Yeah, this is where Linux users have their cake and eat it, too. Microsoft can't put "thousands of programs" with Windows
Yeah, and if I could uninstall all of that crap they bundle (or better yet, not install it in first place). And if OEMs could uninstall IE and distribute Firefox or Openoffice without incurring the wrath of Microsoft, nobody would care what applications Microsoft chooses the bundle with Windows. Every app and library in my linux distribution is uninstallable. It may cease to work after being uninstalled, but I have that option. Likewise, if I take Ubuntu, strip off the Gnome desktop, and make it use fluxbox or whatever (I think there is a project that actually does this) and distribute it, Canonical software won't give shit (they just won't support it). So maybe you should consider *why* people don't care about software bundling in linux and MacOS instead of just whining about how everybody is unfair to Microsoft for "adding value" to their software.
A properly setup box (your phrase) makes these tasks equally easy.
Well, except that I would argue that an apt-get upgrade in Debian (or you can use the little updater utility that comes with Ubuntu) will update all of the software on your system, and it won't require any reboots. Windows update is better now than it was last year, but it still has a ways to go to be as good as the linux updating utilities.
This is actually an Ubuntu problem because it uses esd to provide mixing capabilities for oss apps. Alsa natively supports multiple sounds cards quite well, and if you couple it with jack you have a very sophisticated sound setup. Problem is, you need a desktop that puts all of that together for you, which Ubuntu doesn't do. That is turn is because Ubuntu is busy getting things like wifi to work out of the box, and because the gstreamer isn't quite finished yet. As soon as all of the Gnome apps support gstreamer (most of them do), and gstreamer support audio routing (through either jack or something else), then it is pretty easy for Ubuntu to get all of that working out of the box. It is a work in progress, but progress is being made.
I then try to install ShowEQ and it says I am missing this library or that that version of whatever software is wrong.
Uh huh, so we've gone back to dependency hell from 1999? Have you used a modern linux distribution?
Next take a machine running Red Hat 9
That's your problem. Two things: 1) Red Hat has always built (and continues to build) discrete distributions. That is, the software version that was originally packaged is all you get unless there is some sort of critical security update or errata fix. To get newer software, you have to upgrade the distribution (unless you hack around it with yum or something like that). 2) Red Hat 9 is 2.5 years old. That may not sound like a lot, but it is ages in the linux world where major software revisions come about every 6 months or so. So you are using a pretty out of date distribution.
My suggestion: try a modern, non-Red Hat, desktop oriented distribution like Mandrake or Ubuntu. Ubuntu even has a live cd, so you can try it out first without installing to see if you like it.
The computer could maybe let you know when you pulled the plug that not everything had finished and could finish if you plug it back in for a sec right now, or maybe you'd just prefer to wait for some other time to plug it back in.
Hmmm, that's actually a really good idea. The only problem I can see is that if you leave the device unconnected long enough (or shut the computer down), the cached data will have to be written to disk, and then automagically discovered again when the device is reconnected. It might be a bit tricky. That and the fact that atomic transactions would be necessary. The only filesystem that does that currently is Reiser4, which is not in mainstream use yet. Might be a fun exercise for the linux desktop, but right now there are a lot of other things that need to be worked on.
Where does your perception that Windows is hard possibly come from?
Oh, maybe the fact that you have to do a lot of poking around to do some very simple things. Perhaps you don't read the manual because it is easier to randomly click on buttons and tabs for an hour to find what you are looking for? That and the fact that the organization of settings dialogs still doesn't make any sense to me. Ever try to find the security tab in a default install of WinXP? You won't find it until you uncheck "simple file sharing" in the windows explorer properties. Wow, that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Oh give me a break. Is linux *very* easy to use? No, but it is easy to use. It is not easy to install, but Windows isn't either. Could application installation be easier? Sure, but people who have problems with synaptic are also going to have problems with the installer program that comes in the box they buy at the store.
If you are going to separate your users, separate them all the way. You have basic users that need to have everything set up for them, installed for them, configured for them, but as soon as they know which icons to click they are fine. For this group, linux is fine. You have advanced users who are fine with basic administrative things like installing software and drivers. These may have some difficulty with linux, but if you show them how to use nice tools like synaptic and to download autopackages from third-party sites, they will be fine. Then there are power users who want to do everything, but probably don't really know a whole lot. This is the most troublesome group because they have likely learned all of the ins and outs of Windows, but don't want to learn how to use linux. They want it to be like Windows. Finally, there are the expert users who will sit there and teach themselves a new system. We don't really need to worry about them because they were the first linux adopters.
