I used to run X on a 486DLC40 w/8MB of RAM. The important things were to do away with unnecessary services (I mean, the machine didn't have a dedicated network connection; did I really NEED Sendmail?;-), doing away with memory-hungry stuff (why use bash when ash will do the job in your shellscript?) and choosing light windowmanagers (why use KDE when there are lighter alternatives that work just fine?)
It's possible, but just not for everyone. Then again, if you're on a tight budget and determined to do some computing on "ancient" hardware, you're not going to be able to do it the easy way (well, I suppose you could use Freedom Office or whatever it's called.:-)
instead of regularly sending JPEGs, like VNC, the remote assistance program simply can send the window styles, etc. to the other computer, the location of the windows, and the description of the contents, and after that it only has to send changes in things like window location, window size, etc.
Well, whatever; VNC doesn't send JPEGs. It uses its own format (unless TightVNC uses JFIF; I don't know) and most of the time only sends info on what has changed on screen.
Typical Linux-o-phile onanism - thinking that everyone who is "computer-literate" has a copy of Linux on their system.
More like typical humorless f**k who can't take a joke.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust an OS that was cobbled-together by an ad-hoc committee of hackers (read "LINUX") as far as I could spit.
Funny, I notice you've managed to post this. What do you use, a steam-powered computer with a steam-whistle calliope(sp) acting as an analog modem? Eh? Point me toward a marginally-accepted non-hacked-together OS. If you point me toward an Apple or Microsoft product, it'll be proof that their marketing departments have done their jobs.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Remember the hype about Win95 being a total rewrite? Remember the lack of fanfare when it was discovered that wasn't true?
As for your "humorous" LINUX acronym, I can only suppose you're a BSD zealot if you're bashing cobbled-together OSes and Linux in particular. As such you have no room to talk about xenophobia.;-D
OS X is better.......you get to use all your favorite CLI tools, all your favorite web and dev tools, all your favorite GUI tools, get to use MS Office (for those who like it) and get a realy smooth, out of the way GUI.
If out-of-the-way is defined as in-your-face high-resolution-demanding and high-memory-consumption, then yes, I guess it's better.
whats the problem....if you used Linux as just an alternative to MS or because you like Unix, and not becaue it was free as in speech.
I think I understand what you're saying, though it needs a rephrase. No, I started believing in Linux because it was an alternative to the Big Two's ever-increasing bloat and let's-do-everything-kernel-level. OSX is mostly Old School, so I don't use it. And it has terrible hardware support (even the latest release.)
Printer sharing? What version of OS X are you using, anyway?
Then again, it doesn't matter, because we should all petition Apple to buy BeOS from Palm as a replacement for their bloated sack of crap, OS X. Wait, that was the rumored plan up until the day they announced OS X. My bad.
Okay, who hasn't figured out TheReverand yet? Anyone?
TheReverand is one of those kind souls whose self-appointed task is to troll for the sake of humanity. Rather than attempting to help fix Qt's semi-broken GTK-pixmap-engine-compatible style, this person would rather troll, complain, whine, all with tounge firmly in cheek. Or between cheeks. Ew.
Remember, if you want to improve the problem in the Free and Open Source world, the best thing to do is to either implement a solution, or try to help come up with a solution. Complaining (or trolling on the subject) incessantly only causes hard feelings, and dammit, I don't want hard feelings, as I find Windows to be a mostly-unusable sack of crap. Ditto for MacOS, especially OSX. And folks, I work with MacOS 9.2.2 at least 8 hours, 5 or 6 days a week.
I'd like to see interest in improving X apps' visual consistency, say, rathe than people shrugging and going back to cursing at Windows. Oh, and that whole spyware issue is just icky.
I'm sure glad I'm not the only one. The Slashdot crew has always liked their silly digs . . . erm, comments, and I think it's refreshing, in this period of post-dot-bomb anti-Open-Source kneejerk backlash, to have someone still pointing out that there's something out there whose licensing agreement is, well, hard to beat, in terms of ease.:-D
The only fly in the ointment is that the OS started out as a workstation OS, then was, for a time, destined to become MacOS 10 (God, I wish it had; OS X sucks more than it rules) then when that deal fell through because Apple could get Mr. Personality and his NeXT assets cheaper, Be decided to chase the PC market.
