Hopefully the return of simpler games will cause companies to think about making simpler ones for consoles and home computers - perhaps at a budget price to reflect the fraction of the production costs involved. I'd like to see the return of scrolling beatemups, and shootemups - both genres that have been virtually dead for some years now (even counting the limited japanese arcade releases).
There's a growing number of people including myself who now collect arcade machines and the game boards, simply because the games are more fun. Come home from a long day at the office to play some relaxing starcraft or sprawling RPG? No thanks, I'd rather just shoot a bunch of aliens in a fast scrolling arcade game and not have to think.
Thanks to the people who pointed me in the direction of some up to date drivers. The ATI card is back in, now working, and it looks like they've also fixed the double-width xv problem the previous drivers had.
Why will ATI not aknowledge these even exist (for a while, they tried to tell me my card doesn't exist too, which was amusing)? I've bookmarked the forums the driver news was posted to, but it seems like a very strange way to release drivers.
Someone please mod up the reply posted with the link to the new drivers in it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who hit this pitfall (I'd even tried googletrawling).
I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless. The reason? ATI won't release a driver that works with xfree 4.3.0, and after several mails told me to just keep an eye on their site for updates. I know there are open source drivers (2d only) for the card, but those gave me really nasty rasterline flashes whenever the card did anything - so were next to useless.
Anyone else stuck in the same situation? If you look up drivers for the firegl cards on their site , you find a newer version of the drivers (same as the 9700 - why aren't they listed on the 9700 page??), but again it's compiled only for 4.1.0 and 4.2.0, and will refuse to work with 4.3.0.
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups" It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time."
Ikaruga: arcade, dreamcast XII-Stag: arcade, ps2 DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou: arcade, ps2 (in development) R-Type Final (ps2) Gradius V (ps2) (also not listing the pretty good number that appeared between 1999 and 2001)
I wouldn't say it's dead yet, but it's not very well. Half the trouble is a lot of the time, games from the genre never leave Japan. There's also a very healthy community of people who have been pumping out new shooters for the PC as freeware/shareware.
In my humble opinion, many gamers today really don't have a clue - if you cant walk through the pretty 3D environments (while fighting the camera endlessly) and complete a game in a few days (optionally using the walkthrough guide released at the same time), then they aren't interested. The console and PC commercial lineup is now stale as fuck, costs to make these lavish games are high, so return must be high, and risk low. Kudos to Konami for releasing Contra: Shattered Soldier (with 60hz mode in Europe for once), and as I understand it Gradius V is planned for US/Euro release, as is R-Type Final from Irem. The run-n-gun genre (for it exists) isn't *quite* dead yet either, having seen Contra: SS, and soon to see Metal Slug 3 released for the PS2.
If there's anyone out there reading this, who like myself and others still drool at the prospect of facing thousands of enemy ships in a 2D firefight, head over to www.shmups.com, or join #shmups on any efnet server.
Pity there isn't a similar fanbase for scrolling beatemups really, that genre really is mortally wounded, even Capcom haven't made one for a few years now. Banpresto still make the odd one, and so does one of the other Korean arcade PCB manufacturers - I picked up one called Gaia Crusaders a few weeks back. Not a bad effort.
Could be an interesting test. I used to roll my own Linux some years ago, but now I really can't be bothered and use SuSE instead (flames to/dev/null please). I'm pretty sure with KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.2, XFree86 4.3.0, and java now building properly with gcc 3.2 - that SuSE 8.2 will be just around the corner. I've just ordered the parts to build a new PC too (dual xeon 2.4ghz:-) ), so I'll try it all out at some point and see how they compare.
When I upgraded to SuSE 8.1, I decided to give KDE another whirl since it had hit version 3. Pretty good, does a lot of stuff, appears to do it well aside from a couple of basic apps which would crash every time they were closed (not KDEs fault as such).
Why did I switch back to Gnome 2?
Speed. The two systems I was using KDE on were a dual p2-400 and a celeron 800. On both, there was an enourmous speed increase switching to Gnome - especially with lots of open apps. They definitely still have work to do, I like Metacity because it's nice+light+simple, but the configuration leaves a little to be desired. GTK2 based apps appear to run a lot slower than GTK1, but even then they're still much quicker than the QT based KDE.
