Interestingly enough, the track he downloaded [Somersault (DangerMouse Remix) by Zero7] isn't copyright protected, sine it's a remix.
Wouldn't a remix be considered a derivative work of a copyrighted piece of art, and thus be copyrighted itself (quite probably with royalty payments or at least permission from the original author, with the exception of true parody).
Even if the original work was in the public domain, a derivative work based off of it (like a Disney movie from an old storytale) is still copyrighted.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Just because an artist wants something to be freely available doesn't make it part of the public domain, it just means he or she hasn't "reserved all rights".
As far as I'm aware, there's no way to connect two iPods directly to each other. If you could use a small USB hub and a pocket PC to bridge the two, I could see that being a lot more useful than having two PocketPCs, each equipped with wifi adapters.
I prefer software RAID 1. When I first set it up, I could only afford 2 120 gig disks. I kept one drive per controller (cable) and split the two disks between the built-on controller and a cheap (~$35) Promise IDE controller. I recently ran out of space and bought 2 200 gig disks, and another promise controller. The controllers play nicely together, and again I split the two drives between the two physical cards. That way, any one physical card can die and I still have my data.
I like RAID 1 because you can mount either drive alone, on any system, and get at your data. No dependence on a particular RAID controller, and perfect redundancy (RAID5 only allows 1 disk to die at a time). I ran into some stupid setup problems with the second set of disks and used the ability to mount a disk alone, without using the RAID driver in Linux (md).
Granted, you don't get as much total space, but the redundancy and ease of adding/removing 2-disk sets is key. You also get a performance hit on writes, but since my usage is primarily reads, this wasn't a huge factor for me. At 5 hard drives now, I had to upgrade the power supply (well, I didn't try the crappy one), and added a fan (I may add another).
why haven't we done anything significantly larger? (Maybe because it's impossible? Give the idea a fair shot.)
The link itself says, "no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so." (emphasis mine).
In my opinion, if it doesn't violate a fundamental law, it's by definition not impossible.
As others have said, most applications support both types of clipboards. The ones that only support one, or confuse the two, are becoming few and far between (in my experience).
That said, I've become so accustomed to the select->middle click routine that I find myself missing it in Windows or non-X11 apps in Mac OS X. The biggest problem is obviously wanting to replace the selected text with pasted text, but I find myself working around that.
I use tons of tabs while browsing, so I've become accustomed to opening new tabs and hitting the middle mouse button in the location bar. No clicking to focus on it, it just works. Alternatively, you could middle-click on the window itself (at least in Mozilla), but I usually use the former way.
I find myself wanting to replace rather than append mostly while word processing. Fortunately, Open Office's clipboard support works well for me, so I use the standard ctrl-c ctrl-v method there.
Because the support for both clipboards is nearly universal in the applications I use, I find myself far preferring X11 to Windows because I have a choice.
I'd be interested in software (for X/KDE, as I'm a Linux user) that allows you to custom-specify the dimensions and positions of a few "pseudo-maximize" zones. Say you have one wide screen. Maybe split it up 1/2 and 1/2 or 2/3 1/3 zones. If the majority of a window is within a particular zone, when you hit the maximize button (or perhaps an additional button instead), it maximizes to that zone.
Maybe someone's done this already, but I've never come across it. In the age of more widescreen laptops and desktops I could see a definite advantage. Maximize a browser in the 2/3 zone and a terminal in the 1/3 zone on a particular virtual desktop, etc.
We derive benefit from the pro bono work in other ways as well. When we are testing out a new release we can put it on bkbits.net and we know in seconds if we have broken something important; people use old versions of BK to talk to bkbits.net every few seconds.
Perhaps having the repository where Linux and other projects are hosted being broken to older clients now and then is a bad thing for a community (though the bk people obviously see it as positive for them - free testing). I understand they're providing everything for free, but perhaps Linux might be better off on a community-supported service (still running Bitkeeper) that is concerned a bit more production status?
I'm not intimately familiar with this, so it's just my two cents, feel free to argue.
When I gave the stage 2 CDs a shot in Feb, the athlon xp disks locked up on boot. I didn't have to time to do a full stage 1 install (having never done it before), so I gave up on gentoo for a while.
I've been thinking of trying it out, as I think there's a new set of CDs out. It wasn't my image, either - I redownloaded them and reburned the CDs, same problem. Not quite sure what was failing, but I didn't have time back then to figure it out.