It may be hard to prove that they truly were hurt by MS (I'd personally blame Apple) but my own personal opinion is that consumers were hurt by the failure of what was, in my humble opinion, a superior product, and it's hard to ignore that MS's business practices made it impossible to compete as a traditional proprietary OS vendor in the x86 market.
I was under the impression that much of the KDE instability was due to most of KDE being done in C++, something that the gcc folks themselves state, is not yet anywhere near as stable in their compiler as C is.
Well, whatever; I just know I have great luck with KDE, and terrible luck with GNOME, in other distributions. FYI, GNOME isn't just C based. It's also based on C++, Objective C, and whatever language is popular this year.
Why does Red Hat and Sun prefer Gnome?
They're afraid that, if they write something non-Free, they'll have to pay for a Qt license.
And what's with all the erm and duh? Another/. 12 year old?
You, perhaps. I was being what is known as condescending. I'm actually quite young (28) but doggone it, I feel like saying "I'm right, you're wrong.";-)
Maybe they came to the same conclusion many do, KDE is less configurable and less stable
Nope, it's not less stable, and I'm not sure what you mean by "less configurable." I find KDE to be quite configurable.
and if KDE were'nt so braindead in some of their licence decisions in the past,
Yes, and you've said the important phrase: in the past. As in, it's over, dead, gone.
more would have embraced it to the point where it is on top. KDE can die for all I care.
That's you're decision, if you want to be so immature as to hold a grudge. Which pretty much gives me more grist for my "GNUbies holding an anti-KDE grudge."
BTW, how does it work for one to be a GNUbie AND a GNOME enthusiast when people like Miguel (and dammit, I don't care what people say; it used to be his baby exclusively) whore the project around to proprietary vendors?
I'd just like to point out that Windows isn't intuitive to a hardcore MacOS user. And vice-versa.
Of course, learning is hard, and choice is bad. My mistake. The current party line is "Free Software will never rule the desktop." I stand corrected, Ye Mighty Slashdot Gods.
And besides, Bob's affiliated with a company that decided to abandon the desktop as soon as the stock market went bust. Thanks for developing GNOME, guys; however, we just don't think you'll ever amount to anything. Thanks for playing anyway.
Bah. RH used to be good for the world of Linux. I'm not so sure anymore.
Another nice thing about this particular distro (like the other failed Debian derivatives;-) is that it's actually Potato-based, yet comes with a number of packages that're more recent than Potato, and in the case of KKDE, nonexistent.
That's the nice thing about such a system: it gets the benefits of a well-tested core, so they don't have to concentrate on that (just on making an easier install, and I just installed it, and it's hella sweet) and more recent packages . . . all on this well-tested core. It doesn't get much better than this.;-)
Not a problem for me, I prefer Gnome. Seems to be more stable than KDE, though I have'nt bothered to use it in a long while.
Duh, that was my point. Of course GNOME is more stable; more attention is paid to GNOME than to KDE, hence my peeve. In other distributions, it's Gnome, not KDE, that gives such fits, because GNOME is harder to maintain. Of course, nothing is impossible when you've got a grudge to keep.
Erm, no, actually, the probem is more likely due to the inability of Debian's maintenance tools to do recursive rebuilds i.e. if libpng gets rebuilt, rebuild everything that is dependent upon libpng. If something like that existed, it'd be far simpler for package maintainers, IMHO. Oh wait, FreeBSD already has that. Hrm.
Perhaps someone could explain why the parent is "informative" -- the Vorbis codec is free in every sense. That was the whole freakin' point of the Ogg Vorbis project, for Bob's sake.
You're really telling me that Kenwood engineers are too damned lazy to build Vorbis for the ARM7 architecture?
Secondly, I'm constantly amazed at how people mis-read our stats page. The Linux aggregate stats are the total of all unique bugs across all the various distributions we track. It's supposed to answer the question "How many Linux-related bugs were there that year."
I'm still a little unclear on what you mean by "unique bugs." So if there's a glibc vulnerability in all distributions, it gets counted only once in the aggregate?
If so, I'll consider the numbers a little less suspect.
Before you flame me, bother to learn a bit about the two packaging formats. More flexibility in applying patches (as many people can tell you, once you start mixing software from other distros/OSes, it's unavoidable), more robust in dependency handling (yes, rpm is better than deb in that respect. no, it's not rpm; it's the package maintainers. Get a clue.:-) Other than a couple of minor superiorities in the RPM format, Deb and RPM are pretty much the same.
