX beats the everloving crap out of it. There are certain tasks that the G5 is slightly faster. But there are many tasks for which it is a great deal slower. By switching to x86, Apple get a faster processor now (Intel), and maintains the option for a *very* easy switch to AMD, just incase that AMD because the 'processor manufacturer of the future'.
PPC->x86 will be somewhat difficult. Intel -> AMD would be cake.
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said. That's from news.com.com
$1 says someone will get OS X running on generic hardware. And then each update will break it. And it'll go back and forth for a long time.
Gotta get me one of the developer boxes, crack it open, play with it some.
Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X. That's why the 1.0 port took so long. I'm not talking about NeoOffice/J, by the way, I'm talking about the X11 port. That's why the Mac X11 OO.org port alpha is 6 months overdue *so far*.While running under X11 is less than ideal, it'll still work nicely.
NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.
I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.
Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.
Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.
Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.
Keep in mind. Mac OS X is a unix OS, with lots of unixy underpinnings.
You loose *some* compatability with existing Mac apps.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.
This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*. This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed. Vmware will run on a mac.
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
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I've got to agree, 10.4 is amazing. It's a really, really great Desktop Unix system.
:( ), and can handle the latest and greatest Windows games under Cedega. I've also setup several of Browsing/Email/Light work desktops for my office. (Much cheaper than Mac Minis.)
That being said, I'm a SuSE fanboy. The latest SuSE revisions are very solid.
I used to be one of those people who would go Windows->Linux->Frustration->Back to Windows.
SuSE can stopped me at step 2. In *every* way, I find SuSE 9.3 superior to Windows. Mac OS X continues to beat it in many regards, but unlike yourself, I find myself desiring to play Windows games every now and then (World of Warcraft comes to mind), and Transgaming's Cedega is really fantastic.
I've also grown to like many of the newer KDE's features, and as SuSE is a KDE distro, the integration and presentation is very good.
I *love* being able to use the fish:// protocol. Nothing like it on OS X. I can fish:// to any system I know of running SSH and get a Konqueror Filebrowser window of my home directory.
That is *super* cool. KDE is also much more network capable. I can use ftp in my save/load dialogues. Heck, I can even use fish in my save/load dialogues. The problem is you have to continuously muck around with underlying settings; KDE is beautiful on top of all that garbage.
SuSE fixes the garbage.
Not to mention that my SuSE systems are a far better value proposition performance/dollar than Apple systems.
I've got 2 sets of systems. My Apple systems, and my Linux boxes. I've got a Mac mini and my Powerbook, both of which I use primarily for Adobe Creative Suite (lots of illustrator work). I've got my AMD64 desktop, which is a real beast (and cheaper than my 12" powerbook
All I'm saying is, if you've got a system thats got hardware supported by SuSE, give 9.3 a try. It's really come a long way since the old days, and somehow managed to surpass all the elegant distributions like Debian.
Flash just works out-of-box. Java just works out-of-box. Heck, Beagle does Spotlight-like searches out-of-box.
Printing? Check. Ndiswrapper? Check. Nvidia closed source drivers? Check.
They've really put together a sound-product. I find it good-enough that I've bought the last three versions. (9.3, 9.2, 9.1).
Refuse to boot? That I've never seen.
Crash? On windows, yes. I've never seen an Emu10k card crash on Linux; the ALSA drivers are pretty frigging good.
Does the Turtle Beach Riviera support hardware mixing?
Doesn't matter anyways; the latest distros (SuSE 9.3, Fedora Core 4, latest Mandriva) all support software mixing out of box.
Hehe. I hate to be a fanboi, but I think the printer situation has improved markedly lately.
.).
At least with my trusted SuSE, things seem to work very nicely.
All HPs are supported out-of-box.
All-in-ones with scanners *included*.