Bottom-posting works well in newgroup or mailing list discussions where people might be entering the conversation at any point. However, I've found that top-posting is most convenient in circumstances where all the conversing parties (especially if there are just two parties involved) use top-posting, as there is no need to scroll down to see the newest addition. If someone by chance enters the conversation late, they still have the info, but it's more convenienct for the majority.
On the other hand, some posts (especially Slashdot comments) work well with inline posting. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to a mess and having to keep track of the carets/indenting/whatever to figure out who said what and when...thus, it works best in instances where there are few communications back and forth (again, like Slashdot responses).
Oh yeah, and being the one person to bottom post in a series of messages is far more annoying that just going with the flow. It's kinda like the mass media using the term "hacker" when we might prefer "cracker", you're swimming upstream and humans aren't very good at being salmon (wow, terribly analogy, I know).
I notice that there is no comment to the middle ground, testing is a good one to go with and has (sometimes) faster updates to security fixes.
This isn't from personal experience, but I've read that testing is actually the slowest to receive security updates, as patches spend some time in unstable before getting moved to testing. I believe this was in a discussion on debian-devel at one point, as it isn't on Debian Security's FAQ. The consensus was that testing was as slow or slower than unstable when compared to stable
Stable is really meant to be stable, it should work predictably first, reliably second.
(apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages)
RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?
Let me be the first to say I'm a big Debian fan. I use it on several computers. However, using Debian unstable on my main workstation for about a year was not the most pleasant experience. I don't remember everything, but I'll list a few of the more major annoyances:
1.) Some of us really don't want to download 20 (or over 100) packages, many of them the same update as last week, just to stay up to date with security holes.
2.) Though Debian fans love to say "just use unstable if you want the latest", Debian unstable is often _not_ faster than Fedora or Mandrake at getting the latest version of X, KDE, GNOME, or many other applications. IIRC, it took some time before Debian unstable got KDE 3. Yes, you can add additional sources (which I, actually, do with FC1 on my main workstation now to get the very latest KDE - kde-redhat)
3.) Debian Unstable is not the first priority of the Debian Security project. As such, I wouldn't trust a Debian unstable computer with any directly open ports to the internet, as even the latest "apt-get upgrade" may not fix security bugs that are fixed in Debian stable.
4.) At times, Debian unstable can truly be unstable. For a few weeks sometime last year (January?), KDE broke. A workaround was found a short while later, but it took a few weeks for the packages themselves to be fixed. Depending on what you have installed, Debian unstable can feel rather buggy.
All of this led me to install Debian stable on my computer last spring, which stayed until I got a new computer this February. I found that so long as I grabbed the latest KDE from kde.org's unofficial Debian packages, the system felt pretty new. However, I started to wish for a more updated feel with regards to fonts (which often look terrible in Debian, especially unstable, and I'm not the only one who couldn't quite figure out how to fix them). A more updated application set and the same ability to apt-get a bunch of packages made Fedora feel really nice on my new workstation. Fonts are beautiful, and the kde-redhat project does a nice job of packaging up the latest and greatest KDE. When I do apt-get upgrade, I often get some larger or non-essential upgrades, but it doesn't seem to be the quantity that I went through with Debian unstable. I didn't have to put much fuss into getting my system to look great _and_ have the niceties of the apt system.
I kept browsing the Debian-devel mailing list, hoping to see some sign of when we might see a new release, but some legal and technical issues seem to be pushing it back quite a ways. Therefore, I'm now a believer in the "Debian for the server" mentality. Never before has my desktop looked and functioned so cleanly, with OpenOffice now using some KDE widgets (thanks to the packaging from kde-redhat, I wouldn't have realized it was available otherwise). There was a strange problem with Mozilla in Debian where the occasional line of text would have part of the characters "shifted" a few pixels, which was very distracting. That made me switch to Konqueror way back when, and I still don't use Mozilla much at home - but it's nice to know that in Fedora the Mozilla fonts look great.
Sorry for the long rant, but I think I've got a decent perspective of one user who's tried both Debian unstable, stable, and Fedora on the desktop, and to me it just isn't worth the hassle to use Debian.
My next notebook will probably contain a low-power processor. There'e the Servelinux Enote for $800 that uses a Via processor like my mini-itx motherboard, but I suspect that AMD will be able to come up with something that's a little faster (it doesn't need to be blazing, but a 800 Mhz Via runs like a 600 Mhz P3 it seems).
I'd like to have either a 2.5-3lb subnotebook with a nice 12" screen (and preferably below $1k, like the Servelinux), or a ~4lb notebook that gets a much longer battery life than anything else on the market (besides maybe a Mac), but also is below $1k. No CDROM or large screen needed in my case, cause I'm not looking for a desktop replacement.
