Don't even get me started!:) I just ordered an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to replace my Matrox Parhelia card. The linux drivers that are available for the Parhelia are lousy, not accelerated*, not officially supported (meaning if you can't make it work, tough luck), and only available for RedHat 9. (They might work with other distros but *I* (your milage may vary) couldn't get them to compile under Mandrake or Debian.)
* If you ask politely, they'll e-mail you a link to an accelerated driver package that - in my experience - doesn't work.
...to put that same money towards quality control, thereby preventing the flaws in the first place? Instead of just paying someone to nark out his friend who finds and exploits the flaw that still there?
The only thing this is going to do is make devious hackers more aware that they need to try harder to cover their tracks.
The one I got for the 200GB Western Digital drive is a Coolmax CD-309-Combo series.
How well does it work?
For me, it works great. For you, maybe not. Depends on your uses I guess. I use the external drive for backup purposes. I turn it on when I need it, run my backups, then shut it off. It's probably off 90% of the time. Less power consumption, less heat generated, longer life for the drive. My only complaint with it is that sometimes Linux won't let go of the mount when I try to umount it. Linux says the device is busy even though lsof and fuser show there's nothing in use on the drive. In that case I usually just/sbin/telinit 1, umount it, then turn it off. That always has worked for me. I should also point out that I have the same problem with my internal CD-ROM drive so I don't think it's a problem with the external drive. Sometimes my CD-ROM drive will get "stuck" and I'll have to go through some trouble to unmount it.
Where did you get it from?
From newegg.com (Direct Product link This isn't a whore link. I don't get credit if you buy it.) I always shop around for anything I buy, but Newegg regularly has the lowest prices. Or their price will only be $1 or $2 higher than the lowest which I will gladly pay since I have had flawless service from them. There have been a few items though where they were significantly higher than the lowest place I could find so I bought elsewhere. So always shop around. Pricewatch.com, shopper.com, etc...
Office Depot does not sell Western Digital in the stores, Maxtor yes but not WD dont know what ad your looking at.
You're right. My rebate was from Office Max, not Office Depot. An easy mistake to make though. (This rebate was part of the same deal but was directly from Western Digital.) Total cost after rebates, $59 + tax + 2 postage stamps.
On the topic of lousy CD burns... Does anyone else get an error from XCDRoast with EVERY THING you burn? I downloaded the Fedora Core ISO's a couple of days ago (pretty cool by the way) and burned them to CD using XCDRoast. And as always, it reports that the writing process failed when it's done. However, when I loop mount the ISO and "diff" it with the CD, it's fine. And when I installed Fedora Core, all 3 CD's passed the initial Media Test and the system installed just fine. So what the heck is up with XCDRoast?
I have the same problem with media that you're talking about. I almost don't even bother with CD backups any more. Hard-drives, despite all the trouble I had with the IBM DeathStar earlier this year, are much more reliable. And cheap. Check out your Office Depot add. You can pick up a 120GB, 7200RPM, 8MB Cache, Western Digital drive almost every Sunday for $59 after rebates. (Not SATA unfortunately.) I now have 2 of the 120GB WD drives and I recently caught an even more amazing rebate for a 200GB WD drive. So that has become my backup method of choice. And I also bought an aluminium 3.5" Firewire / USB 2.0 external enclosure for the 200GB WD drive so I could have relatively portable storage.
Keep an eye out for endless special editions and reworks until the day you die, conveniently spaced out and with enough extra materials to keep you coming back every time.
I'm probably the only geek alive who hasn't seen a single Star Wars movie. Same reason I won't do drugs, I might get hooked. That, and I think Star * sucks.
I plugged in my digital camera into the USB port and switched it on. To my amazement, with a soft *ding*, an icon appeared on my KDE desktop showing a digital camera...
That is very cool... though it kind of sucks that things like that are so uncommon that you were amazed (as I would have been). But it is getting better, I see vast improvements all the time.
For me it's little things like this which make up a good distribution.
Yeah - same here. When it comes to the Desktop, I just want things to work. I don't want to spend several days (or even hours) setting things up. I want the "out of the box" experience to cover the majority of my needs.
