My main question is what the interface is going to be to this. Is it going to appear as regular flash media? Will there be extended PATA and SATA commands to address the Flash/modify the drive priorities? The re-posted article says that it's only designed for Windows Vista and will not support XP; does that mean that the interface is now totally different from anything else and these drives won't work?
Finally, why the hell haven't they given Linux hackers a go at the drives? There are certainly those who would be interested in supporting the technology. AMD and Intel sure seem to (note that Linux supported x86_64 before it even shipped!)
When you get down to it, isn't virtually every company in every trade envisioning a world in which they eventually snuff out all the competition and grow to become the only source for whatever it is they do?
Sure, but there's a critical difference: very, very few can.
Why rely on frivolous lawsuits and punishing companies for having too many features in their software?
By categorizing and then dismissing out-of-hand the lawsuits as "frivolous" and "punishing [Microsoft] for having too many features", your bias wrt this topic has already been displayed.
Why not just let the options compete, and let the users decide?
I'll answer this with a question. What chance does a lone soccer player have?
While many would like to see them go under, or disappear altogether, how long before the next "MS" would step up to the plate and become the "bad guy"?
So we should live under a tyrant because other people want to be tyrants too? I don't see the logic behind that.
You just mount your disk under linux or whatever and replace ci.dll with one that always returns "yeah this file hashes OK". Could probably do it with a hex editor.
Counterpoint:
A TPM-equipped system requires support in the BIOS. Before the system boots, the BIOS will "measure" the current hardware state, storing the result in a PCR. The boot loader will also be checksummed, with the result going into another PCR. The boot loader is then run; its job is to stash a checksum of the kernel into yet another register before actually booting that kernel. Once the kernel is up, the "trusted software stack" takes charge of talking to the TPM, providing access to its services and keeping an eye on the state of the system. Systems which provide a TPM typically also include the needed BIOS support; this support could also be added by projects like FreeBIOS and OpenBIOS. There are versions of the Grub bootloader which can handle the next step; LILO patches also exist. Once the kernel is booted, the TPM driver takes over, with the user-space being handled by the TrouSerS TSS stack.
Two, that Linux has traditionally had hibernation problems (for whatever reason, which was not important to my comment) and Ubuntu is the first dist that has ever gotten it right for me on any hardware at all.
Ah. It seemed to me (due to the emphesis on same OS) that you were surprised that suspend would work on one pc and not on others. That is what I was addressing.
As such I have only a limited choice of what hardware to purchase.
True. I have found the PCs I built for Linux to work great with Linux. Unfortunately, due to market conditions, you're quite correct. It's extremely hard to get a prebuilt PC without Windows on it, much less designed for Linux and not Windows. The marketplace is very uneven.
If that URL happens to point to a sharepoint server, when you click "save" it will save it back to the site, update the document history, prompt you for any necessary meta-data, and (with 2007) kick off a workflow for (example here) document approval.
That sounds nifty. What about if it's not a Microsoft SharePoint Server. Instead, say, WebDAV or something. Or a BZR repository?
I'm sure many people can think of many other reasons why some OSes are more equal than others wrt internet and common usages of them now and particularly in the future
Ubuntu is the first linux that hibernates correctly for me, but out of two machines I've tried it on (IBM Thinkpad A21p and Dell Dimension D600) only one of them (the dell) is hibernating correctly. Same exact OS...
Sure, exact same OS, but vastly different hardware. The hardware is what is causing the problem, due to Microsoft's ACPI compiler, which nearly every vendor uses. It varies highly between vendors and even models how badly the Microsoft compiler horkage affects you. The problem is being worked on, but it's a thorny one due to the fact that you have to precisely replicate bugs in order to make things work as intended.
The long-term solution is to buy hardware from vendors who support your choice of OS on them. If you want to buy a Windows notebook, but one from a vendor that will give you 100% Windows support. If you want to buy a Linux notebook, buy one from a vendor that will give you 100% linux support. Otherwise, the hardware support is on your shoulders. No, for Linux, this is not an easy task, since so few vendors have the cojones to give Linux decent support.
Seriously....is Microsoft TRYING to chase off their customers?
Are you kidding me? They're bending over backwards to get their customers' attention. They release patches almost instantaneously for security vulnerabilities that would affect their customers, and they help their customers do what they want to get done.
You don't think that the user is Microsoft's customer, do you?
What I really want to know is why, oh, WHY, both Gnome and KDE waste so much usefull screen space.
If you don't like it, it's Linux--you're not forced into any one particular system. Many people like other window managers, like WindowMaker, FluxBox, IceBox, xfce, FVWM, and even TWM. They will provide you a much more minimalistic setup.
Additionally, you can shrink things down. It's under the panel properties under GNOME (right-click on the panel, Properties, change the "Size" setting).