For now, though, the Servelinux enote is too obscure for me to look at it seriously, and I'll stick with my used 7020 (?) Toshiba Portege (at a little over 4 lbs I think, with a nearly useless battery).
I've personally seen and played with the enote, anyone have comments on other laptops in the same category (maybe from Transmeta instead?). Cheap, light, and fast, pick three; I like cheap and light.
Re:Lack of decent up to date software.
on
Zaurus SL-6000 Review
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· Score: 4, Informative
Just don't buy it if you're looking for an organiser, you'll be bitterly disappointed.
As the proud owner of a now obsolete Handspring Visor and having just purchased a "new" Zaurus 5500 on Ebay, I basically agree.
Everything on a Palm is instant. It may not have every feature you want, and until recently, the screens had pretty poor resolution (Sony is the exception). However, the applications worked well, and had reasonable interfaces so they could be used quickly.
I quickly abandoned the Sharp ROM for the Zaurus in favor of OpenZaurus, but I've certainly had my frustrations with bugs and missing features. Some small things, like the ability for the application buttons to turn on the device (like a Palm), and some larger things, like having it not reboot properly the second time if you haven't suspended in between (though there is an unofficial fix).
Why am I rebooting in the first place? Because of the Zaurus' greatest aspect - it's basically a fully-functional Linux system. As such, one can tweak, test, and otherwise poke around (sometimes needing a reboot if something got messed up or you're testing something). Some Zaurus applications I've found I've had no good free Palm equivalent. Zee Cookbook is a great, if somewhat slow (when editing), way to keep a database of recipes on hand. QTJournal is a great way to take notes that are categorized by date and subject. The ability to run just about any console-based Linux software (even the statistical software R) makes it very useful as a sysadmin tool. With a small, cheap wireless card from Ebay, it is often more convenient than lugging around a laptop.
Some of the things I've wanted to use my Zaurus for before I bought it work, and some don't (yet). I got xmms running and it plays OGG files well (but the included mediaplayer with openzaurus doesn't, and the Sharp ROM's media player has a horrendous interface). I can control the Zaurus remotely via ssh (VERY handy for exploring with a real keyboard) and VNC (with the framebuffer vnc package). However, the latter doesn't offer even basic security (and I haven't gotten iptables to work), so I'm reluctant to use it often, mostly out of principle.
I got the xvnc server running, but the vncviewer client to view it simply will not connect to it, or any other vnc server. I've seen a few other reports of this behavior but no fix, and most people seem to have no problem. This combo is supposed to allow the use of any X11 application on the Zaurus itself, and more importantly for me, remote X applications (so I can control xmms on my music server with a wireless connection - the ultimate remote). If anyone has a suggestion about this, I'd be happy to hear it.
My other problem is mail - mailit (included with OpenZaurus) is simplistic, but more importantly doesn't work for one of my domains (not sure why this is). I can telnet manually to port 110 and execute pop commands fine, but this mail client barks about an unknown response from the server. QTmail doesn't work either - it gives host not found or something like that.
For the price I paid, I get far more functionality than I ever did from a Visor, but the Zaurus definitely has its frustrations. The PIM apps are nothing much to speak of, they function, but are slower than their Palm equivalents (this, again is on OpenZaurus). My greatest desire - the ability to have tree-view tasks, is not implemented on either my Handspring or any version of "todo" on the Zaurus that I've used.
So it's not perfect, but you can still pry it from my cold, dead hands.
"By Example" books a great idea
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Obviously teaching things by example is not new, but far too many computer books on too many subjects (especially programming) don't use enough examples to illustrate their points. Some just use poor examples.
Samba is one of those setups where the total amount of functionality is far more than many users need, so a collection of well-designed examples will greatly speed one's implementation (and reduce common security problems). Fortunately the default config file has improved in Samba to the point where it's not too difficult to setup basic printer/filesystem sharing.
These "cookbook" style books obviously can't replace a reference, but they often are more useful as a starting point. I've spent over five years on unix systems now, but I still groan at the lack of examples in the man pages of more obscure command line software. Google often comes through, provided I can think of a good phrase that describes what I'm trying to do ("search and replace with perl command line" - perl -pi -e 's/searchterm/replaceterm/g' [filenames], btw).
"i still dont have a fully functional sound card. granted, this card (turtle beach santa cruz) has many known problems with linux, and some people have been able to get it to work fully - but i have not talked or read a response from any of them"
I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card running in Debian stable. I found ALSA drivers to be much better than OSS, and Debian packages those for its stable 2.4 kernel.