Let me guess, you've never done tech support for Windows ? *grin*
Sharp Laptop computers from Aug 96 to Feb 97. Was cool for about 2 months. Learned a lot. But quickly grew to hate my job and my life. So I got out of it. I'm not a "people person"... so rather than act like a condescending, imperialistic dick to everyone who would call, and putting them down and telling them they were too dumb to use a computer - I found a job that suited me better.
In Linux, I read a bunch of stuff, fiddle around with settings (which I enjoy), and then it works.
That is the good and the bad, at the same time. The good - You fiddle around, read a bunch of stuff, and learn all kinds of things.
The bad - end users just want it to work. I can relate. I have no desire to learn anything about my car. I put gas in it and take it in for service as needed (oil change, tire rotation, etc..) Anything more complicated than that and I'd never drive.
There is a difference, though. In Windows, using the scanner crashes the system about 1/3 of the time.
I can honestly say that Windows XP has been very solid for me in terms of system stability. And I'm an informed user so security isn't much of a problem either. I have a router/firewall, I don't open attachments of Anna Kournikova that swear to God they are really, truly her and we aren't kidding - this isn't a virus - we mean it - come on d00d - open the attachment or else you're ghey..., and I check for security updates regularly, I scan for viruses regularly, etc...
Also, it sometimes starts scanning even when I'm not using it.
My scanner seems to wake up on it's own sometimes too. Rather I'm using Linux or Windows. It's weird, but not that bothersome so I haven't tried to figure out what the issue is. Could be normal behavior, could be in need of a firmware update, could be a poltergeist.
And the scanning program seems to have no way of saving its settings. Every time I use it, I have to click through a couple dialogs to tell it that I want it to scan in black-and-white.
I've noticed something like that with my scanner, and only in Windows I believe. I'll tell it to scan in tru-color, then it jumps back to black and white for no reason? I don't use my scanner that much (5 times a year at most) so I just live with it.
I think this is typical of user experiences with Windows: Easy installation, but poor performance.
Yeah... Desktop Linux could definitely take a page out of the Microsoft / Mac book when it comes to setting up programs. I downloaded America's Army for Linux (http://www.americasarmy.com) the other day and was pretty impressed with the graphical installer... and the fact that the graphical installer even worked on my system. A lot of times graphical installers require something I don't have and I'm stuck doing it from the command line anyway.
All Linux needs to win is easier installation. And this has already happened for the OS itself.
Yeah... the install is a snap now for RedHat and Mandrake. And probably SuSE and others. As far as Slackware and Debian go, leave them how they are. Some people feel better about themselves if they have to work harder at it.
But setting up new programs is still irksome at times. Dependency hell is usually the source of the head ache. I've messed with apt-get RPM but haven't had much luck ever finding the stuff I wanted. So I end up searching rpmfind.net and downloading all the stuff I need, then installing it manually.
Funny, I've been using my USB digital camera with Linux since I bought it over a year ago.
I can use mine in Linux as well... and now that I have it setup it's basically just as easy as it is in Windows. But setting it up, while not difficult for geeks like us, wouldn't have been possible for a lot of people. In Windows I just plug my camera in and some wizard thing pops up and aks me what I want to do with my camera. You can hate wizards all you want. But when it comes to devices that are just toys for most people, the wizards probably spell the difference between a positive experience and a negative experience.
And on the topic of digital cameras specifically, I actually wouldn't mind having some little daemon wizard fire up when the kernel detected my digital camera was plugged in. As it is now I have to mount the camera, copy the images from the mounted location to my permanent storage, erase them if I want them gone, then unmount it. All of which is relatively simple for me since I have created little scripts to do it all automatically. But I wouldn't recommend it to my mom and I think that's what the statement "Consumers want USB drivers and digital camera support" really means. The "just works" concept. "dmesg | grep sd (find camera device) - mount -t vfat/dev/sdc1/mnt/camera - cp/mnt/camera/*/home/user/pics - umount/mnt/camera" doesn't fit the bill for most people.
And I've never had an experience where increasing resolution or detail options in a game made it more enjoyable to me. I'm an oldschooler who's played enough nintendo that his eyes are shot, I cant tell 1600x1200 from 800x600.