I wonder whether you all who use these system feel the same thing, but in reverse, with XP's screen objects seen as too small.
Actually, I don't usually find that; I have my panels down at the minimum, and it's likely smaller than XP. Although things that I find most immediately annoying are the ugly icon set, lack of useful applets and panels, and particularly the lack of virtual desktops. Oh, and the Start Button. I like how GNOME has split it up. Oh, and the lack of Beagle. And the lack of thumbnailing of things like PDFs. I'll stop now; it's starting to sound zealoty. Thank goodness I don't have to use Windows that often.:)
my laptop hangs on the formatting stage of installation.
Weird. I have an ancient Satellite (1605CDS) and its chipset was slightly quirky. It would lock up suspending to disk if I had enabled DMA. But DMA-would be auto-enabled if I booted up *once* with DMA enabled and then warm-rebooted without it being explicitly enabled, and then it would suspend fine. Very strange. It sounds potentially like a quirky chip, but we can't be sure until someone can take a look at it. If you have a Linux friend, I'd recommend taking it to him/her to be checked out.
Or it might be that Sony doesn't target their hardware at Linux users.
I entirely agree with this point, which is why I recommend that people who want to run Linux not buy Sony computers. Tragic, really, considering their support for Linux on their console.
The desktop market isn't moving where you think it's moving, i.e. towards Linux. Not gonna happen.
If the market were truly free, then I suspect there would be much more of it. Unfortunately, the deck is stacked against Anything But Windows succeeding in the marketplace (note that all competitors that tried to operate in the IBM-compatible PC space have been crushed under Microsoft's little toe, and that the sole main competitors right now are only in existance because the first tries not to directly compete, and the other simply is not a company. More on this in a bit. But by and large, right, now, very few Windows users are switching to Linux.
That said, your statement is overly simplistic. Some segments of the market are, particularly in other regions (e.g. Extremedura, Spain) and in some segments of the market, e.g. developers' desktops and some nice submarkets (last I heard, some call centers were switching). But the largest difference is likely regional, not market.
Or that people don't WANT the alternatives.
That is one option, and certainly there are people who truly want Windows. In my experience, however, the vast majority do not like Windows, yet they continue to purchase it because they feel that it's what they need because they are locked in by file formats (e.g. MSOffice, PhotoShop, etc), and by their applications, and because that is all that the market really supports right now. Chicken, meet egg.
If lots of people didn't want Windows on laptops, they would buy from places that didn't sell Windows, or specifically request it
Again, you're being too simplistic. There are very very few places that don't ship Windows (at least as an option), let alone shipping with something else. Sure, they exist, but most users won't know about them. Apple isn't trying to be a threat the same way that Linux is, and additionally they're kind of grandfathered in to the market.
More effort needs to be put in to reverse engineering
All of a billion pieces of hardware, sure. It's also a very very very slow, painstaking process. Especially when the hardware is very complex (e.g. video cards). It's not the panacaea you seem to think it is, nor is it very robust (things could break in the next minor revision of the card, particularly with wireless vendors jumping chip *vendors* within the same product line!)
or making a stable driver ABI so that Broadcom can release their own drivers.
I would tend to agree that a stable ABI would work better for proprietary device driver development, although stable usespace APIs exist for some systems (e.g. USB, though that would be of no help here). Dell has a stable framework for proprietary device drivers, and Novell (I think, unless it was Red Hat) recently broke ground on a binary driver support system.
And even then, you are still assuming that Broadcom will want to support Linux. They may have other interests, and they may have external pressures preventing them from doing that.
I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 and unfortunately the broadcom wireless didnt work. I went to the forum and wasted something like 4 hours trying to get the firmware copy it to the/var/firmware folder and doing other dozen tricks to *try* to make it work. Of coruse without success.
It's not Ubuntu's fault that Broadcom refuses to let Linux developers work with their hardware. There are a large numbers of wireless chips whose vendors are not hostile, and they work very well (indeed, right out of the box with Ubuntu). I personally recommend Intel chips, or else Atheros-based or Prism-based cards.
Then I proceeded to download the brand new Ati drivers and after installing them and wandering trou the forums I wasted another 5 hours trying to make my Ati IGP Radeon 9100 3D acceleration work.
It's not Ubuntu's fault that ATI's drivers don't work with your card, and it's not Ubuntu's fault that ATI refuses to let Linux developers support your card. For the "Just Works" factor, highly recommend either an ATI 9200 or below (where ATI provided the devs specs) or Intel video.
