it is on my ASUS eeePC 701. Wife got it for me while my primary notebook was in the shop and i was compiling C code on it and everything while i was in notebook withdrawal, but now all we ever use it for is Skype video calls, even though it still runs Fedora and has lots of software. I wonder how often that becomes the main use of gadgets like this after the excitement dies down.
sad but more or less accurate. you can see why it frustrates us who prefer Linux, right? I mean, it's not the fault of the Linux kernel developers, or Red Hat, or Canonical, or anyone else who can fall under the designation of "Linux" that so many of these necessary apps are without a native Linux version. Adobe and others primarily don't port them because of Linux's tiny market share, according to the popular excuse - but Linux's market share is small mostly because of the lack of apps. it's a catch-22. Far more people dual-boot than the statistics show, because the statistics are based on what OS was pre-installed. but if I'm willing to keep windows on my system for the apps, why make a Linux native version?
the whole thing just frustrates us to death, and it's actually even more complicated than that because there is also an entire group of people who refuse to run any non-FOSS on their machine at all. But for a guy who simply prefers to not reboot into an OS i don't personally like just for one app i need, it is at least nice to think that it will ever-so-slowly get better. for example, if Adobe officially supported running Creative Suite apps on Wine, that would be an intermediary that would allow more shops to switch. only a Linux-native version will really be satisfying, but you have to start somewhere. I had been thinking that games (easier to port since they rely less on the OS's UI) would be the first area to really embrace the paradigm of supporting all platforms equally, but Id Software was one of the leaders in that department and some of the recent news from them is worrisome. I've been playing almost all my games on Linux lately and would love to skip buying a copy of Windows for my next computer, but that milestone is probably years off still.
I do think we'll eventually get to a point where everyone can run whatever software they want on whatever platform they want with just a few exceptions. obviously, there are big corporations who won't want that, but I don't think they can prevent it. It will be interesting to me to see how much Linux would benefit from the removal of the "but there's no apps!" barrier. Either way I am pretty sure it will continue to be my primary OS anyway, though.
funny, yeah, but true. that is almost exactly how i fixed my laptop's screen brightness which was always being set to unusable levels after a kernel update. i'm a natural tinkerer and linux suits me very well, but i can see how the average user might not have figured that one out or even bothered to try. of course, less than half of linux installs i've done run into something like that. most are painless and Just Work. considering that three years ago basic stuff like sound, screen resolution and wireless networking took days or weeks to make work in linux, and now they are all out-of-the-box virtually 100% of the time, the future looks bright. but people who won't admit that we're not quite there yet are no help. there's work to be done and we can either religiously deny it or enjoy the challenge.
lol, so would i. neither was $15 at wal*mart though. and i don't need more that 2 buttons and a clickable scroll wheel for SpringRTS and Heroes of Newerth. the high dpi would be great for the next time i get into an FPS though...
for a lot of people, probably. for me, Linux was always intriguing because it was different and because i liked the idea of being able to customize it so much, plus the fact that getting it to run made me feel like a hacker. it was mostly a failure for me though until i tried Fedora 6. that's when i found a distro that i could make work as my primary OS (if i'd stumbled upon Ubuntu first things would probably have been easier though). rather than MS being the reason i found Linux, Linux was the reason i dodged the Vista bullet. I do like my MS optical mouse though:)
i liked the RTS / FPS hybrid sequel made by activision better, even if it isn't open source. i should try bzflag again, i couldn't get into it last time.
incidentally, there is an open source game called adanaxis that plays in 4 spatial dimesions (ie, it's not time travel.) - and it's actually some fun to play. it's in the Fedora repos and probably Ubuntu as well.
i've got Fedora Directory Server running and it handles auth for the network. it seems to work fine. if i am using a non-NFS folder for home, i don't have any issues at all. i don't know much about NIS (read: don't know ANYTHING) but it would fill roughly the same role as an LDAP service like Fedora-DS anyways, right?
given that i'm loving the 13-second boot time in Fedora 11 and the general speed increase, i don't think i will go back to Fedora 9. i'll see if i can make it work with samba, or give up on using nfs for the entire home dir and just symlink the most important stuff to a different NFS share. I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong but I've already spent too much time on it.
NFSv4 for home dirs has worked in our office, and when it works it does exactly what we wanted - it's beautiful, even. Lately I've been seeing more and more problems with new distros though. We have a Fedora 8 server (a decade-old desktop rocking a 500MHZ P3 and 128MiB of RAM, haha) and some clients which are running various Fedora releases. Fedora 8 and 9 were nearly perfect. the same settings, though, on Fedora 10 and now 11 have broken pulseaudio, skype, and will hang gnome-panel if any of its settings are changed. Fedora 11 seems to have some other stability issues on one client but that may be a wiring issue.