And if you don't like Deb either, what do you prefer? A Ports tree? Well, me too, but I don't see it happening in the Linux world anytime soon...and I'm typing this on a Gentoo Linux machine, which has its nice Portage tree. The darn system is too far off from "standard" for stuff like StarOffice/prebuilt OpenOffice to run, as well as other prebuilt/binary-only apps.
I'd switch back to FreeBSD, but I like the possibility of running stuff like win4lin, and 3D.:-)
Oh, the ritualistic hazing I got when I went to college? I hardly remember it.
The initial install, and the pain it invokes, matters to some because some people never get past the install. Duh.
Personally, my only peeve with Debian (Sid) is that nobody can seem to maintain KDE properly, but the harder-to-maintain GNOME base seems to work peachy. The excuse I've been given is that GNOME is easier to maintain. Hrm.
Wow, you've got a lower UID than I. I bow to thee. Sorry if my comment sounded revisionist; I still stand by my KDE-programmer-naivete remark. Heck, up until QT was dual-licensed under the GPL, some of the KDE folks claimed their lawyers(!) could find nothing wrong with linking against Qt. The FSF's lawyers, however, could.
All a matter of perspective. I pored through the GPL, the QPL, etc. for hours once upon a time and I could find more than one way of interpreting it, in favor of both groups. It was never as clear-cut was it was claimed.
I'd ordinarily label this as "flamebait" and move on, but I've got to say...y'know, you're onto something.
I just had an online argument with a GNUbite and a GNOMEite about his/her (don't know which) "boycott" of KDE, because its mere existence had somehow put the Free desktop in jeopardy.
Well, here's the thing.
When I first started using Free systems (I used Linux for years, then went to FreeBSD, and back to Linux) the best I could come up with was TkDesk, and RMS didn't even like that because of Tcl licensing. At that point, GNUstep was little more than a pipe dream ('96) but now ('02) it's getting closer.
I look at it like this: the KDE project was based on Qt due to it being a nice toolkit and due to the naivete of the core team. They just weren't aware of the implications, and couldn't understand it because, let's face it, programmers aren't lawyers. Later on, some of the KDE project people worked to make Qt GPL-friendly, a fact that was completely ignored by the GNUbite crowd, and largely ignored during RMS's crowing after Qt was dual-licensed under the GPL/QPL. To admit that both sides wanted the same thing would be to admit that the GNUbites were a bit wrong to spew so much venom at the KDE crowd.
Doggone it, news items like this just show how harmful having GNOME around is for the Free desktop. Nowadays, to be free-from-cost in the KDE world, one has to release their code under a Free license. To do otherwise is to pay a princely sum to Troll Tech, which most people don't want to do. The GNOME project, however, has wanted to get into bed with commercial projects since the beginning, and this is a great example. Such a license is bad for the Free world, though they'll not admit that their darling environment would be so.
If anyone's been harmful to the Free desktop, it's GNOME, not KDE.
sorry to get on the KDE vs. GNOME tangent again; it just bothers me that GNOME, the GNU darling, is getting so darned commercial-friendly. Seems a tad contradictory. I'm not really a Free zealot at all.:-)
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It's possible, but just not for everyone. Then again, if you're on a tight budget and determined to do some computing on "ancient" hardware, you're not going to be able to do it the easy way (well, I suppose you could use Freedom Office or whatever it's called.
Of course, they're also still in development, so Vorbis has that against it. But don't give up on it yet.
Well, whatever; VNC doesn't send JPEGs. It uses its own format (unless TightVNC uses JFIF; I don't know) and most of the time only sends info on what has changed on screen.
Thanks for sharing your ignorance, though.
More like typical humorless f**k who can't take a joke.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust an OS that was cobbled-together by an ad-hoc committee of hackers (read "LINUX") as far as I could spit.
Funny, I notice you've managed to post this. What do you use, a steam-powered computer with a steam-whistle calliope(sp) acting as an analog modem? Eh? Point me toward a marginally-accepted non-hacked-together OS. If you point me toward an Apple or Microsoft product, it'll be proof that their marketing departments have done their jobs.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Remember the hype about Win95 being a total rewrite? Remember the lack of fanfare when it was discovered that wasn't true?