I've had great experiences with my new, cheapo Samsung color laser (don't remember the model number, but they only sell one), as well as with my Brother MFC-8500 (all-in-one laser fax). Both have Linux drivers avaliable on their website, and although the drivers have a ugly Tk interface, they work quite nicely and show up automagically in CUPS. SuSE is setup so that all your Cups printers show up correctly in the gnome printing utility, Kprinter, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (now version 2.0 in SuSE 9.3). Plus, you can always point any program that uses lpr -> kprinter, and everything works swimmingly.
This is a markedtly improved situations from even last year. Given that you find a vendor that supports Linux (not hard, I believe everyone but Lexmark does (Brother, HP, Samsung, Epson, Canon), its just as easy to get your printer running as it is in Windows.
The place where Linux *really* shines vis-a-vis Windows is Printing over the network. At work, we've got a couple linux desktops, a linux laptop, and two mac minis. All of them automatically discover all the printers on the network.
*SWEET*. No more \\\ Select Printer driver in Windows.
Everything popups up automatically. I take my Powerbook home, and it finds my home printers, and removes the work printers from the list. It is *super-duper* slick.
I have to admit, though, that the CUPS printer interface (the web one) is a bit clunky. The SuSE yast interface, although not quite as pretty as the Windows XP interface (there are fewer icons in the dialogues) is much more functional, and doesn't ever 'stall' while searching for something, such as the way XP Builds driver indexes, or Browses the network, or this, that, and/or the other.
I really, sincerely, believe that SuSE has gotten Linux for the Desktop/Laptop correct, as long as you tier 1 linux hardware (vendor support AND distro support).
I used to be one of those people that would try Linux, and then go back to windows for real work, because I couldn't get 2 sounds to play at the same time, or no matter how much I messed with my printer settings something just wasn't right. No longer; my linux setup is much slicker and easy to work with than Windows ever was, and comes very, very close to OS X.
The 3 SuSE printing caveats (The first two are security compromises).
1. CUPS admin password for using the web interface over the network is *not* your root password. You've got to set it with lppadmin -g sys -a root. It popups a big message saying this at the end of your install, but its easy to just keep clicking next while your doing the install. This is what you need to do to be able to remotely administer your printers.
2. SuSE is setup that by default the only system with access permissions to your printer queues is 127.0.0.1. In YaST2, under printer setup, you have to click permissions, and under the topic "/ (root)", Add either your network (192.168.0.255), or your interface (eth0). I believe you can also add all (255.255.255.255). This is clearly outlined in the administration guide that comes with the box setup. Under network printing. Once you do this, all Linux systems and all Mac OS X systems on your network will autodiscover your printers.
3. It's a German product, so the default page size for each new printer queue is A4, not Letter. This means that your printouts will not be centered correctly on the page unless you fix this. The correct way to fix this is in YaST2, under printer settings. When you are setting up a new queue, go to Default Queues Settings; Page Size. Select Letter (or whatever you want Legal, etc. .
These 3 caveats I find to be more than acceptable.
Oh, and if you are trying to print from a Windows machine on your Linux box,
AFAIK, HP sells laptops under which Linux is fully fuctional.
My Dell Inspiron 8200 uses an Nvidia card, and has automagic software audio mixing under SuSE 9.3.
The miniPci card that is avaliable through dell is either a prism2 (802.11b), or acx110 (802.11g).
I've heard that the new dell 9700's (and XPS) have similar configuration. SuSE is also known for particularly good ACPI support. So yes, this is an option for laptops. Just pick the right laptop. Either one that the manufacturer certifies as linux compatible, or one that has just the right hardware.
Fixed.
:)
The newest Mandrake, SuSE, and Fedora Core 4 all have dmix setup automagically for soundcards that do not support hardware mixing.
Soundcards that do support hardware mixing will play multiple sounds already.
What's next on the list, chief?