Fortunately, with "big players" backing KDE and Gnome seperately, I don't see either going away - a good thing, although I do wish they'd agree on how drag+drop should work;-)
You *do* realise that OpenOffice 1.0 and StarOffice 6.0 are actually the very some program don't you? I've used both, and the only difference I've spotted personally is that the fonts can look a little smoother in SO.
I'm prepared to accept that OO might appear to run faster if you happen to compile it yourself with arch-dependant flags however. Since SO only ships binary, it might not have been built tailored to i686 and mmx machines.
Perhaps if they can't keep afloat, then they should rightly go out of business.
It's harsh to say that, but people have to realise there's a finite amount of money available in the paying Linux market. That money is always going to go to the companies putting out a better, or more consistent product, or those who provide better services. In fact it's one of the few markets where distribution is often selected by people with a clue - less vulnurable to the pressures of idiots in suits dictating corporate policy.
Is there space for a distro which is essentially "almost RedHat", when RedHat exists. It would seem there isn't. I've always had a hard time working out quite where Mandrake fitted, after having talked to quite a few newbies who installed Mandrake, praised its ease of installation, and then came totally unstuck when it came to getting more software, or getting a build environment installed.
Personally, I think the *paying* Linux market is going to be better served by two or three larger players in competition, than lots of much smaller outfits - the lack of consistent standards when it comes to Linux installs, desktop setups, file locations, and the infamous library versions, is a real headache for people trying to provide Linux software.
Try playing the NTSC version of Gran Turismo 3, then stop and start playing the PAL version.
Become horrified at how the cars seem to lumber around more, like buses. Rather than keep the physics engine responding at the same speed and just drawing at different frame intervals, it *appears* that they opted to just run it slower overall. GT2 did not suffer this problem.
Another good one was SSX. The magazines in Europe raved about the game, and it's pretty good fun. However, not a single one of them pointed out that after every 50 frames it skips 10. You generally don't notice but pay close attention to the intro camera sweep before the boarders set off. Ugly.
I couldn't say how much work a proper conversion requires, thankfully more PS2 games are starting to appear with 60hz options for the huge majority of people with TVs that are quite capable of displaying NTSC (or at least PAL 60hz - which does exist) anyway. Sad to say but crap conversions are alive and well.
Not such a valid reason these days, since the vast majority of modern TV sets (and lets face it, how many people likely to buy a PS2/Xsux/Gamecube *really* will be using an ancient television?) sold in Europe are more than capable of displaying NTSC signals. Makes sense really since the TV manufacturers don't have to make everything twice.
Additionally, how the images are output to TV at hardware level has nothing to do with the game software at all.
Lots of people are mentioning postfix and qmail - personally I'd recommend exim (www.exim.org) which has proved itself everywhere I've used it, to be an excellent MTA. English config files, flexibility, all manner of database lookups as well as flat files, speed and reliability. To top things off it's an easy migration since it works as a drop-in replacement for sendmail if you so wish.
A particular variant of Ultrasparc II chips suffer from it, and even with the alleged patches it never entirely goes away.
I used to be a Sun fan, but with the modern machines tendency to suffer hardware failures as a regular thing (especially E250s with memory and motherboards), and the huge performance gap between them and linux (or HP-UX boxes for that matter), I can't see N1 actually working very well. Long gone are the days of the IPC and IPX, machines you could stomp on, kick, run in dusty dirt ridden corners in carpeted rooms behind a desk[1], and generally not treat very carefully, and they would keep on running:)
james
[1] I have done all of these things[2]. [2] Not to E250s though, they break all on their own.
I'll probably get modded as a troll for this, but:
Despite this being currently of questionable factual quality - IF the make a slight infringement of the GPL, but their product takes off and starts to help linux in general against the Microsoft monopoly, perhaps that is a greater goal.
If someone said to me that if United Linux would have to break the GPL in some way, but their actions would result in say a 20% desktop share by the end of next year, I would say thats a worthwhile sacrifice.
There's a greater issue here folks, and it affects computing as a whole, not just open source software. Microsoft need to have a competitor or we're all fucked.