Does linux have problems? Yes. I love watching linux develop and get excited when I see things like Openoffice and Gnumeric maturing, automatic hardware detection, and Gnome usability increasing. It means that every year linux becomes that much more useful for people. Linux will always be in development. It will never be done, but right now it is quite usable.
Well, there is memtester which there should be an Ubuntu package for, but I can't tell if it will actually benchmark the memory because the website isn't very helpful. You'll just have to install it and see. If it doesn't, try looking in sourceforge.net or gnomefiles.org for something else.
Uhhh, then I take it you don't use too many usb devices because running mknod everytime you want to plug in your usb camera is not what I would consider user friendly. And having/dev/hd* enumerate all the way out to k30 is also annoying when you have only one hard disk with three partitions on it.
Hmmm...that sounds like a good idea. You might want to send a message to the cpufreq-applet folks. It will allow you to get/set the cpufreq, but I don't think it is connected to sensor warnings such as temperature. It would be a good addition to the linux desktop if it did.
Yes, MAC filtering is easy to forge, but it is still a deterrance. People wardriving up and down the street are not going to bother to break into your wireless network if it has some security in place. There are plenty of hotspots and unsecured wireless networks around. There is SSL if you want something a little bit stronger. SSL certificates are specifically designed to prevent man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks. Of course you have to rely on Verisign to do their job correctly. If you want real security, the only way to do it is with IPSEC. Whatever Intel is coming up with is not going to top that.
Intel is developing a new technology that could prevent unauthorized access to wireless networks
There already exist a number of methods for preventing unauthorized access to wireless networks: stopping SSID broadcasting, filtering MAC addresses, WPA, and even IPSEC for the paranoid. People already don't use what is available because they don't think it is important. What makes Intel think they will use this? It seems to me that the automatic response to security mechanism these days is "turn it off, it's too confusing and we aren't trying to hide anything." A lot of people just don't understand that their passwords and credit card numbers are being sent over the airwaves in cleartext and can be easily intercepted unless you use the security features of your access point.
Wait, so this is a laptop? (Googles Inspiron 8000...right, duh, haven't really been paying attention to Dell lately). Hrrmm...my first thought is your motherboard is pooched, but it could be an overheating issue. I don't know if you have ever taken apart a laptop. It is a real PITA. I would recommend taking it into the shop, but if it is going to cost more than, say, $200 it probably isn't worth it. Sorry, I don't know what else to suggest. Maybe if you shut it down, light a circle of candles around it, and play some soft Mozart it will magically be all better in the morning.:)
That is actually really slow. I don't think it can be right. That is pretty much your harddisk bandwidth; your memory bandwidth should be at least an order of magnitude higher. You may have a bad dimm or incorrect timings set in the bios. There are a few benchmarking programs on sourceforge. You might want to try xfbsuite. I've never used it, but it looks like it will do what you want it to do.
Another place to look for performance issuses is with your harddisk controller. Have a look at the hdparm utility. It will do some basic benchmarks and allow you to tweak some settings to get better performance.
It sounds like you are all set. If you don't have the right kernel module, X won't load with the nvidia driver (you'll get a "No screens available" error message). If you specify NvAGP, the nvidia driver will use its own agp code. You supposedly don't need to blacklist agpgart, but I usually do anyway. The only other thing you should look for is the NVIDIA Corporation string in glxinfo. That will tell you that nvidia's glx is in use. So if you've done all that you should be set.
Ok. The nvidia install instructions say dri should be removed from xorg.conf, so I would even if it appears to be working. The nvidia kernel module is not the same thing as the nvidia X driver. The former should be in/lib/modules/kernel/... and the latter in/usr/X11R6/drivers/.... The kernel module will use agpgart if it is present, but it also has its own agp driver which you can direct it to use. Agpgart gets loaded automatically by hotplug, so you have to blacklist it in/etc/hotplug/blacklist if you want to prevent it from loading.