Oh, and while Ubuntu did have suspend and hibernate when I installed Kubuntu (ubuntu crashed randomly when login in on my laptop... just after a fresh install), and Kubuntu did not showed any place to hibernate or suspend. Oh and when you connect/disconnect the AC the tray icion is not updated accordingly,
It sounds to me like your laptop's ACPI implementation is broken. Broken hardware is not Ubuntu's fault. With the proper information, the developers work around the various broken pieces of hwardare, just like the vendors do for their Windows drivers. Again, there's nothing Ubuntu can do to make the hardware vendor play nice with them, and there is little they can do to make random broken pieces of hardware work.
in Ubuntu if you change the time (say from 9:00 to 8:00) double clicking the clock, the change is NOT reflected until after some time passes.
I've not seen this. It's worked well for me.
So, no, there are several problems with Ubuntu
No, there are several problems with the hardware and the vendors' support for Linux and precious little Ubuntu can do to change it.
Seriously. A darned lot of hardware is broken, but because they only have to support Windows, they work around it in drivers. And then, to boot, Linux gets blamed because they "don't work with it", implying that somehow, Linux should magically know how to make random pieces of hostile hardware work with it. The world doesn't work that way. And additionally, there are some notable vendors who refuse to either produce Linux drivers or to give the Linux devs information to support their hardware (iirc, the broadcomm drivers are very slowly and painstakingly reverse-engineered). Again, if the OS market were among a couple of equal vendors, hardware vendors would support standards, and things would truly work out of the box (because the OSes would follow the standards too), and on any OS. Given the market situation, there are two things you can do to use Linux: 1) Buy hardware that supports Linux and 2) Stop using Windows. 1) ensures that your hardware will work with Linux now and 2) ensures that general hardware will work with Linux later.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know if any Linux/FOSS hackers are active on this project?
My main question is what the interface is going to be to this. Is it going to appear as regular flash media? Will there be extended PATA and SATA commands to address the Flash/modify the drive priorities? The re-posted article says that it's only designed for Windows Vista and will not support XP; does that mean that the interface is now totally different from anything else and these drives won't work?
Finally, why the hell haven't they given Linux hackers a go at the drives? There are certainly those who would be interested in supporting the technology. AMD and Intel sure seem to (note that Linux supported x86_64 before it even shipped!)
Sure, but there's a critical difference: very, very few can.
Fun times. Heh.
haha. Wow. Way to lean to avoid the point.
I note your lack of replying to my question.
By categorizing and then dismissing out-of-hand the lawsuits as "frivolous" and "punishing [Microsoft] for having too many features", your bias wrt this topic has already been displayed.
I'll answer this with a question. What chance does a lone soccer player have?
So we should live under a tyrant because other people want to be tyrants too? I don't see the logic behind that.
Counterpoint:
source
Seems like this is possible in Linux today, and is a good idea in my opinion.
Caveat: your Designed For Windows Vista computer may not boot anything else in the near future....
Interesting. Thanks for the update.
Ah. It seemed to me (due to the emphesis on same OS) that you were surprised that suspend would work on one pc and not on others. That is what I was addressing.
True. I have found the PCs I built for Linux to work great with Linux. Unfortunately, due to market conditions, you're quite correct. It's extremely hard to get a prebuilt PC without Windows on it, much less designed for Linux and not Windows. The marketplace is very uneven.
I'm sure many people can think of many other reasons why some OSes are more equal than others wrt internet and common usages of them now and particularly in the future
Sure, exact same OS, but vastly different hardware. The hardware is what is causing the problem, due to Microsoft's ACPI compiler, which nearly every vendor uses. It varies highly between vendors and even models how badly the Microsoft compiler horkage affects you. The problem is being worked on, but it's a thorny one due to the fact that you have to precisely replicate bugs in order to make things work as intended.
The long-term solution is to buy hardware from vendors who support your choice of OS on them. If you want to buy a Windows notebook, but one from a vendor that will give you 100% Windows support. If you want to buy a Linux notebook, buy one from a vendor that will give you 100% linux support. Otherwise, the hardware support is on your shoulders. No, for Linux, this is not an easy task, since so few vendors have the cojones to give Linux decent support.
man 2 capget
man 7 capabilities
Are you kidding me? They're bending over backwards to get their customers' attention. They release patches almost instantaneously for security vulnerabilities that would affect their customers, and they help their customers do what they want to get done.
You don't think that the user is Microsoft's customer, do you?
If you don't like it, it's Linux--you're not forced into any one particular system. Many people like other window managers, like WindowMaker, FluxBox, IceBox, xfce, FVWM, and even TWM. They will provide you a much more minimalistic setup.
Additionally, you can shrink things down. It's under the panel properties under GNOME (right-click on the panel, Properties, change the "Size" setting).