Granted, I only use two channel audio output (it connects to a stereo receiver), but it sounds terrific. I can't speak for recording quality or hardware decoding, sorry (it's on mini-itx board in a smallish case as my music "server").
# This file was automatically generated by alsa-base's debconf stuff alias char-major-116 snd alias char-major-14 soundcore
options snd major=116 cards_limit=4
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
Hope it helps. If you use a modern distro with the 2.6 kernel (Mandrake 10, Fedora core 2 test2), ALSA is used by default, and probably a lot newer version than the one Debian stable distributes.
I'm sure the responses in the discussion of this article have already touched on these points, but here it goes:
none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
I think the above empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
1.) We have no way of judging the competence of this user with respect to Linux. Just because he got it working in Windows - sometimes with "from CD" drivers, means only that he knows how to setup hardware in Windows. Does he know he'll need to manually enable kernel modules in Debian with modconf? Did he know what he should be searching for in usenet? Granted, these are things that average user will not know or want to know, but I strongly suspect this author has a much stronger grasp of the Windows way of doing things.
2.) If his hardware is "new" as he claims - it wouldn't really be fully supported in win9x. But because he (IIRC) never gave the card type, we won't know just how "well" it worked in Windows.
3.) Most Windows users do not install their own OS and do not add their own hardware - they call on skilled friends or shops to do it for them. A sound card is not a printer, scanner, or camera (though we can talk about the ease of using those in Linux at another time)
and the most important argument:
4.) One computer with one type of hardware and one user is a laughably small basis to claim that Windows has more broad hardware support than Linux. Absolutely absurd. It may be able to be argued on some levels. This article is better suited as an anecdote of how Linux should continue to try to improve its automatic hardware recognition and Xandros' customer support quality.
I'm sure this article can be criticized from many more perspectives, and that my four can be refuted in some respects. However, that this passed as some sort of journalism makes me lose what little faith I have in the tech-writing community. If you want a decent end-user perspective on technology, read Walter Mossberg (sp?) in The Wall Street Journal. He's not perfect, but he's certainly better than this guy.
I used to be a Mandrake user, but I got sick of the fact that once you install, there are no easely automated ways to update yoyr software.
You mean like "MandrakeUpdate"? Or from the command-line:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi --auto --auto-select
Just be sure to specify a good update source first, because the initial selection (at least in 9.X) are pretty bogged down. The updates are mirrored all over the place though.
Oh yes, Sun is just _great_ for Linux. Right. Just look at what they did to Cobalt - they bought up a company that made a decent product for its market, and failed to provide timely updates and significant new products in the line. As such instead of building on a name that was just starting to great traction and a certain bit of respect, they let it whither.
No, I doubt Sun is doing the Linux community such a big favor with the Java Desktop (as I understand it it's basically a reworked version of GNOME...) Sun hasn't exactly been a rousing success in the desktop market - they stuck with CDE for a long time (it has its fans, but I'm not one of them), and now is shipping a rather stock install of GNOME, at least with Solaris x86. Big deal - I'm not looking to Sun to "revitalize the Linux desktop". Novell on the other hand, just might make a nice enterprise bundle with its trusted server products (though as I understand are losing market share) and a decent client based off SuSE.
IMHO, Sun likes to dip its feet occasionally into Linux, but I won't be surprised if it pulls out just as its getting started (like Corel did).
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, it's:
Aaaghhhhh!!!!, I'm on FIRE! Hel#$%*&^# &@ [No Carrier]
Interestingly enough, the track he downloaded [Somersault (DangerMouse Remix) by Zero7] isn't copyright protected, sine it's a remix.
Wouldn't a remix be considered a derivative work of a copyrighted piece of art, and thus be copyrighted itself (quite probably with royalty payments or at least permission from the original author, with the exception of true parody).
Even if the original work was in the public domain, a derivative work based off of it (like a Disney movie from an old storytale) is still copyrighted.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Just because an artist wants something to be freely available doesn't make it part of the public domain, it just means he or she hasn't "reserved all rights".
As far as I'm aware, there's no way to connect two iPods directly to each other. If you could use a small USB hub and a pocket PC to bridge the two, I could see that being a lot more useful than having two PocketPCs, each equipped with wifi adapters.
Just a thought.
Take out the laptop hard drive, buy yourself a $5 desktop IDE to laptop IDE converter, and install it from any computer you'd like.