I wouldn't worry too much about the Firefox load time. It is a little slow because it has to load up its own set of widgets and all of that XUL stuff. But once it is started, new windows should be quick. I think that is a better benchmark than load times. For MPlayer you have to tell it to use one of the accelerated backends or it will default to some crappy xlib stuff. I use opengl2 and it works great. You should have a/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf file you can tweak to set those things. Also make sure you apt-get install w32codecs or you won't be able to play a lot of formats.
I've never noticed significant speed increases with prelinking. I would disable xcompmgr because it is still pretty buggy.
In my experience the proprietary nvidia driver works better than the oss one. But there are a lot of little things that can make it not work so well. Do, glxinfo | grep OpenGL and look for the NVIDIA Corporation string. Then do, glxgears and look at your framerate.
If the nvidia glx isn't working, check your xorg.conf and make sure
load "GLcore"
load "dri" are not in the modules section. These will conflict with the nvidia glx. If it runs but is buggy, disable RenderAccel and put agpgart in/etc/hotplug/blacklist to keep it from loading and interfering with the nvidia AGP driver.
Take, for instance, the VFS layers. It makes absolutely no bloody sense for GNOME to have a VFS or KDE to have kioslaves. These functions have *nothing* to do with a desktop environment -- they are generic functionality that would be useful anywhere. They *should* be available in a separate library. You wouldn't make kxml and gnome-xml -- you'd use libxml So why all the tying into DEs?
I agree with this, but I think you are just dealing with a bit of history and politics here. You can argue that a good vfs layer belongs in the kernel, but the kernel guys are trying to push as much of that stuff to userspace as possible. This is becoming more reasonable with things like dbus and inotify being added to the kernel to allow for good userspace vfs implementations. But the desktops wanted this functionality years ago and had to implement some hacks. KDE came out with kioslaves and Gnome came out with gnome-vfs. Each had to implement it separately because there was no universal project, mostly because there wasn't a good way to do it until recently. Possibly in the future, both of these will go away, and we will see more system-wide integration in general (NetworkManager at the RedHat level as opposed to the Gnome level, for example).
As for the lack of console-friendly config files/apps, I have to agree 100% that it is very irritating. The Gnome System Tools are fine because they are specifically meant to be a part of Gnome. But if the distribution packages config utilities, they should be console aware. This is one reason why I still like Debian above other distributions. There is synaptic, but there is also dselect and apt-get. There is update-rc.d. There is dpkg-reconfigure with ncurses, text, and graphical frontends. Config files are plain text, sanely organized, and well-commented. Everything can be done from the console despite the nice graphical interface you might be running.
Well, I agree. I'm sure most of the people that work at Microsoft are reasonable and technologically oriented people. I think the animosity between the open source community and Microsoft doesn't come from a dislike for the people. It comes from a dislike for company practices and policies, some of which are just due to it being a commercial company, but others are unnecessarily predatory and anticompetitive.
Like you said,.NET is technically very good. Why doesn't the open source community like it? Because they can't safely implement a set of libraries for interoperability without worrying about patent issues. Sun's implementation of Java isn't open either, but the Java standard is, and the open source community can attempt (so far, not so well) to implement a gpl'd version. Mono is attempting to do the same thing with.NET, but a lot of people are concerned about intellectual property issues, and I doubt any major distribution will ever ship it out of the box.
Dude, where have you been? He meant a live cd with an operating system and the game, not just a game with its own drivers. Gentoo has been making linux gaming cds for a while where you just boot up and run your game directly. This could in principle be done with any os, but it is easiest with linux because it already has a fair number of hardware drivers and is open source. So a game company could just write *one* version of their game to use a specific glibc, opengl, xfree86, etc version, and then ship a live cd with all of that stuff prepackaged (they might not even have to make the cd themselves if they just grabbed a Morphix image). The only problem I see here is if writing to the hard disk is necessary, which it often is given the size of games these days.
As with anything patentable, you arent protecting that specific implementation,
Absolutely not! You are talking about intellectual property patents. That is, patenting an idea. The original patent system was for specific implementations. You could get a patent for a specific combustion engine, or a specific circuit board. You could not get a patent for the idea of a combustion engine. Imagine where we would be in engine technology if such patents had been possible. Whoops! We just stopped the industrial revolution from happening because we made it illegal to bring competing implementations of the same idea to market.