I think you'll find that most of the 'problems' that exist on desktop linux already have solutions out there, but it takes time for distro makers to take a proper solution (like, say, dmix for alsa) and implement it in a working fashion. It is absolutely not the job of the alsa project to make using dmix easy; that's the realm of distro managers. Thankfully, they've gone and made it standard now.
Not a valid comparison.
OS X works well on a tightly controlled set of hardware.
Linux is broken when I try to install it on my toaster after I shoved this soundcard I found in the bargain bin inside.
If you tightly control the hardware you install Linux on, and pick a *good* distribution (read SuSE 9.3), your Linux experience is quite similar to your OS X experience. I.e. you install, everything is autodetected during install, and then your ready to go.
While I do like Tiger 10.4, might I suggest that you just tried really crappy linux distributions? You're not the first IT expert I've suggested this to. Most people are quite impressed when I show them a newer SuSE.
As long as you've got appropriate hardware, 9.3 is easy to install, easy to use, and easy to configure. Most of it will work correctly out of box.
If Apple had to deal with the same variety of hardware as Linux did, you'd have the same problems. Rather, if you limit the hardware that you'll run Linux on to a small subset of well-supported stuff, everything will work nicely and out of box.
1. I was wrong. Newest SuSE, Mandrake, and Fedora now include software mixing out of box.
2. On Linux, the Nvidia hardware is siginifcantly faster than equivalent ATI lines.
3. I'm a Mac OS X fan, but it is significantly cheaper to build a linux box with easy to setup hardware than it is to get a OS X box with equivalent hardware.
Plus, I'm not impressed with Mac performance in gaming. My fairly cheap AMD64 mid-range box smokes my Dual G5 2.5 with a geforce 6800Gt in World of Warcraft.
I'm running WoW on Cedega in Linux, versus a native binary for OS X.
Also, exactly how did I suggest you should downgrade your hardware? Except for the soundcard thing, which is actually a non-issue if your running a latest distro, Nvidia and TI produce top-notch hardware.
IMHO, we have this.
/etc/sysconfig/, and then your own options can be added to /etc/.local
SuSE 9.3 is really nice. As in, really, really, really nice.
Everything is documented. Each package has its own documentation with the original package HOWTO, as well as a HOWTO modified by SuSE for the SuSE version.
I find that after I understand the changes SuSE made everything makes sense.
1. Out-of-the-box, more stuff works on SuSE than any other distribution, and random RPMs (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, you name it) actually tend to work!
2. If you like to tear apart the configuration files yourself, you can do that. Almost everything that is configured through a gui can be shut-off in
3. SuSE is very practical. When possible, there is as much unification as can be imagined. The gnome and the KDE desktop are the same, for one. Java is setup according to the jpackage rules. Configuration files are being changed from old-style pure SuSE stuff to match the original as much as possible. At the same time, enough compromises are made so that things tend to work out of box. Ndiswrapper is included. Nvidia drivers install themselves on the first update. 802.11 firmware for the various drivers out there (Atmel, ACX110, and some others) download on the first update. Things do *just work*. It's a much better experience than even the latest Ubuntu, or Fedora Core.
I second this.
I was one of the dummies to purchase a S3 Savage 2000 based card.
"This thing is gonna *smoke* the geforce, as soon as they make a driver with T/L support. It's coming, Real Soon Now(TM)".
Then S3 realized that the T/L port of the core was actually *broken*.
Get an Nvidia graphics card, and make sure the rest of your hardware is out of the box supported by your distro of choice.
Than the install will be easier than Windows.
Apparently, both the newest Mandrake (Mandriva?), Fedora Core 4, and SuSE 9.3 feature dmix out of the box for soundcards that do not support hardware mixing.
So this is now a non-problem.
Survey says? Stop running Redhat 5. Old linux=PITA. Get a new user-friendly distro.
Oh, you don't want a dumbed-down OS? Than why are you switching to OS X?
Note: I have a powerbook G4, running Tiger, and two mac minis running Tiger. I also have several linux desktops and 2 linux servers. I've got plenty of experience with both platforms.