I don't care to get into the heated debate that everyone else is, but that line realy jumped out at me. Being a Flight Sim fanatic, it's all about the resolution. Saying that the difference between 1600x1200 and 800x600 is night/day is a gross understatement. The world you fly in becomes nearly photo realistic when you hit a certain resolution. Whereas it's ugly and clunky looking at the lower resolutions.
I'm not big on the FPS genre, though I think they are interesting to look at, visually. I just don't care to play them really. But I have of course played them. And there again the resolution difference is night/day.
I'm curious what kind of video card you're using? You can get a very inexpensive ($100-$150) NVidia or ATI card that will take advantage of a lot of the visual features that your card might be missing? It's not just about eye candy. At least not with Flight Simulators. It completely changes the experience when you have rich detail. another example
Yeah... you make a lot of good points. I didn't realize that you couldn't get updates from RedHat unless you paid for their distribution. Like with Windows... I'll admit I've never bought a single copy though I have used it for certain things. (I just don't want to support Microsoft with my money. But that's another topic.) But I can still access the Windows update system on my laptop even though I don't have a legal key for that computer.
So what is the bottom line for home Desktop users of RedHat? Are we to look else where? (I've been considering Mandrake actually - has nothing to do with this RedHat announcement either. I just happened to take a look at Mandrake a couple of weeks ago for totally unrelated reasons. I downloaded 9.2rc2, tested it on my spare machine and liked what I saw. I almost pre ordered it but I didn't want to make an impulsive move like that. I decided to wait until I saw the next version of SuSE before I made up my mind.)
Or is Fedora the answer? I have no problem paying for the O/S. In fact I prefer to pay something... vote with my dollars as the saying goes. But I can't realistically afford an Enterprise ($$) level solution just so I can check my e-mail and chat with friends.
This is one of the more confusing things I've seen in Linux in quite a while.
Are we talking about a Desktop home user? You know - web, e-mail, music, instant messaging, and so on?
I downloaded Mandrake 9.2rc2 a couple of weeks ago and was happy with what I saw. (Compared to older versions of Mandrake which I never liked.) I plan on buying Mandrake 9.2 directly from the Mandrake Store... as opposed to getting it from cheapbytes.com or just downloading it for free when it's available. (Call me cooky. But I want to support their work you know.)
But I had made that decision before I had read about this RedHat ordeal. I think a lot of people are jumping the gun and drawing extreme, rash conclusions without really knowing many of the facts. Maybe that's not the case here, but it often is. This will probably turn out to be another needlessly heated thread.
Slashdot is good for that.
I always liked Debian best when I was running a server at home. But I prefer the ease (some call it "bloat") that you get with the Desktop oriented distros when I want to setup a Desktop system.
SuSE is one I would consider checking out as well based on recent articles I've read. I think I tried SuSE once years ago, but I never really gave it a fair go back then.
I'm not interested in Linux From Scratch or compiling a terabyte worth of source code (Gentoo) for my Desktop system. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
I'm really confused by this announcement. It's my understanding that Open Source does not automatically equate to Free (beer) Software. But people are free to do what they want with the software, right? So what's to stop some Good Samaritan from paying for the next RedHat Enterprise release and then making it freely available (free beer) on his website? It's not illegal, right? He paid for it and based on the GPL is free to do what he wants with it.
discussions on Slashdot are like riding on a bus with no steering: it careens onto the right shoulder, heads back toward the middle, only to screetch onto the left shoulder, back toward the middle...
will start drawing broad conclusions about hard drive reliablility with a sample size they could count on one hand
I guess you've never had the privilege of owning an IBM Deathstar. Nor did you bother to follow the link where you can read thousands of stories by other Deathstar owners who have had failed drives. Nor did you bother to check google to see how many people have complained about Maxtor drive reliability. Too bad. Your troll post might have held credence otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
What about Matrox...
:) I just ordered an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to replace my Matrox Parhelia card. The linux drivers that are available for the Parhelia are lousy, not accelerated*, not officially supported (meaning if you can't make it work, tough luck), and only available for RedHat 9. (They might work with other distros but *I* (your milage may vary) couldn't get them to compile under Mandrake or Debian.)
Don't even get me started!
* If you ask politely, they'll e-mail you a link to an accelerated driver package that - in my experience - doesn't work.