Also, SAMBA 3 doesn't support Kerberos as an authentication backend, and so password synchronisation and single signon is difficult in a mixed windows and *nix environment.
Not sure what you mean by this. I have used both server = domain and server = ADS quite successfully, and both use Kerberos to authenticate against the PDC. The directory stuff, though, I agree is a bit of a problem. However, winbind or nss_ldap+schema extension for Windows PDC are fairly good solutions that can be used while you wait for Samba4.
When I first started using Linux I got very frustrated for a while, simply because my mind is notoriously bad for resisting change. It didn't like having to re learn such simple stuff. In fact in the beginning I kind of felt like I was a prisoner to my computer. I no longer knew how it worked at all. No idea! How do things run at startup? How do I add a printer? It was all this huge mystery.
I agree with this 100%. My first linux experience was exactly the same way. Where is autoexec.bat? How do I set my PATH? Where are my programs? It takes a while, but now that I am used to it, it is very painful to have to use Windows/DOS. Now when I started using linux, I had only dabbled a little with Win 95/98. I hadn't become proficient in the "new Windows." So that probably made a big difference. The linux desktop has really caught up to WinXP and MacOSX in recent months, so now I wouldn't say the learning curve is all that steep, but a year and half ago it was.
It seems like a lot of folks, though, would blame GM for not making steel shields for your windows.
Yes, but there is a responsibility for the manufacturer to at least match the status quo. If GM made a car without locks and an engine that didn't need a key to turn, you would say the manufacturer is being negligent. The reality is cars need locks, so manufacturers better supply cars with locks (and maybe more if they are trying to add value to their car as a purchase incentive). Likewise, operating system software requires some sort of access control system, be it a firewall or whatever. If it doesn't have such a system (or the implementation is flawed) the manufacturer is at least partly to blame because it knows there are risks associated with putting a computer on the Internet.
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Yeah, this is where Linux users have their cake and eat it, too. Microsoft can't put "thousands of programs" with Windows
Yeah, and if I could uninstall all of that crap they bundle (or better yet, not install it in first place). And if OEMs could uninstall IE and distribute Firefox or Openoffice without incurring the wrath of Microsoft, nobody would care what applications Microsoft chooses the bundle with Windows. Every app and library in my linux distribution is uninstallable. It may cease to work after being uninstalled, but I have that option. Likewise, if I take Ubuntu, strip off the Gnome desktop, and make it use fluxbox or whatever (I think there is a project that actually does this) and distribute it, Canonical software won't give shit (they just won't support it). So maybe you should consider *why* people don't care about software bundling in linux and MacOS instead of just whining about how everybody is unfair to Microsoft for "adding value" to their software.
A properly setup box (your phrase) makes these tasks equally easy.
Well, except that I would argue that an apt-get upgrade in Debian (or you can use the little updater utility that comes with Ubuntu) will update all of the software on your system, and it won't require any reboots. Windows update is better now than it was last year, but it still has a ways to go to be as good as the linux updating utilities.
This is actually an Ubuntu problem because it uses esd to provide mixing capabilities for oss apps. Alsa natively supports multiple sounds cards quite well, and if you couple it with jack you have a very sophisticated sound setup. Problem is, you need a desktop that puts all of that together for you, which Ubuntu doesn't do. That is turn is because Ubuntu is busy getting things like wifi to work out of the box, and because the gstreamer isn't quite finished yet. As soon as all of the Gnome apps support gstreamer (most of them do), and gstreamer support audio routing (through either jack or something else), then it is pretty easy for Ubuntu to get all of that working out of the box. It is a work in progress, but progress is being made.
I then try to install ShowEQ and it says I am missing this library or that that version of whatever software is wrong.
Uh huh, so we've gone back to dependency hell from 1999? Have you used a modern linux distribution?
Next take a machine running Red Hat 9
That's your problem. Two things:
1) Red Hat has always built (and continues to build) discrete distributions. That is, the software version that was originally packaged is all you get unless there is some sort of critical security update or errata fix. To get newer software, you have to upgrade the distribution (unless you hack around it with yum or something like that).
2) Red Hat 9 is 2.5 years old. That may not sound like a lot, but it is ages in the linux world where major software revisions come about every 6 months or so. So you are using a pretty out of date distribution.