They do after all emit co2. I wonder if you can smell them?
o mp /co2.html
"Carbon dioxide is a colourless odourless gas"
http://www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/chem/dolchem/html/c
I prefer software RAID 1. When I first set it up, I could only afford 2 120 gig disks. I kept one drive per controller (cable) and split the two disks between the built-on controller and a cheap (~$35) Promise IDE controller. I recently ran out of space and bought 2 200 gig disks, and another promise controller. The controllers play nicely together, and again I split the two drives between the two physical cards. That way, any one physical card can die and I still have my data.
I like RAID 1 because you can mount either drive alone, on any system, and get at your data. No dependence on a particular RAID controller, and perfect redundancy (RAID5 only allows 1 disk to die at a time). I ran into some stupid setup problems with the second set of disks and used the ability to mount a disk alone, without using the RAID driver in Linux (md).
Granted, you don't get as much total space, but the redundancy and ease of adding/removing 2-disk sets is key. You also get a performance hit on writes, but since my usage is primarily reads, this wasn't a huge factor for me. At 5 hard drives now, I had to upgrade the power supply (well, I didn't try the crappy one), and added a fan (I may add another).
why haven't we done anything significantly larger? (Maybe because it's impossible? Give the idea a fair shot.)
The link itself says, "no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so." (emphasis mine).
In my opinion, if it doesn't violate a fundamental law, it's by definition not impossible.
It plays all my ogg files without problems (a friends iriver could only handle lower bitrate ogg files).
I can't speak for all iriver devices but my wife's new iHP-120 (20 GB) plays quality 9 (~320 kbit/sec) OGGs just fine.
As others have said, most applications support both types of clipboards. The ones that only support one, or confuse the two, are becoming few and far between (in my experience).
That said, I've become so accustomed to the select->middle click routine that I find myself missing it in Windows or non-X11 apps in Mac OS X. The biggest problem is obviously wanting to replace the selected text with pasted text, but I find myself working around that.
I use tons of tabs while browsing, so I've become accustomed to opening new tabs and hitting the middle mouse button in the location bar. No clicking to focus on it, it just works. Alternatively, you could middle-click on the window itself (at least in Mozilla), but I usually use the former way.
I find myself wanting to replace rather than append mostly while word processing. Fortunately, Open Office's clipboard support works well for me, so I use the standard ctrl-c ctrl-v method there.
Because the support for both clipboards is nearly universal in the applications I use, I find myself far preferring X11 to Windows because I have a choice.
No, Heston is quoted out of context in a very dishonest way.
"'Blackmail' is such an ugly word. I prefer 'extortion'" -Darl McBride
I'm no fan of SCO, but something tells me that was taken out of context.
Feel free to prove me wrong.
I'd be interested in software (for X/KDE, as I'm a Linux user) that allows you to custom-specify the dimensions and positions of a few "pseudo-maximize" zones. Say you have one wide screen. Maybe split it up 1/2 and 1/2 or 2/3 1/3 zones. If the majority of a window is within a particular zone, when you hit the maximize button (or perhaps an additional button instead), it maximizes to that zone.
Maybe someone's done this already, but I've never come across it. In the age of more widescreen laptops and desktops I could see a definite advantage. Maximize a browser in the 2/3 zone and a terminal in the 1/3 zone on a particular virtual desktop, etc.
We derive benefit from the pro bono work in other ways as well. When we are testing out a new release we can put it on bkbits.net and we know in seconds if we have broken something important; people use old versions of BK to talk to bkbits.net every few seconds.
Perhaps having the repository where Linux and other projects are hosted being broken to older clients now and then is a bad thing for a community (though the bk people obviously see it as positive for them - free testing). I understand they're providing everything for free, but perhaps Linux might be better off on a community-supported service (still running Bitkeeper) that is concerned a bit more production status?
I'm not intimately familiar with this, so it's just my two cents, feel free to argue.
When I gave the stage 2 CDs a shot in Feb, the athlon xp disks locked up on boot. I didn't have to time to do a full stage 1 install (having never done it before), so I gave up on gentoo for a while.
I've been thinking of trying it out, as I think there's a new set of CDs out. It wasn't my image, either - I redownloaded them and reburned the CDs, same problem. Not quite sure what was failing, but I didn't have time back then to figure it out.
Bottom-posting works well in newgroup or mailing list discussions where people might be entering the conversation at any point. However, I've found that top-posting is most convenient in circumstances where all the conversing parties (especially if there are just two parties involved) use top-posting, as there is no need to scroll down to see the newest addition. If someone by chance enters the conversation late, they still have the info, but it's more convenienct for the majority.