Actually, I don't usually find that; I have my panels down at the minimum, and it's likely smaller than XP. Although things that I find most immediately annoying are the ugly icon set, lack of useful applets and panels, and particularly the lack of virtual desktops. Oh, and the Start Button. I like how GNOME has split it up. Oh, and the lack of Beagle. And the lack of thumbnailing of things like PDFs. I'll stop now; it's starting to sound zealoty. Thank goodness I don't have to use Windows that often. :)
That cozy feeling that what you're running is what everyone else is running.
Weird. I have an ancient Satellite (1605CDS) and its chipset was slightly quirky. It would lock up suspending to disk if I had enabled DMA. But DMA-would be auto-enabled if I booted up *once* with DMA enabled and then warm-rebooted without it being explicitly enabled, and then it would suspend fine. Very strange. It sounds potentially like a quirky chip, but we can't be sure until someone can take a look at it. If you have a Linux friend, I'd recommend taking it to him/her to be checked out.
I entirely agree with this point, which is why I recommend that people who want to run Linux not buy Sony computers. Tragic, really, considering their support for Linux on their console.
If the market were truly free, then I suspect there would be much more of it. Unfortunately, the deck is stacked against Anything But Windows succeeding in the marketplace (note that all competitors that tried to operate in the IBM-compatible PC space have been crushed under Microsoft's little toe, and that the sole main competitors right now are only in existance because the first tries not to directly compete, and the other simply is not a company. More on this in a bit. But by and large, right, now, very few Windows users are switching to Linux.
That said, your statement is overly simplistic. Some segments of the market are, particularly in other regions (e.g. Extremedura, Spain) and in some segments of the market, e.g. developers' desktops and some nice submarkets (last I heard, some call centers were switching). But the largest difference is likely regional, not market.
That is one option, and certainly there are people who truly want Windows. In my experience, however, the vast majority do not like Windows, yet they continue to purchase it because they feel that it's what they need because they are locked in by file formats (e.g. MSOffice, PhotoShop, etc), and by their applications, and because that is all that the market really supports right now. Chicken, meet egg.
Again, you're being too simplistic. There are very very few places that don't ship Windows (at least as an option), let alone shipping with something else. Sure, they exist, but most users won't know about them. Apple isn't trying to be a threat the same way that Linux is, and additionally they're kind of grandfathered in to the market.
All of a billion pieces of hardware, sure. It's also a very very very slow, painstaking process. Especially when the hardware is very complex (e.g. video cards). It's not the panacaea you seem to think it is, nor is it very robust (things could break in the next minor revision of the card, particularly with wireless vendors jumping chip *vendors* within the same product line!)
I would tend to agree that a stable ABI would work better for proprietary device driver development, although stable usespace APIs exist for some systems (e.g. USB, though that would be of no help here). Dell has a stable framework for proprietary device drivers, and Novell (I think, unless it was Red Hat) recently broke ground on a binary driver support system.
And even then, you are still assuming that Broadcom will want to support Linux. They may have other interests, and they may have external pressures preventing them from doing that.
Explain to me how it's linux's fault, please.
It's not Ubuntu's fault that Broadcom refuses to let Linux developers work with their hardware. There are a large numbers of wireless chips whose vendors are not hostile, and they work very well (indeed, right out of the box with Ubuntu). I personally recommend Intel chips, or else Atheros-based or Prism-based cards.
It's not Ubuntu's fault that ATI's drivers don't work with your card, and it's not Ubuntu's fault that ATI refuses to let Linux developers support your card. For the "Just Works" factor, highly recommend either an ATI 9200 or below (where ATI provided the devs specs) or Intel video.
It sounds to me like your laptop's ACPI implementation is broken. Broken hardware is not Ubuntu's fault. With the proper information, the developers work around the various broken pieces of hwardare, just like the vendors do for their Windows drivers. Again, there's nothing Ubuntu can do to make the hardware vendor play nice with them, and there is little they can do to make random broken pieces of hardware work.
I've not seen this. It's worked well for me.
No, there are several problems with the hardware and the vendors' support for Linux and precious little Ubuntu can do to change it.
Seriously. A darned lot of hardware is broken, but because they only have to support Windows, they work around it in drivers. And then, to boot, Linux gets blamed because they "don't work with it", implying that somehow, Linux should magically know how to make random pieces of hostile hardware work with it. The world doesn't work that way. And additionally, there are some notable vendors who refuse to either produce Linux drivers or to give the Linux devs information to support their hardware (iirc, the broadcomm drivers are very slowly and painstakingly reverse-engineered). Again, if the OS market were among a couple of equal vendors, hardware vendors would support standards, and things would truly work out of the box (because the OSes would follow the standards too), and on any OS. Given the market situation, there are two things you can do to use Linux: 1) Buy hardware that supports Linux and 2) Stop using Windows. 1) ensures that your hardware will work with Linux now and 2) ensures that general hardware will work with Linux later.
Cool. Thanks for the link.