My suggestion: try a modern, non-Red Hat, desktop oriented distribution like Mandrake or Ubuntu. Ubuntu even has a live cd, so you can try it out first without installing to see if you like it.
The computer could maybe let you know when you pulled the plug that not everything had finished and could finish if you plug it back in for a sec right now, or maybe you'd just prefer to wait for some other time to plug it back in.
Hmmm, that's actually a really good idea. The only problem I can see is that if you leave the device unconnected long enough (or shut the computer down), the cached data will have to be written to disk, and then automagically discovered again when the device is reconnected. It might be a bit tricky. That and the fact that atomic transactions would be necessary. The only filesystem that does that currently is Reiser4, which is not in mainstream use yet. Might be a fun exercise for the linux desktop, but right now there are a lot of other things that need to be worked on.
Where does your perception that Windows is hard possibly come from?
Oh, maybe the fact that you have to do a lot of poking around to do some very simple things. Perhaps you don't read the manual because it is easier to randomly click on buttons and tabs for an hour to find what you are looking for? That and the fact that the organization of settings dialogs still doesn't make any sense to me. Ever try to find the security tab in a default install of WinXP? You won't find it until you uncheck "simple file sharing" in the windows explorer properties. Wow, that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
Oh give me a break. Is linux *very* easy to use? No, but it is easy to use. It is not easy to install, but Windows isn't either. Could application installation be easier? Sure, but people who have problems with synaptic are also going to have problems with the installer program that comes in the box they buy at the store.
If you are going to separate your users, separate them all the way. You have basic users that need to have everything set up for them, installed for them, configured for them, but as soon as they know which icons to click they are fine. For this group, linux is fine. You have advanced users who are fine with basic administrative things like installing software and drivers. These may have some difficulty with linux, but if you show them how to use nice tools like synaptic and to download autopackages from third-party sites, they will be fine. Then there are power users who want to do everything, but probably don't really know a whole lot. This is the most troublesome group because they have likely learned all of the ins and outs of Windows, but don't want to learn how to use linux. They want it to be like Windows. Finally, there are the expert users who will sit there and teach themselves a new system. We don't really need to worry about them because they were the first linux adopters.
Does linux have problems? Yes. I love watching linux develop and get excited when I see things like Openoffice and Gnumeric maturing, automatic hardware detection, and Gnome usability increasing. It means that every year linux becomes that much more useful for people. Linux will always be in development. It will never be done, but right now it is quite usable.
Well, there is memtester which there should be an Ubuntu package for, but I can't tell if it will actually benchmark the memory because the website isn't very helpful. You'll just have to install it and see. If it doesn't, try looking in sourceforge.net or gnomefiles.org for something else.
Uhhh, then I take it you don't use too many usb devices because running mknod everytime you want to plug in your usb camera is not what I would consider user friendly. And having /dev/hd* enumerate all the way out to k30 is also annoying when you have only one hard disk with three partitions on it.
Hmmm...that sounds like a good idea. You might want to send a message to the cpufreq-applet folks. It will allow you to get/set the cpufreq, but I don't think it is connected to sensor warnings such as temperature. It would be a good addition to the linux desktop if it did.
Yes, MAC filtering is easy to forge, but it is still a deterrance. People wardriving up and down the street are not going to bother to break into your wireless network if it has some security in place. There are plenty of hotspots and unsecured wireless networks around. There is SSL if you want something a little bit stronger. SSL certificates are specifically designed to prevent man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks. Of course you have to rely on Verisign to do their job correctly. If you want real security, the only way to do it is with IPSEC. Whatever Intel is coming up with is not going to top that.
Intel is developing a new technology that could prevent unauthorized access to wireless networks
There already exist a number of methods for preventing unauthorized access to wireless networks: stopping SSID broadcasting, filtering MAC addresses, WPA, and even IPSEC for the paranoid. People already don't use what is available because they don't think it is important. What makes Intel think they will use this? It seems to me that the automatic response to security mechanism these days is "turn it off, it's too confusing and we aren't trying to hide anything." A lot of people just don't understand that their passwords and credit card numbers are being sent over the airwaves in cleartext and can be easily intercepted unless you use the security features of your access point.