As for your "humorous" LINUX acronym, I can only suppose you're a BSD zealot if you're bashing cobbled-together OSes and Linux in particular. As such you have no room to talk about xenophobia. ;-D
If out-of-the-way is defined as in-your-face high-resolution-demanding and high-memory-consumption, then yes, I guess it's better.
whats the problem....if you used Linux as just an alternative to MS or because you like Unix, and not becaue it was free as in speech.
I think I understand what you're saying, though it needs a rephrase. No, I started believing in Linux because it was an alternative to the Big Two's ever-increasing bloat and let's-do-everything-kernel-level. OSX is mostly Old School, so I don't use it. And it has terrible hardware support (even the latest release.)
First words of truth from MS. Yay.
Then again, it doesn't matter, because we should all petition Apple to buy BeOS from Palm as a replacement for their bloated sack of crap, OS X. Wait, that was the rumored plan up until the day they announced OS X. My bad.
TheReverand is one of those kind souls whose self-appointed task is to troll for the sake of humanity. Rather than attempting to help fix Qt's semi-broken GTK-pixmap-engine-compatible style, this person would rather troll, complain, whine, all with tounge firmly in cheek. Or between cheeks. Ew.
Remember, if you want to improve the problem in the Free and Open Source world, the best thing to do is to either implement a solution, or try to help come up with a solution. Complaining (or trolling on the subject) incessantly only causes hard feelings, and dammit, I don't want hard feelings, as I find Windows to be a mostly-unusable sack of crap. Ditto for MacOS, especially OSX. And folks, I work with MacOS 9.2.2 at least 8 hours, 5 or 6 days a week.
I'd like to see interest in improving X apps' visual consistency, say, rathe than people shrugging and going back to cursing at Windows. Oh, and that whole spyware issue is just icky.
I'm sure glad I'm not the only one. The Slashdot crew has always liked their silly digs . . . erm, comments, and I think it's refreshing, in this period of post-dot-bomb anti-Open-Source kneejerk backlash, to have someone still pointing out that there's something out there whose licensing agreement is, well, hard to beat, in terms of ease. :-D
It may be hard to prove that they truly were hurt by MS (I'd personally blame Apple) but my own personal opinion is that consumers were hurt by the failure of what was, in my humble opinion, a superior product, and it's hard to ignore that MS's business practices made it impossible to compete as a traditional proprietary OS vendor in the x86 market.
I bet you get really annoyed when you use GNOME, too.
Well, whatever; I just know I have great luck with KDE, and terrible luck with GNOME, in other distributions. FYI, GNOME isn't just C based. It's also based on C++, Objective C, and whatever language is popular this year.
Why does Red Hat and Sun prefer Gnome?
They're afraid that, if they write something non-Free, they'll have to pay for a Qt license.
And what's with all the erm and duh? Another
You, perhaps. I was being what is known as condescending. I'm actually quite young (28) but doggone it, I feel like saying "I'm right, you're wrong."
Maybe they came to the same conclusion many do, KDE is less configurable and less stable
Nope, it's not less stable, and I'm not sure what you mean by "less configurable." I find KDE to be quite configurable.
and if KDE were'nt so braindead in some of their licence decisions in the past,
Yes, and you've said the important phrase: in the past. As in, it's over, dead, gone.
more would have embraced it to the point where it is on top. KDE can die for all I care.
That's you're decision, if you want to be so immature as to hold a grudge. Which pretty much gives me more grist for my "GNUbies holding an anti-KDE grudge."
BTW, how does it work for one to be a GNUbie AND a GNOME enthusiast when people like Miguel (and dammit, I don't care what people say; it used to be his baby exclusively) whore the project around to proprietary vendors?
I won't, especially in something so scathing in nature. For something so unforgiving to contain such an unforgivable error is, well, you know.
And the lack of English skills among some posters.
Of course, learning is hard, and choice is bad. My mistake. The current party line is "Free Software will never rule the desktop." I stand corrected, Ye Mighty Slashdot Gods.
And besides, Bob's affiliated with a company that decided to abandon the desktop as soon as the stock market went bust. Thanks for developing GNOME, guys; however, we just don't think you'll ever amount to anything. Thanks for playing anyway.
Bah. RH used to be good for the world of Linux. I'm not so sure anymore.
Of course, free upgrades for Free software isn't an issue, either. I mean, nobody else does it.