I'll miss the card with my Flight Simulator under Windows.
VA Linux! Biggest IPO of all time. Granted they are bankrupt now, but that's beside the point, no really - it's beside the point.
...to put that same money towards quality control, thereby preventing the flaws in the first place? Instead of just paying someone to nark out his friend who finds and exploits the flaw that still there?
The only thing this is going to do is make devious hackers more aware that they need to try harder to cover their tracks.
What brand/model is the enclosure?
/sbin/telinit 1, umount it, then turn it off. That always has worked for me. I should also point out that I have the same problem with my internal CD-ROM drive so I don't think it's a problem with the external drive. Sometimes my CD-ROM drive will get "stuck" and I'll have to go through some trouble to unmount it.
The one I got for the 200GB Western Digital drive is a Coolmax CD-309-Combo series.
How well does it work?
For me, it works great. For you, maybe not. Depends on your uses I guess. I use the external drive for backup purposes. I turn it on when I need it, run my backups, then shut it off. It's probably off 90% of the time. Less power consumption, less heat generated, longer life for the drive. My only complaint with it is that sometimes Linux won't let go of the mount when I try to umount it. Linux says the device is busy even though lsof and fuser show there's nothing in use on the drive. In that case I usually just
Where did you get it from?
From newegg.com (Direct Product link This isn't a whore link. I don't get credit if you buy it.) I always shop around for anything I buy, but Newegg regularly has the lowest prices. Or their price will only be $1 or $2 higher than the lowest which I will gladly pay since I have had flawless service from them. There have been a few items though where they were significantly higher than the lowest place I could find so I bought elsewhere. So always shop around. Pricewatch.com, shopper.com, etc...
Office Depot does not sell Western Digital in the stores, Maxtor yes but not WD dont know what ad your looking at.
You're right. My rebate was from Office Max, not Office Depot. An easy mistake to make though. (This rebate was part of the same deal but was directly from Western Digital.) Total cost after rebates, $59 + tax + 2 postage stamps.
Have you actually gotten any of those rebates?
Yes
On the topic of lousy CD burns... Does anyone else get an error from XCDRoast with EVERY THING you burn? I downloaded the Fedora Core ISO's a couple of days ago (pretty cool by the way) and burned them to CD using XCDRoast. And as always, it reports that the writing process failed when it's done. However, when I loop mount the ISO and "diff" it with the CD, it's fine. And when I installed Fedora Core, all 3 CD's passed the initial Media Test and the system installed just fine. So what the heck is up with XCDRoast?
I have the same problem with media that you're talking about. I almost don't even bother with CD backups any more. Hard-drives, despite all the trouble I had with the IBM DeathStar earlier this year, are much more reliable. And cheap. Check out your Office Depot add. You can pick up a 120GB, 7200RPM, 8MB Cache, Western Digital drive almost every Sunday for $59 after rebates. (Not SATA unfortunately.) I now have 2 of the 120GB WD drives and I recently caught an even more amazing rebate for a 200GB WD drive. So that has become my backup method of choice. And I also bought an aluminium 3.5" Firewire / USB 2.0 external enclosure for the 200GB WD drive so I could have relatively portable storage.
Why diss a movie you haven't seen?
Didn't realize I was "dissing" anything, let alone Star Wars.
Uhh... ok. My mistake I guess. I thought the topic was Star Wars.
Keep an eye out for endless special editions and reworks until the day you die, conveniently spaced out and with enough extra materials to keep you coming back every time.
I'm probably the only geek alive who hasn't seen a single Star Wars movie. Same reason I won't do drugs, I might get hooked. That, and I think Star * sucks.
Uh, yeah - great idea.
Welcome to our Poll 12.222.21.42 - Do you have illegal, pirated music on your computer?
I plugged in my digital camera into the USB port and switched it on. To my amazement, with a soft *ding*, an icon appeared on my KDE desktop showing a digital camera...
That is very cool... though it kind of sucks that things like that are so uncommon that you were amazed (as I would have been). But it is getting better, I see vast improvements all the time.
For me it's little things like this which make up a good distribution.