Wait, so this is a laptop? (Googles Inspiron 8000...right, duh, haven't really been paying attention to Dell lately). Hrrmm...my first thought is your motherboard is pooched, but it could be an overheating issue. I don't know if you have ever taken apart a laptop. It is a real PITA. I would recommend taking it into the shop, but if it is going to cost more than, say, $200 it probably isn't worth it. Sorry, I don't know what else to suggest. Maybe if you shut it down, light a circle of candles around it, and play some soft Mozart it will magically be all better in the morning. :)
That is actually really slow. I don't think it can be right. That is pretty much your harddisk bandwidth; your memory bandwidth should be at least an order of magnitude higher. You may have a bad dimm or incorrect timings set in the bios. There are a few benchmarking programs on sourceforge. You might want to try xfbsuite. I've never used it, but it looks like it will do what you want it to do.
Another place to look for performance issuses is with your harddisk controller. Have a look at the hdparm utility. It will do some basic benchmarks and allow you to tweak some settings to get better performance.
It sounds like you are all set. If you don't have the right kernel module, X won't load with the nvidia driver (you'll get a "No screens available" error message). If you specify NvAGP, the nvidia driver will use its own agp code. You supposedly don't need to blacklist agpgart, but I usually do anyway. The only other thing you should look for is the NVIDIA Corporation string in glxinfo. That will tell you that nvidia's glx is in use. So if you've done all that you should be set.
Ok. The nvidia install instructions say dri should be removed from xorg.conf, so I would even if it appears to be working. The nvidia kernel module is not the same thing as the nvidia X driver. The former should be in /lib/modules/kernel/... and the latter in /usr/X11R6/drivers/.... The kernel module will use agpgart if it is present, but it also has its own agp driver which you can direct it to use. Agpgart gets loaded automatically by hotplug, so you have to blacklist it in /etc/hotplug/blacklist if you want to prevent it from loading.
/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf file you can tweak to set those things. Also make sure you apt-get install w32codecs or you won't be able to play a lot of formats.
I wouldn't worry too much about the Firefox load time. It is a little slow because it has to load up its own set of widgets and all of that XUL stuff. But once it is started, new windows should be quick. I think that is a better benchmark than load times. For MPlayer you have to tell it to use one of the accelerated backends or it will default to some crappy xlib stuff. I use opengl2 and it works great. You should have a
I've never noticed significant speed increases with prelinking. I would disable xcompmgr because it is still pretty buggy.
In my experience the proprietary nvidia driver works better than the oss one. But there are a lot of little things that can make it not work so well. Do, glxinfo | grep OpenGL and look for the NVIDIA Corporation string. Then do, glxgears and look at your framerate.
/etc/hotplug/blacklist to keep it from loading and interfering with the nvidia AGP driver.
If the nvidia glx isn't working, check your xorg.conf and make sure
load "GLcore"
load "dri"
are not in the modules section. These will conflict with the nvidia glx. If it runs but is buggy, disable RenderAccel and put agpgart in
Errr...am I reading your conf right? It looks like you are trying to use the open source nv driver with the proprietary NvAGP driver.
/etc/X11/xorg.conf,
/etc/init.d/gdm restart
Try this:
apt-get install nvidia-glx
nvidia-glx-config enable
reboot
Or manually:
apt-get install nvidia-glx
modprobe nvidia
In
Section "Module"
load "glx"
load "bitmap"
load "dbe"
load "ddc"
load "extmod"
load "freetype"
load "int10"
load "record"
load "type1"
load "vbe"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "NvAGP" "1"
EndSection
close x session and,
Take, for instance, the VFS layers. It makes absolutely no bloody sense for GNOME to have a VFS or KDE to have kioslaves. These functions have *nothing* to do with a desktop environment -- they are generic functionality that would be useful anywhere. They *should* be available in a separate library. You wouldn't make kxml and gnome-xml -- you'd use libxml So why all the tying into DEs?
I agree with this, but I think you are just dealing with a bit of history and politics here. You can argue that a good vfs layer belongs in the kernel, but the kernel guys are trying to push as much of that stuff to userspace as possible. This is becoming more reasonable with things like dbus and inotify being added to the kernel to allow for good userspace vfs implementations. But the desktops wanted this functionality years ago and had to implement some hacks. KDE came out with kioslaves and Gnome came out with gnome-vfs. Each had to implement it separately because there was no universal project, mostly because there wasn't a good way to do it until recently. Possibly in the future, both of these will go away, and we will see more system-wide integration in general (NetworkManager at the RedHat level as opposed to the Gnome level, for example).