If they need the software why can't they fucking well pay for it?;)
Most people wouldn't steal a car from a car dealership just because they needed one, so why software? If it was food I'd have a lot of sympathy - but fucking software? Anyone who "needs" hardcore circuit design software should pay for it.
Personally, I'd tell your boss to go fuck his job. Long hours, constant work including weekends, lack of sleep - do it long enough and you'll head right along down to RSI-city with the rest of us poor sods with painful wrist/finger/arm problems.
Use your head, your arms are not designed to bash out code 15 hours a day - change your career while you still have one[1].
james
[1] Mine was only partially fucked - I got lucky with a slight case of pain for the rest of my life , with a matching set of muscle relaxant pills and anti inflammatories. Nice.
It is expensive, astonishingly expensive. It is bug ridden to the point of being unbelievable. It loses records. It requires almost daily reboots on all associated servers, even the call ticket generators. It is simply one of the worst piles of utter shite I have experienced in the workplace.
However, there *IS* a linux client;) You have to be running the iHeat server on an NT/whatever box, but there is a linux client. It comes as rpm or deb, and appears to basically vnc you into a very cut down windows session with the client launcher. It probably uses vnc code.
I think he must have meant Gorilla Marketing. This is where you throw away your computers and move into selling bananas to apes - a far more profitable endeavor that trying to be a freelance programmer without a list of completed projects.
Look in absolute horror as it trawls the kitchen sink down, including xfree.
This isn't debians fault, exactly - the package is fully featured, but it's useless for people who just want the core functionality.
The only place I've seen this done right, so far, is the FreeBSD ports system - mod_php being a good example, it asks you what support you want before checking dependancies.
I'd imagine the same goes for gentoo, which I will try one day - but I'm currently using SuSE because I've been through the whole slackware/roll your own/freebsd/redhat/etc mill so many times that I'm now happy to just use one that works, but isn't necessarily bang up to date with package versions.
Well - perhaps I haven't been using Solaris NFS enough to see the horrors then. (I'm not a big Sun/Solaris fan - it's expensive, it's not as reliable as it used to be, and it's somewhere near the bottom in performance, even post tuning. I'm really getting bored now of swapping in new memory and motherboards on E250s in particular). I'll have to admit to not having used Suns NFS regularly since Solaris 2.5 and Sunos 4.0.x on IPC and IPX machines.
Just because you have your first Unix sysadmin job does not mean that your experience is significant.
Oh my, I'm very sorry sir - how DARE I question you, since you obviously know everything there is to know. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe it was just the fact that I've not used Solaris for NFS nearly as much as Digital Unix/True64, Irix, or HP-UX. I'll hand my notice in at work tomorrow, explaining that apparently my employment history was bogus, the references fake, and that the past years have all been a drug/alcohol induced haze.
What do you propose to do on Solaris when it tells you "umount: filesystem busy", accessing any files on it just hangs, and fuser -c tells you no processes have that filesystem busy?
Try using lsof, it tends to spot more than fuser. Using soft mounts can help enourmously, but as you know they open up a whole new world of pain. I think it's an acceptable one however, assuming the timeout values are increased to compenstate for quick network or server glitches. File integrity is compromised, allegedly, because processes won't wait for the remote server to come back and the write to complete successfully - but if a server goes down during an NFS write, do you actually want to trust that write anyway? I'm a paranoiac so I don't. Admittedly that's sidestepping the problem you've posed - which can only be solved by knocking the client down if lsof and fuser yield no useful killable results. You never want to be in that position though.
I've yet to find a better alternative to NFS, maybe CODA is up to the task - not had the time to investigate that, hopefully soon in an upcoming project.
E was great, I loved it. When/if E17 finally appears (and works on FreeBSD properly, the CVS one doesn't), I'll be one of the first to install it. For the moment I use KDE and Windowmaker at home/work respectively.
Anyway, The war for the desktop is not home users. Home users mean nothing in the big picture, save a nice treat if we can hook some of them. The majority of Microsofts monopoly is comprised of company desktops. Company desktops are often used for nothing other than email, browsing, and office apps. If we provide decent alternatives for each of these, while maintaining an extremely low cost per workstation (remember commercial licenses are more expensive), then we can compete.
Enter SuSE linux, Galeon, and OpenOffice.