But SuSE is almost as easy as OS X, and I can run most of my Windows games on SuSE.
I've found that the ALSA dmix plugin works *extremely* well.
.alsarc. That's a config file. Here are some examples to get you started. None of these will work properly on your machine, so keep changing them to get it to work properly. Please try and be conversant with the alsa lingo so that you can figure out what to put where. Best of luck!"
.alsarc with the appropriate plugin options setup already.
The only problem is that it's a total beast to setup, especially if you are used to point and click.
The only real setup instructions for dmix go something like this:
"You setup dmix in your
That is *NOT* a help file. I'd write one, but I know very little about alsa, and I do not think I'd be able to write an approrpriate one. Really, distro makers need to come up with a script that writes an
So I got an Audigy 2 Value, and haven't looked back.
Get SuSE.
Get an SB Live! Value or an SB Audigy! Value.
Get an Nvidia Geforce(1/2/3/4) MX or not video card.
Use an ACX110/111 802.11g wireless card.
Done.
Hardware audio mixing, all the drivers will auto-install. An almost Mac OS X-like experience, and certainly much easier than Windows.
The U.S. moves the seventh fleet towards Taiwan.
For those who don't know; The seventh fleet is the world's largest naval armada, and its currently stationed at a port in Japan.
I believe it constitutes *multiple* aircraft carrier battle groups, as includes nuclear armaments. That fleet alone would be enough to level most of Asia, let alone China.
China, although it may threaten, and although it has a nuclear arsenal, does *NOT* have the capability to invade Taiwan. China's *entire* navy consists of the following:
http://www.navyleague.org/seapower/chinas_navy_to
Furthermore, China's airfore consists of 20-30 year old Russia planes in various states of maintenance.
Taiwan's airforce consists of the latest and greatest American military hardware that their economy can purchase. Consider that Taiwan spends about 1/6 of the amount China spends on their military. This is to defend a small island, while the Chinese expenditure must go towards the entire nation.
This is in addition to the U.S. unofficial military support.
List of Taiwanese naval ships: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/row/rocn/
As of right now, I would not be certain that China had naval superiority over Taiwan *alone*, ignoring that the U.S. navy makes both look incredibly puny. Considering the following facts:
1. No Naval superiority for China
2. Air superiority for Taiwan
3. Massive naval superiority of the U.S.
4. ~$120 billion in trade between TaiwanChina
5. Reluctance of China to employ nuclear weapons
I'd say its *extremely* unlikely that China will seriously consider invading Taiwan over the next 50 years. Saber rattle? Perhaps. Let loose the people's army? No way.
There was a large company, with a powerful staff of lawyers, who tried very, very, hard to keep other companies from running PC OSs on clone systems.
That didn't work out very well for the large company (IBM), whom I believe is/was far more sophisticated/powerful in terms of its legal staff.
There is a difference this time, of course; Apple's EULA. My guess is, however, that there will be some way to challenge the 'Apple branded machine' requirement in court. If there wasn't, I suspect Apple would have sued the emulator designers by now (PowerPC (pearpc) and 68k (basilisk)).
Honestly, I believe this will happen:
1. Intel Macs will be cheap. Not Dell cheap, but maybe midrange HP cheap.
2. Apple will grab marketshare.
3. Apple will license Mac reference designs to other manufacturers, possibly with Microsoft's blessing. How? They'll buy a Microsoft license to something or other.
4. Once a sufficent marketshare is reached, Apple will sell un-tied versions of Mac OS. These will only be OEM, and will have to be supported by OEM PC manufactuers. Apple will only support the 'Apple' experience.
Death to the Mac-Fanbois!
This is great news. Hopefully, the opensource community and Apple will be able to support and help each other.
In other news: Stop complaining about the Intel switch.
(By the way, I own 2 mac minis, a Dual G5, a powerbook, and have encouraged two other people at our company to switch to powerbooks).