Am I the only one experiencing this, or do y'all think it's some kind of trend? It could honestly just be that I messed up some settings or don't know what I'm doing, but F9 worked so well that I'm tempted to just go back to it. Ubuntu is of course an option too, but one i haven't explored much yet. but with all of the options suggested here, i probably have a lot of options to look into. rsync works brilliantly for backups. still, i would prefer NFS working right again, because the peace of mind knowing that any one client on our network can go down without taking anyone's data with it and i can add a new client with so little work has been really nice.
I'm open to suggestions, but since this isn't the 'ask slashdot' section, I'll just summarize what I can contribute to the thread: NFS, as eln says, works very well when your network is well-wired and stable, but is useless for home dirs on notebooks that will be used away from the LAN. and Fedora 10 and 11 have given me problems with NFS home dirs.
well, you're absolutely right, and I wondered if anyone would take the time to bring it up. Software piracy is so rampant here in Davao that the computers sold in a lot of the shops come with cracked copies of Win XP. when I was given the title of IT Manager I made it an issue right away, and now we only have one Windows machine, which is legit. There are only three other linux boxes and a server anyway - it's a tiny community development center, and you may have overestimated us a bit.
I do think my boss would respond well to buying an appropriate AV product, and it is already in my proposed budget. Perhaps now is a good time to push that issue. however, if they tell me 'maybe later', i'm not sure what else i can do - even if there was a Starbucks in Davao i don't know if they could afford it. At least they mean well and trusted me enough to switch the other machines to linux. i'm sure i can get these last wrinkles ironed out.
again, it's a good point and i am taking it to heart.
we switched from AVG to Avast! also - our tiny nonprofit pretty much only considered the free options. I'm the only IT guy on staff and i'd been spending way too much time manually cleaning stuff that got through AVG using tools like Runalyzer and Spybot S&D. I don't remember any viruses getting through Avast! so far, and people bring in infected USB disks all the time (we're in the Philippines). Of course, we switched all workstations to Linux not terribly long after that except for the finance pc that needs to have Quickbooks and MS Office.
the only negative things I can say about Avast! are that the 'virus database has been updated' speech clip is annoying and almost gave my mother-in-law a heart attack once, and that it does make a noticeable impact on the performance on old machines (we actually still have pentium 3 boxes in use with 192mb ram). for a free product it does quite a good job.
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it is on my ASUS eeePC 701. Wife got it for me while my primary notebook was in the shop and i was compiling C code on it and everything while i was in notebook withdrawal, but now all we ever use it for is Skype video calls, even though it still runs Fedora and has lots of software. I wonder how often that becomes the main use of gadgets like this after the excitement dies down.
sad but more or less accurate. you can see why it frustrates us who prefer Linux, right? I mean, it's not the fault of the Linux kernel developers, or Red Hat, or Canonical, or anyone else who can fall under the designation of "Linux" that so many of these necessary apps are without a native Linux version. Adobe and others primarily don't port them because of Linux's tiny market share, according to the popular excuse - but Linux's market share is small mostly because of the lack of apps. it's a catch-22. Far more people dual-boot than the statistics show, because the statistics are based on what OS was pre-installed. but if I'm willing to keep windows on my system for the apps, why make a Linux native version?
the whole thing just frustrates us to death, and it's actually even more complicated than that because there is also an entire group of people who refuse to run any non-FOSS on their machine at all. But for a guy who simply prefers to not reboot into an OS i don't personally like just for one app i need, it is at least nice to think that it will ever-so-slowly get better. for example, if Adobe officially supported running Creative Suite apps on Wine, that would be an intermediary that would allow more shops to switch. only a Linux-native version will really be satisfying, but you have to start somewhere. I had been thinking that games (easier to port since they rely less on the OS's UI) would be the first area to really embrace the paradigm of supporting all platforms equally, but Id Software was one of the leaders in that department and some of the recent news from them is worrisome. I've been playing almost all my games on Linux lately and would love to skip buying a copy of Windows for my next computer, but that milestone is probably years off still.
I do think we'll eventually get to a point where everyone can run whatever software they want on whatever platform they want with just a few exceptions. obviously, there are big corporations who won't want that, but I don't think they can prevent it. It will be interesting to me to see how much Linux would benefit from the removal of the "but there's no apps!" barrier. Either way I am pretty sure it will continue to be my primary OS anyway, though.
funny, yeah, but true. that is almost exactly how i fixed my laptop's screen brightness which was always being set to unusable levels after a kernel update. i'm a natural tinkerer and linux suits me very well, but i can see how the average user might not have figured that one out or even bothered to try. of course, less than half of linux installs i've done run into something like that. most are painless and Just Work. considering that three years ago basic stuff like sound, screen resolution and wireless networking took days or weeks to make work in linux, and now they are all out-of-the-box virtually 100% of the time, the future looks bright. but people who won't admit that we're not quite there yet are no help. there's work to be done and we can either religiously deny it or enjoy the challenge.