SuSE: installs cleanly, and just works. I've been on the FreeBSD trail for some time now after getting sick of the annoying way in which rpm dists upgrade (or don't). SuSE has impressed me from start to finish. It knew my hardware, it installed with minimal interference, it even came with nice default themes for Window Managers, and updated just fine from their site when I told it to.
Galeon: Minor work for the sysadmin types to get this set up as a simple-to-install package with a new enough version, but they're the only ones in a corp. environment who will have to do this. It uses the mozilla rendering engine, it does Flash, Java, tabbed browsing, etc.
OpenOffice: Grab version 1 (or buy SO 6 from Sun). Again this just works. Printing just works. It even gets Excel formulas right now, and seems highly stable and usable.
As for email clients - take your pick....
We're starting to roll out Linux where I work, directly due to the increased costs that come with MS Licensing 6.0. Great for us you may say, but some companies have essential apps that don't exist for Linux. Do your homework and lobby the vendor. We use a hideous mess of a Call Handling/Kitchen Sink type application called Goldmine. Avoid it if you can, before it gets as far as test implementation;-) All was not lost - due to customer requests they now have a lightweight native X client for their remote app service.
I think this year, and possibly the next, will truly decide if Linux will get anywhere or not in the corporate desktop environment. If it does, we enter a winning situation where multiple operating systems are available and practical for all (Joe uses Linux at work and likes it..), as choices - and that's what was really important in the first place.
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Hopefully the return of simpler games will cause companies to think about making simpler ones for consoles and home computers - perhaps at a budget price to reflect the fraction of the production costs involved. I'd like to see the return of scrolling beatemups, and shootemups - both genres that have been virtually dead for some years now (even counting the limited japanese arcade releases).
There's a growing number of people including myself who now collect arcade machines and the game boards, simply because the games are more fun. Come home from a long day at the office to play some relaxing starcraft or sprawling RPG? No thanks, I'd rather just shoot a bunch of aliens in a fast scrolling arcade game and not have to think.
Thanks to the people who pointed me in the direction of some up to date drivers. The ATI card is back in, now working, and it looks like they've also fixed the double-width xv problem the previous drivers had.
Why will ATI not aknowledge these even exist (for a while, they tried to tell me my card doesn't exist too, which was amusing)? I've bookmarked the forums the driver news was posted to, but it seems like a very strange way to release drivers.
Someone please mod up the reply posted with the link to the new drivers in it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who hit this pitfall (I'd even tried googletrawling).
Go on - ask ATI if they support Xfree 4.3.0 with the Radeon 9700 Pro.
I did.
Hence my original post.
Aha - thanks a lot, I'll give this a go.
I asked ATI about this several times, and was told they don't exist. Apparently they do...
It did work, until I upgraded the machine to a dist with 4.3.0.
I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless. The reason? ATI won't release a driver that works with xfree 4.3.0, and after several mails told me to just keep an eye on their site for updates. I know there are open source drivers (2d only) for the card, but those gave me really nasty rasterline flashes whenever the card did anything - so were next to useless.
Anyone else stuck in the same situation? If you look up drivers for the firegl cards on their site , you find a newer version of the drivers (same as the 9700 - why aren't they listed on the 9700 page??), but again it's compiled only for 4.1.0 and 4.2.0, and will refuse to work with 4.3.0.
"here are the genres that are supposedly dying:
10. Space Shooter or "Shmups"
It's not dying: it has been dead for quite a long time."
Ikaruga: arcade, dreamcast
XII-Stag: arcade, ps2
DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou: arcade, ps2
(in development)
R-Type Final (ps2)
Gradius V (ps2)
(also not listing the pretty good number that appeared between 1999 and 2001)
I wouldn't say it's dead yet, but it's not very well. Half the trouble is a lot of the time, games from the genre never leave Japan. There's also a very healthy community of people who have been pumping out new shooters for the PC as freeware/shareware.