On the other hand, some posts (especially Slashdot comments) work well with inline posting. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to a mess and having to keep track of the carets/indenting/whatever to figure out who said what and when...thus, it works best in instances where there are few communications back and forth (again, like Slashdot responses).
Oh yeah, and being the one person to bottom post in a series of messages is far more annoying that just going with the flow. It's kinda like the mass media using the term "hacker" when we might prefer "cracker", you're swimming upstream and humans aren't very good at being salmon (wow, terribly analogy, I know).
I notice that there is no comment to the middle ground, testing is a good one to go with and has (sometimes) faster updates to security fixes.
This isn't from personal experience, but I've read that testing is actually the slowest to receive security updates, as patches spend some time in unstable before getting moved to testing. I believe this was in a discussion on debian-devel at one point, as it isn't on Debian Security's FAQ. The consensus was that testing was as slow or slower than unstable when compared to stable
Stable is really meant to be stable, it should work predictably first, reliably second.
Reliably is a basically synonym for predictably:
"1. Capable of being relied on; dependable[...]
2. Yielding the same or compatible results in different clinical experiments or statistical trials."
I would think that "reliable" is one of the major goals of Debian stable.
(apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages)
RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?
Let me be the first to say I'm a big Debian fan. I use it on several computers. However, using Debian unstable on my main workstation for about a year was not the most pleasant experience. I don't remember everything, but I'll list a few of the more major annoyances:
1.) Some of us really don't want to download 20 (or over 100) packages, many of them the same update as last week, just to stay up to date with security holes.
2.) Though Debian fans love to say "just use unstable if you want the latest", Debian unstable is often _not_ faster than Fedora or Mandrake at getting the latest version of X, KDE, GNOME, or many other applications. IIRC, it took some time before Debian unstable got KDE 3. Yes, you can add additional sources (which I, actually, do with FC1 on my main workstation now to get the very latest KDE - kde-redhat)
3.) Debian Unstable is not the first priority of the Debian Security project. As such, I wouldn't trust a Debian unstable computer with any directly open ports to the internet, as even the latest "apt-get upgrade" may not fix security bugs that are fixed in Debian stable.
4.) At times, Debian unstable can truly be unstable. For a few weeks sometime last year (January?), KDE broke. A workaround was found a short while later, but it took a few weeks for the packages themselves to be fixed. Depending on what you have installed, Debian unstable can feel rather buggy.
All of this led me to install Debian stable on my computer last spring, which stayed until I got a new computer this February. I found that so long as I grabbed the latest KDE from kde.org's unofficial Debian packages, the system felt pretty new. However, I started to wish for a more updated feel with regards to fonts (which often look terrible in Debian, especially unstable, and I'm not the only one who couldn't quite figure out how to fix them). A more updated application set and the same ability to apt-get a bunch of packages made Fedora feel really nice on my new workstation. Fonts are beautiful, and the kde-redhat project does a nice job of packaging up the latest and greatest KDE. When I do apt-get upgrade, I often get some larger or non-essential upgrades, but it doesn't seem to be the quantity that I went through with Debian unstable. I didn't have to put much fuss into getting my system to look great _and_ have the niceties of the apt system.
I kept browsing the Debian-devel mailing list, hoping to see some sign of when we might see a new release, but some legal and technical issues seem to be pushing it back quite a ways. Therefore, I'm now a believer in the "Debian for the server" mentality. Never before has my desktop looked and functioned so cleanly, with OpenOffice now using some KDE widgets (thanks to the packaging from kde-redhat, I wouldn't have realized it was available otherwise). There was a strange problem with Mozilla in Debian where the occasional line of text would have part of the characters "shifted" a few pixels, which was very distracting. That made me switch to Konqueror way back when, and I still don't use Mozilla much at home - but it's nice to know that in Fedora the Mozilla fonts look great.
Sorry for the long rant, but I think I've got a decent perspective of one user who's tried both Debian unstable, stable, and Fedora on the desktop, and to me it just isn't worth the hassle to use Debian.
Cheap, light, and fast, pick three; I like cheap and light.
Whoops, I meant pick two of course.
My next notebook will probably contain a low-power processor. There'e the Servelinux Enote for $800 that uses a Via processor like my mini-itx motherboard, but I suspect that AMD will be able to come up with something that's a little faster (it doesn't need to be blazing, but a 800 Mhz Via runs like a 600 Mhz P3 it seems).