That's the nice thing about such a system: it gets the benefits of a well-tested core, so they don't have to concentrate on that (just on making an easier install, and I just installed it, and it's hella sweet) and more recent packages . . . all on this well-tested core. It doesn't get much better than this.
Duh, that was my point. Of course GNOME is more stable; more attention is paid to GNOME than to KDE, hence my peeve. In other distributions, it's Gnome, not KDE, that gives such fits, because GNOME is harder to maintain. Of course, nothing is impossible when you've got a grudge to keep.
Erm, no, actually, the probem is more likely due to the inability of Debian's maintenance tools to do recursive rebuilds i.e. if libpng gets rebuilt, rebuild everything that is dependent upon libpng. If something like that existed, it'd be far simpler for package maintainers, IMHO. Oh wait, FreeBSD already has that. Hrm.
You're really telling me that Kenwood engineers are too damned lazy to build Vorbis for the ARM7 architecture?
I'm still a little unclear on what you mean by "unique bugs." So if there's a glibc vulnerability in all distributions, it gets counted only once in the aggregate?
If so, I'll consider the numbers a little less suspect.
Thanks in advance.
Before you flame me, bother to learn a bit about the two packaging formats. More flexibility in applying patches (as many people can tell you, once you start mixing software from other distros/OSes, it's unavoidable), more robust in dependency handling (yes, rpm is better than deb in that respect. no, it's not rpm; it's the package maintainers. Get a clue.
And if you don't like Deb either, what do you prefer? A Ports tree? Well, me too, but I don't see it happening in the Linux world anytime soon...and I'm typing this on a Gentoo Linux machine, which has its nice Portage tree. The darn system is too far off from "standard" for stuff like StarOffice/prebuilt OpenOffice to run, as well as other prebuilt/binary-only apps.
I'd switch back to FreeBSD, but I like the possibility of running stuff like win4lin, and 3D.
The initial install, and the pain it invokes, matters to some because some people never get past the install. Duh.
Personally, my only peeve with Debian (Sid) is that nobody can seem to maintain KDE properly, but the harder-to-maintain GNOME base seems to work peachy. The excuse I've been given is that GNOME is easier to maintain. Hrm.
And that's a constant problem.
Way too old to be of any discussion value.
Wow, you've got a lower UID than I. I bow to thee. Sorry if my comment sounded revisionist; I still stand by my KDE-programmer-naivete remark. Heck, up until QT was dual-licensed under the GPL, some of the KDE folks claimed their lawyers(!) could find nothing wrong with linking against Qt. The FSF's lawyers, however, could.
All a matter of perspective. I pored through the GPL, the QPL, etc. for hours once upon a time and I could find more than one way of interpreting it, in favor of both groups. It was never as clear-cut was it was claimed.
I just had an online argument with a GNUbite and a GNOMEite about his/her (don't know which) "boycott" of KDE, because its mere existence had somehow put the Free desktop in jeopardy.
Well, here's the thing.
When I first started using Free systems (I used Linux for years, then went to FreeBSD, and back to Linux) the best I could come up with was TkDesk, and RMS didn't even like that because of Tcl licensing. At that point, GNUstep was little more than a pipe dream ('96) but now ('02) it's getting closer.
I look at it like this: the KDE project was based on Qt due to it being a nice toolkit and due to the naivete of the core team. They just weren't aware of the implications, and couldn't understand it because, let's face it, programmers aren't lawyers. Later on, some of the KDE project people worked to make Qt GPL-friendly, a fact that was completely ignored by the GNUbite crowd, and largely ignored during RMS's crowing after Qt was dual-licensed under the GPL/QPL. To admit that both sides wanted the same thing would be to admit that the GNUbites were a bit wrong to spew so much venom at the KDE crowd.
Doggone it, news items like this just show how harmful having GNOME around is for the Free desktop. Nowadays, to be free-from-cost in the KDE world, one has to release their code under a Free license. To do otherwise is to pay a princely sum to Troll Tech, which most people don't want to do. The GNOME project, however, has wanted to get into bed with commercial projects since the beginning, and this is a great example. Such a license is bad for the Free world, though they'll not admit that their darling environment would be so.
If anyone's been harmful to the Free desktop, it's GNOME, not KDE.
sorry to get on the KDE vs. GNOME tangent again; it just bothers me that GNOME, the GNU darling, is getting so darned commercial-friendly. Seems a tad contradictory. I'm not really a Free zealot at all.