PPC is dog slow! That's the *reality*. Pick any game supported on the Mac. Compare the speed of that game on the *top of the line* dual G5 with the *top of the line* nvidia 6800 ultra video card.
My mid-grade AMD64 system with a Geforce 5900FX beats the everloving crap out of it. There are certain tasks that the G5 is slightly faster. But there are many tasks for which it is a great deal slower. By switching to x86, Apple get a faster processor now (Intel), and maintains the option for a *very* easy switch to AMD, just incase that AMD because the 'processor manufacturer of the future'.
PPC->x86 will be somewhat difficult. Intel -> AMD would be cake.
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
That's from news.com.com
$1 says someone will get OS X running on generic hardware. And then each update will break it. And it'll go back and forth for a long time.
Gotta get me one of the developer boxes, crack it open, play with it some.
Regarding OO.org, theres plenty of architecture specific code in OO.org that had to be re-written for OS X. That's why the 1.0 port took so long. I'm not talking about NeoOffice/J, by the way, I'm talking about the X11 port. That's why the Mac X11 OO.org port alpha is 6 months overdue *so far*.While running under X11 is less than ideal, it'll still work nicely.
NeoOffice/J hasn't even started working on OO.org 2.0.
I understand the problems associated with an aqua port. Even without aqua, there are quite a few apps which make poor assumptions about the architecture they are running on, and quite a few libraries which use code that won't compile on a mac. I'm talking about just running stuff normalish linux apps on X11 on your Mac.
Not everything is a portable as you make it out to be. Plenty of programmers make poor assumptions when writing their software, including the sun guys who wrote the original star office codebase.
Oh, and Fullscreen opengl works great on the Mac's X11 implementation right now. I doubt that we'll see that go away on Mac OS X x86.
Why *shouldn't* wine work? We don't know the specifics of the OS yet, but Wine works on Freebsd. Transgaming believes that Cedega can be shoehorned onto Freebsd.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
Freebsd->Darwin isn't really that big of a jump, if you are talking about x86. Running Half-Life 2, even under X11, even under Cedega, could be quite a big selling point.
The Mac OS X ports of OO required quite a bit of rewriting.
The port of 2.0 was canceled because of the success of the java based NeoOffice/J, and that project has not even started on the 2.0 codebase yet.
Many complex apps similar to OO have lots of architecture specific code in them. They run on FreeBSD now, however, as long as your willing to use X11.
Correspondingly, I imagine x86 Darwin with X has little problem running these apps.
Oh, and what else would I want to run on a PC that I can't on my Mac right now?
Games, Games, Games.
Wine (Cedega) on a Mac x86, when it is ported, will run Half-Life 2 quite nicely.
Oh, I see.
Thats why I run World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, and Farcry, on my AMD64 box, at *native* speeds, in SuSE 9.3.
With Cedega, a Wine derivative.
No, not any Windows software.
But lots of Windows software works *very* well under Wine, even Direct3D apps.
Look for manufacturers like HP, and Legend, to license Macintosh designs.
These will be *strict* reference designs. HP will make what Apple tells them to make, but they will be HP branded.
Similar to iPod+HP.
VMware?
Think Wine.
Windows API for Mac OS X.
After all, if you've got x86 hardware, Wine will work well.
That means native speeds, and native hardware access.
That means windows games and OpenGL/Direct 3D apps, too.
Keep in mind. Mac OS X is a unix OS, with lots of unixy underpinnings.
You loose *some* compatability with existing Mac apps.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.
This means OpenOffice.org 2.0 will work *now*.
This means no more second-class Mac versions of popular OS apps.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac.
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
I want one, just to play with :)
Screw that. Apple should take Microsoft on. Balls on the table.
Fund their own branch of wine. Go to the wall. Mac OS X straight up versus Windows.
The *biggest* barrier to Wine on OS X was the x86 emulation code that needed to be written.
No longer!