I'd like to have either a 2.5-3lb subnotebook with a nice 12" screen (and preferably below $1k, like the Servelinux), or a ~4lb notebook that gets a much longer battery life than anything else on the market (besides maybe a Mac), but also is below $1k. No CDROM or large screen needed in my case, cause I'm not looking for a desktop replacement.
For now, though, the Servelinux enote is too obscure for me to look at it seriously, and I'll stick with my used 7020 (?) Toshiba Portege (at a little over 4 lbs I think, with a nearly useless battery).
I've personally seen and played with the enote, anyone have comments on other laptops in the same category (maybe from Transmeta instead?). Cheap, light, and fast, pick three; I like cheap and light.
Just don't buy it if you're looking for an organiser, you'll be bitterly disappointed.
As the proud owner of a now obsolete Handspring Visor and having just purchased a "new" Zaurus 5500 on Ebay, I basically agree.
Everything on a Palm is instant. It may not have every feature you want, and until recently, the screens had pretty poor resolution (Sony is the exception). However, the applications worked well, and had reasonable interfaces so they could be used quickly.
I quickly abandoned the Sharp ROM for the Zaurus in favor of OpenZaurus, but I've certainly had my frustrations with bugs and missing features. Some small things, like the ability for the application buttons to turn on the device (like a Palm), and some larger things, like having it not reboot properly the second time if you haven't suspended in between (though there is an unofficial fix).
Why am I rebooting in the first place? Because of the Zaurus' greatest aspect - it's basically a fully-functional Linux system. As such, one can tweak, test, and otherwise poke around (sometimes needing a reboot if something got messed up or you're testing something). Some Zaurus applications I've found I've had no good free Palm equivalent. Zee Cookbook is a great, if somewhat slow (when editing), way to keep a database of recipes on hand. QTJournal is a great way to take notes that are categorized by date and subject. The ability to run just about any console-based Linux software (even the statistical software R) makes it very useful as a sysadmin tool. With a small, cheap wireless card from Ebay, it is often more convenient than lugging around a laptop.
Some of the things I've wanted to use my Zaurus for before I bought it work, and some don't (yet). I got xmms running and it plays OGG files well (but the included mediaplayer with openzaurus doesn't, and the Sharp ROM's media player has a horrendous interface). I can control the Zaurus remotely via ssh (VERY handy for exploring with a real keyboard) and VNC (with the framebuffer vnc package). However, the latter doesn't offer even basic security (and I haven't gotten iptables to work), so I'm reluctant to use it often, mostly out of principle.
I got the xvnc server running, but the vncviewer client to view it simply will not connect to it, or any other vnc server. I've seen a few other reports of this behavior but no fix, and most people seem to have no problem. This combo is supposed to allow the use of any X11 application on the Zaurus itself, and more importantly for me, remote X applications (so I can control xmms on my music server with a wireless connection - the ultimate remote). If anyone has a suggestion about this, I'd be happy to hear it.
My other problem is mail - mailit (included with OpenZaurus) is simplistic, but more importantly doesn't work for one of my domains (not sure why this is). I can telnet manually to port 110 and execute pop commands fine, but this mail client barks about an unknown response from the server. QTmail doesn't work either - it gives host not found or something like that.
For the price I paid, I get far more functionality than I ever did from a Visor, but the Zaurus definitely has its frustrations. The PIM apps are nothing much to speak of, they function, but are slower than their Palm equivalents (this, again is on OpenZaurus). My greatest desire - the ability to have tree-view tasks, is not implemented on either my Handspring or any version of "todo" on the Zaurus that I've used.
So it's not perfect, but you can still pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Obviously teaching things by example is not new, but far too many computer books on too many subjects (especially programming) don't use enough examples to illustrate their points. Some just use poor examples.
Samba is one of those setups where the total amount of functionality is far more than many users need, so a collection of well-designed examples will greatly speed one's implementation (and reduce common security problems). Fortunately the default config file has improved in Samba to the point where it's not too difficult to setup basic printer/filesystem sharing.
These "cookbook" style books obviously can't replace a reference, but they often are more useful as a starting point. I've spent over five years on unix systems now, but I still groan at the lack of examples in the man pages of more obscure command line software. Google often comes through, provided I can think of a good phrase that describes what I'm trying to do ("search and replace with perl command line" - perl -pi -e 's/searchterm/replaceterm/g' [filenames], btw).
"i still dont have a fully functional sound card. granted, this card (turtle beach santa cruz) has many known problems with linux, and some people have been able to get it to work fully - but i have not talked or read a response from any of them"
/etc/modules.conf:
I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card running in Debian stable. I found ALSA drivers to be much better than OSS, and Debian packages those for its stable 2.4 kernel.