Yeah - same here. When it comes to the Desktop, I just want things to work. I don't want to spend several days (or even hours) setting things up. I want the "out of the box" experience to cover the majority of my needs.
Let me guess, you've never done tech support for Windows ? *grin*
... so rather than act like a condescending, imperialistic dick to everyone who would call, and putting them down and telling them they were too dumb to use a computer - I found a job that suited me better.
Sharp Laptop computers from Aug 96 to Feb 97. Was cool for about 2 months. Learned a lot. But quickly grew to hate my job and my life. So I got out of it. I'm not a "people person"
Things are much quieter here in Antarctica.
In Linux, I read a bunch of stuff, fiddle around with settings (which I enjoy), and then it works.
... Desktop Linux could definitely take a page out of the Microsoft / Mac book when it comes to setting up programs. I downloaded America's Army for Linux (http://www.americasarmy.com) the other day and was pretty impressed with the graphical installer ... and the fact that the graphical installer even worked on my system. A lot of times graphical installers require something I don't have and I'm stuck doing it from the command line anyway.
... the install is a snap now for RedHat and Mandrake. And probably SuSE and others. As far as Slackware and Debian go, leave them how they are. Some people feel better about themselves if they have to work harder at it.
That is the good and the bad, at the same time. The good - You fiddle around, read a bunch of stuff, and learn all kinds of things.
The bad - end users just want it to work. I can relate. I have no desire to learn anything about my car. I put gas in it and take it in for service as needed (oil change, tire rotation, etc..) Anything more complicated than that and I'd never drive.
There is a difference, though. In Windows, using the scanner crashes the system about 1/3 of the time.
I can honestly say that Windows XP has been very solid for me in terms of system stability. And I'm an informed user so security isn't much of a problem either. I have a router/firewall, I don't open attachments of Anna Kournikova that swear to God they are really, truly her and we aren't kidding - this isn't a virus - we mean it - come on d00d - open the attachment or else you're ghey..., and I check for security updates regularly, I scan for viruses regularly, etc...
Also, it sometimes starts scanning even when I'm not using it.
My scanner seems to wake up on it's own sometimes too. Rather I'm using Linux or Windows. It's weird, but not that bothersome so I haven't tried to figure out what the issue is. Could be normal behavior, could be in need of a firmware update, could be a poltergeist.
And the scanning program seems to have no way of saving its settings. Every time I use it, I have to click through a couple dialogs to tell it that I want it to scan in black-and-white.
I've noticed something like that with my scanner, and only in Windows I believe. I'll tell it to scan in tru-color, then it jumps back to black and white for no reason? I don't use my scanner that much (5 times a year at most) so I just live with it.
I think this is typical of user experiences with Windows: Easy installation, but poor performance.
Yeah
All Linux needs to win is easier installation. And this has already happened for the OS itself.
Yeah
But setting up new programs is still irksome at times. Dependency hell is usually the source of the head ache. I've messed with apt-get RPM but haven't had much luck ever finding the stuff I wanted. So I end up searching rpmfind.net and downloading all the stuff I need, then installing it manually.
Most of my calls can be fixed by restarting the computer...
Or by properly trouble shooting the problem.
Funny, I've been using my USB digital camera with Linux since I bought it over a year ago.
... and now that I have it setup it's basically just as easy as it is in Windows. But setting it up, while not difficult for geeks like us, wouldn't have been possible for a lot of people. In Windows I just plug my camera in and some wizard thing pops up and aks me what I want to do with my camera. You can hate wizards all you want. But when it comes to devices that are just toys for most people, the wizards probably spell the difference between a positive experience and a negative experience.
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/camera - cp /mnt/camera/* /home/user/pics - umount /mnt/camera" doesn't fit the bill for most people.
I can use mine in Linux as well
And on the topic of digital cameras specifically, I actually wouldn't mind having some little daemon wizard fire up when the kernel detected my digital camera was plugged in. As it is now I have to mount the camera, copy the images from the mounted location to my permanent storage, erase them if I want them gone, then unmount it. All of which is relatively simple for me since I have created little scripts to do it all automatically. But I wouldn't recommend it to my mom and I think that's what the statement "Consumers want USB drivers and digital camera support" really means. The "just works" concept. "dmesg | grep sd (find camera device) - mount -t vfat
And I've never had an experience where increasing resolution or detail options in a game made it more enjoyable to me. I'm an oldschooler who's played enough nintendo that his eyes are shot, I cant tell 1600x1200 from 800x600.