lol, so would i. neither was $15 at wal*mart though. and i don't need more that 2 buttons and a clickable scroll wheel for SpringRTS and Heroes of Newerth. the high dpi would be great for the next time i get into an FPS though...
for a lot of people, probably. for me, Linux was always intriguing because it was different and because i liked the idea of being able to customize it so much, plus the fact that getting it to run made me feel like a hacker. it was mostly a failure for me though until i tried Fedora 6. that's when i found a distro that i could make work as my primary OS (if i'd stumbled upon Ubuntu first things would probably have been easier though). rather than MS being the reason i found Linux, Linux was the reason i dodged the Vista bullet. I do like my MS optical mouse though :)
funny, i used to do the same thing! then, dig randomly around my nest until i found a passage to theirs, and storm them from below! ah, memories...
you're right, and Tron 2.0 was a brilliant game. this movie should be Tron 3.0!
i liked the RTS / FPS hybrid sequel made by activision better, even if it isn't open source. i should try bzflag again, i couldn't get into it last time.
incidentally, there is an open source game called adanaxis that plays in 4 spatial dimesions (ie, it's not time travel.) - and it's actually some fun to play. it's in the Fedora repos and probably Ubuntu as well.
i've got Fedora Directory Server running and it handles auth for the network. it seems to work fine. if i am using a non-NFS folder for home, i don't have any issues at all. i don't know much about NIS (read: don't know ANYTHING) but it would fill roughly the same role as an LDAP service like Fedora-DS anyways, right?
given that i'm loving the 13-second boot time in Fedora 11 and the general speed increase, i don't think i will go back to Fedora 9. i'll see if i can make it work with samba, or give up on using nfs for the entire home dir and just symlink the most important stuff to a different NFS share. I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong but I've already spent too much time on it.
NFSv4 for home dirs has worked in our office, and when it works it does exactly what we wanted - it's beautiful, even. Lately I've been seeing more and more problems with new distros though. We have a Fedora 8 server (a decade-old desktop rocking a 500MHZ P3 and 128MiB of RAM, haha) and some clients which are running various Fedora releases. Fedora 8 and 9 were nearly perfect. the same settings, though, on Fedora 10 and now 11 have broken pulseaudio, skype, and will hang gnome-panel if any of its settings are changed. Fedora 11 seems to have some other stability issues on one client but that may be a wiring issue.
Am I the only one experiencing this, or do y'all think it's some kind of trend? It could honestly just be that I messed up some settings or don't know what I'm doing, but F9 worked so well that I'm tempted to just go back to it. Ubuntu is of course an option too, but one i haven't explored much yet. but with all of the options suggested here, i probably have a lot of options to look into. rsync works brilliantly for backups. still, i would prefer NFS working right again, because the peace of mind knowing that any one client on our network can go down without taking anyone's data with it and i can add a new client with so little work has been really nice.
I'm open to suggestions, but since this isn't the 'ask slashdot' section, I'll just summarize what I can contribute to the thread: NFS, as eln says, works very well when your network is well-wired and stable, but is useless for home dirs on notebooks that will be used away from the LAN. and Fedora 10 and 11 have given me problems with NFS home dirs.
well, you're absolutely right, and I wondered if anyone would take the time to bring it up. Software piracy is so rampant here in Davao that the computers sold in a lot of the shops come with cracked copies of Win XP. when I was given the title of IT Manager I made it an issue right away, and now we only have one Windows machine, which is legit. There are only three other linux boxes and a server anyway - it's a tiny community development center, and you may have overestimated us a bit.
I do think my boss would respond well to buying an appropriate AV product, and it is already in my proposed budget. Perhaps now is a good time to push that issue. however, if they tell me 'maybe later', i'm not sure what else i can do - even if there was a Starbucks in Davao i don't know if they could afford it. At least they mean well and trusted me enough to switch the other machines to linux. i'm sure i can get these last wrinkles ironed out.
again, it's a good point and i am taking it to heart.
we switched from AVG to Avast! also - our tiny nonprofit pretty much only considered the free options. I'm the only IT guy on staff and i'd been spending way too much time manually cleaning stuff that got through AVG using tools like Runalyzer and Spybot S&D. I don't remember any viruses getting through Avast! so far, and people bring in infected USB disks all the time (we're in the Philippines). Of course, we switched all workstations to Linux not terribly long after that except for the finance pc that needs to have Quickbooks and MS Office.
the only negative things I can say about Avast! are that the 'virus database has been updated' speech clip is annoying and almost gave my mother-in-law a heart attack once, and that it does make a noticeable impact on the performance on old machines (we actually still have pentium 3 boxes in use with 192mb ram). for a free product it does quite a good job.