Granted, I only use two channel audio output (it connects to a stereo receiver), but it sounds terrific. I can't speak for recording quality or hardware decoding, sorry (it's on mini-itx board in a smallish case as my music "server").
Here are the relevant modules I have loaded:
snd-cs46xx 65224 1
snd-pcm 53636 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-cs46xx]
snd-timer 12900 0 [snd-pcm]
snd-ac97-codec 36184 0 [snd-cs46xx]
snd-page-alloc 5716 0 [snd-cs46xx snd-pcm]
gameport 1548 0 [snd-cs46xx]
snd-rawmidi 12256 0 [snd-cs46xx]
snd-seq-device 3776 0 [snd-rawmidi]
snd 27364 0 [snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-cs46xx snd-pcm snd-timer snd-ac97-codec snd-rawmidi snd-seq-device]
soundcore 3620 6 [snd]
and within
# This file was automatically generated by alsa-base's debconf stuff
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
options snd major=116 cards_limit=4
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
Hope it helps. If you use a modern distro with the 2.6 kernel (Mandrake 10, Fedora core 2 test2), ALSA is used by default, and probably a lot newer version than the one Debian stable distributes.
Posting in "code" to avoid the lameness filter
I'm sure the responses in the discussion of this article have already touched on these points, but here it goes:
none of the Linux distributions I've tried so far on this PC succeeded in getting the sound working. That includes majors, such as two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, plus Debian, Xandros, and Lindows; as well as several specialty distros like Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
I think the above empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.
Bottom line: For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux. That's not bias--it's a demonstrable fact.
1.) We have no way of judging the competence of this user with respect to Linux. Just because he got it working in Windows - sometimes with "from CD" drivers, means only that he knows how to setup hardware in Windows. Does he know he'll need to manually enable kernel modules in Debian with modconf? Did he know what he should be searching for in usenet? Granted, these are things that average user will not know or want to know, but I strongly suspect this author has a much stronger grasp of the Windows way of doing things.
2.) If his hardware is "new" as he claims - it wouldn't really be fully supported in win9x. But because he (IIRC) never gave the card type, we won't know just how "well" it worked in Windows.
3.) Most Windows users do not install their own OS and do not add their own hardware - they call on skilled friends or shops to do it for them. A sound card is not a printer, scanner, or camera (though we can talk about the ease of using those in Linux at another time)
and the most important argument:
4.) One computer with one type of hardware and one user is a laughably small basis to claim that Windows has more broad hardware support than Linux. Absolutely absurd. It may be able to be argued on some levels. This article is better suited as an anecdote of how Linux should continue to try to improve its automatic hardware recognition and Xandros' customer support quality.
I'm sure this article can be criticized from many more perspectives, and that my four can be refuted in some respects. However, that this passed as some sort of journalism makes me lose what little faith I have in the tech-writing community. If you want a decent end-user perspective on technology, read Walter Mossberg (sp?) in The Wall Street Journal. He's not perfect, but he's certainly better than this guy.
I used to be a Mandrake user, but I got sick of the fact that once you install, there are no easely automated ways to update yoyr software.
You mean like "MandrakeUpdate"? Or from the command-line:
urpmi.update -a
urpmi --auto --auto-select
Just be sure to specify a good update source first, because the initial selection (at least in 9.X) are pretty bogged down. The updates are mirrored all over the place though.
Did anyone else think of some new GNOME e-mail program when they first read "Gmail"?
Oh yes, Sun is just _great_ for Linux. Right. Just look at what they did to Cobalt - they bought up a company that made a decent product for its market, and failed to provide timely updates and significant new products in the line. As such instead of building on a name that was just starting to great traction and a certain bit of respect, they let it whither.
No, I doubt Sun is doing the Linux community such a big favor with the Java Desktop (as I understand it it's basically a reworked version of GNOME...) Sun hasn't exactly been a rousing success in the desktop market - they stuck with CDE for a long time (it has its fans, but I'm not one of them), and now is shipping a rather stock install of GNOME, at least with Solaris x86. Big deal - I'm not looking to Sun to "revitalize the Linux desktop". Novell on the other hand, just might make a nice enterprise bundle with its trusted server products (though as I understand are losing market share) and a decent client based off SuSE.
IMHO, Sun likes to dip its feet occasionally into Linux, but I won't be surprised if it pulls out just as its getting started (like Corel did).