I don't care to get into the heated debate that everyone else is, but that line realy jumped out at me. Being a Flight Sim fanatic, it's all about the resolution. Saying that the difference between 1600x1200 and 800x600 is night/day is a gross understatement. The world you fly in becomes nearly photo realistic when you hit a certain resolution. Whereas it's ugly and clunky looking at the lower resolutions.
I'm not big on the FPS genre, though I think they are interesting to look at, visually. I just don't care to play them really. But I have of course played them. And there again the resolution difference is night/day.
I'm curious what kind of video card you're using? You can get a very inexpensive ($100-$150) NVidia or ATI card that will take advantage of a lot of the visual features that your card might be missing? It's not just about eye candy. At least not with Flight Simulators. It completely changes the experience when you have rich detail. another example
Yeah ... you make a lot of good points. I didn't realize that you couldn't get updates from RedHat unless you paid for their distribution. Like with Windows ... I'll admit I've never bought a single copy though I have used it for certain things. (I just don't want to support Microsoft with my money. But that's another topic.) But I can still access the Windows update system on my laptop even though I don't have a legal key for that computer.
... vote with my dollars as the saying goes. But I can't realistically afford an Enterprise ($$) level solution just so I can check my e-mail and chat with friends.
So what is the bottom line for home Desktop users of RedHat? Are we to look else where? (I've been considering Mandrake actually - has nothing to do with this RedHat announcement either. I just happened to take a look at Mandrake a couple of weeks ago for totally unrelated reasons. I downloaded 9.2rc2, tested it on my spare machine and liked what I saw. I almost pre ordered it but I didn't want to make an impulsive move like that. I decided to wait until I saw the next version of SuSE before I made up my mind.)
Or is Fedora the answer? I have no problem paying for the O/S. In fact I prefer to pay something
This is one of the more confusing things I've seen in Linux in quite a while.
Are we talking about a Desktop home user? You know - web, e-mail, music, instant messaging, and so on?
... as opposed to getting it from cheapbytes.com or just downloading it for free when it's available. (Call me cooky. But I want to support their work you know.)
I downloaded Mandrake 9.2rc2 a couple of weeks ago and was happy with what I saw. (Compared to older versions of Mandrake which I never liked.) I plan on buying Mandrake 9.2 directly from the Mandrake Store
But I had made that decision before I had read about this RedHat ordeal. I think a lot of people are jumping the gun and drawing extreme, rash conclusions without really knowing many of the facts. Maybe that's not the case here, but it often is. This will probably turn out to be another needlessly heated thread.
Slashdot is good for that.
I always liked Debian best when I was running a server at home. But I prefer the ease (some call it "bloat") that you get with the Desktop oriented distros when I want to setup a Desktop system.
SuSE is one I would consider checking out as well based on recent articles I've read. I think I tried SuSE once years ago, but I never really gave it a fair go back then.
I'm not interested in Linux From Scratch or compiling a terabyte worth of source code (Gentoo) for my Desktop system. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
I'm really confused by this announcement. It's my understanding that Open Source does not automatically equate to Free (beer) Software. But people are free to do what they want with the software, right? So what's to stop some Good Samaritan from paying for the next RedHat Enterprise release and then making it freely available (free beer) on his website? It's not illegal, right? He paid for it and based on the GPL is free to do what he wants with it.
No, I said "the fastest hardware available today". That means G5.
Hahah.. that's a good one. Tell me another.
discussions on Slashdot are like riding on a bus with no steering: it careens onto the right shoulder, heads back toward the middle, only to screetch onto the left shoulder, back toward the middle...
Are you just now figuring that out?
will start drawing broad conclusions about hard drive reliablility with a sample size they could count on one hand
I guess you've never had the privilege of owning an IBM Deathstar. Nor did you bother to follow the link where you can read thousands of stories by other Deathstar owners who have had failed drives. Nor did you bother to check google to see how many people have complained about Maxtor drive reliability. Too bad. Your troll post might have held credence otherwise.