As for the lack of console-friendly config files/apps, I have to agree 100% that it is very irritating. The Gnome System Tools are fine because they are specifically meant to be a part of Gnome. But if the distribution packages config utilities, they should be console aware. This is one reason why I still like Debian above other distributions. There is synaptic, but there is also dselect and apt-get. There is update-rc.d. There is dpkg-reconfigure with ncurses, text, and graphical frontends. Config files are plain text, sanely organized, and well-commented. Everything can be done from the console despite the nice graphical interface you might be running.
Well, I agree. I'm sure most of the people that work at Microsoft are reasonable and technologically oriented people. I think the animosity between the open source community and Microsoft doesn't come from a dislike for the people. It comes from a dislike for company practices and policies, some of which are just due to it being a commercial company, but others are unnecessarily predatory and anticompetitive.
.NET is technically very good. Why doesn't the open source community like it? Because they can't safely implement a set of libraries for interoperability without worrying about patent issues. Sun's implementation of Java isn't open either, but the Java standard is, and the open source community can attempt (so far, not so well) to implement a gpl'd version. Mono is attempting to do the same thing with .NET, but a lot of people are concerned about intellectual property issues, and I doubt any major distribution will ever ship it out of the box.
Like you said,
Dude, where have you been? He meant a live cd with an operating system and the game, not just a game with its own drivers. Gentoo has been making linux gaming cds for a while where you just boot up and run your game directly. This could in principle be done with any os, but it is easiest with linux because it already has a fair number of hardware drivers and is open source. So a game company could just write *one* version of their game to use a specific glibc, opengl, xfree86, etc version, and then ship a live cd with all of that stuff prepackaged (they might not even have to make the cd themselves if they just grabbed a Morphix image). The only problem I see here is if writing to the hard disk is necessary, which it often is given the size of games these days.
As with anything patentable, you arent protecting that specific implementation,
Absolutely not! You are talking about intellectual property patents. That is, patenting an idea. The original patent system was for specific implementations. You could get a patent for a specific combustion engine, or a specific circuit board. You could not get a patent for the idea of a combustion engine. Imagine where we would be in engine technology if such patents had been possible. Whoops! We just stopped the industrial revolution from happening because we made it illegal to bring competing implementations of the same idea to market.
Also, SAMBA 3 doesn't support Kerberos as an authentication backend, and so password synchronisation and single signon is difficult in a mixed windows and *nix environment.
Not sure what you mean by this. I have used both server = domain and server = ADS quite successfully, and both use Kerberos to authenticate against the PDC. The directory stuff, though, I agree is a bit of a problem. However, winbind or nss_ldap+schema extension for Windows PDC are fairly good solutions that can be used while you wait for Samba4.
When I first started using Linux I got very frustrated for a while, simply because my mind is notoriously bad for resisting change. It didn't like having to re learn such simple stuff. In fact in the beginning I kind of felt like I was a prisoner to my computer. I no longer knew how it worked at all. No idea! How do things run at startup? How do I add a printer? It was all this huge mystery.
I agree with this 100%. My first linux experience was exactly the same way. Where is autoexec.bat? How do I set my PATH? Where are my programs? It takes a while, but now that I am used to it, it is very painful to have to use Windows/DOS. Now when I started using linux, I had only dabbled a little with Win 95/98. I hadn't become proficient in the "new Windows." So that probably made a big difference. The linux desktop has really caught up to WinXP and MacOSX in recent months, so now I wouldn't say the learning curve is all that steep, but a year and half ago it was.
It seems like a lot of folks, though, would blame GM for not making steel shields for your windows.
Yes, but there is a responsibility for the manufacturer to at least match the status quo. If GM made a car without locks and an engine that didn't need a key to turn, you would say the manufacturer is being negligent. The reality is cars need locks, so manufacturers better supply cars with locks (and maybe more if they are trying to add value to their car as a purchase incentive). Likewise, operating system software requires some sort of access control system, be it a firewall or whatever. If it doesn't have such a system (or the implementation is flawed) the manufacturer is at least partly to blame because it knows there are risks associated with putting a computer on the Internet.