In my humble opinion, many gamers today really don't have a clue - if you cant walk through the pretty 3D environments (while fighting the camera endlessly) and complete a game in a few days (optionally using the walkthrough guide released at the same time), then they aren't interested. The console and PC commercial lineup is now stale as fuck, costs to make these lavish games are high, so return must be high, and risk low. Kudos to Konami for releasing Contra: Shattered Soldier (with 60hz mode in Europe for once), and as I understand it Gradius V is planned for US/Euro release, as is R-Type Final from Irem. The run-n-gun genre (for it exists) isn't *quite* dead yet either, having seen Contra: SS, and soon to see Metal Slug 3 released for the PS2.
If there's anyone out there reading this, who like myself and others still drool at the prospect of facing thousands of enemy ships in a 2D firefight, head over to www.shmups.com, or join #shmups on any efnet server.
Pity there isn't a similar fanbase for scrolling beatemups really, that genre really is mortally wounded, even Capcom haven't made one for a few years now. Banpresto still make the odd one, and so does one of the other Korean arcade PCB manufacturers - I picked up one called Gaia Crusaders a few weeks back. Not a bad effort.
I was rather hoping PHP would kill ASP off, having had the unpleasant task of maintaining a machine running Chillisoft ASP.
I remember many moons ago, there was a program that could convert ASP to PHP - I wonder if it still exists and how good it is these days if so..?
Could be an interesting test. I used to roll my own Linux some years ago, but now I really can't be bothered and use SuSE instead (flames to /dev/null please). I'm pretty sure with KDE 3.1, GNOME 2.2, XFree86 4.3.0, and java now building properly with gcc 3.2 - that SuSE 8.2 will be just around the corner. I've just ordered the parts to build a new PC too (dual xeon 2.4ghz :-) ), so I'll try it all out at some point and see how they compare.
When I upgraded to SuSE 8.1, I decided to give KDE another whirl since it had hit version 3. Pretty good, does a lot of stuff, appears to do it well aside from a couple of basic apps which would crash every time they were closed (not KDEs fault as such).
;-)
Why did I switch back to Gnome 2?
Speed. The two systems I was using KDE on were a dual p2-400 and a celeron 800. On both, there was an enourmous speed increase switching to Gnome - especially with lots of open apps. They definitely still have work to do, I like Metacity because it's nice+light+simple, but the configuration leaves a little to be desired. GTK2 based apps appear to run a lot slower than GTK1, but even then they're still much quicker than the QT based KDE.
Fortunately, with "big players" backing KDE and Gnome seperately, I don't see either going away - a good thing, although I do wish they'd agree on how drag+drop should work
Errrrrrrr..
You *do* realise that OpenOffice 1.0 and StarOffice 6.0 are actually the very some program don't you? I've used both, and the only difference I've spotted personally is that the fonts can look a little smoother in SO.
I'm prepared to accept that OO might appear to run faster if you happen to compile it yourself with arch-dependant flags however. Since SO only ships binary, it might not have been built tailored to i686 and mmx machines.
Perhaps if they can't keep afloat, then they should rightly go out of business.
It's harsh to say that, but people have to realise there's a finite amount of money available in the paying Linux market. That money is always going to go to the companies putting out a better, or more consistent product, or those who provide better services. In fact it's one of the few markets where distribution is often selected by people with a clue - less vulnurable to the pressures of idiots in suits dictating corporate policy.
Is there space for a distro which is essentially "almost RedHat", when RedHat exists. It would seem there isn't. I've always had a hard time working out quite where Mandrake fitted, after having talked to quite a few newbies who installed Mandrake, praised its ease of installation, and then came totally unstuck when it came to getting more software, or getting a build environment installed.
Personally, I think the *paying* Linux market is going to be better served by two or three larger players in competition, than lots of much smaller outfits - the lack of consistent standards when it comes to Linux installs, desktop setups, file locations, and the infamous library versions, is a real headache for people trying to provide Linux software.
It had to be said.
Try playing the NTSC version of Gran Turismo 3, then stop and start playing the PAL version.
Become horrified at how the cars seem to lumber around more, like buses. Rather than keep the physics engine responding at the same speed and just drawing at different frame intervals, it *appears* that they opted to just run it slower overall. GT2 did not suffer this problem.
Another good one was SSX. The magazines in Europe raved about the game, and it's pretty good fun. However, not a single one of them pointed out that after every 50 frames it skips 10. You generally don't notice but pay close attention to the intro camera sweep before the boarders set off. Ugly.
I couldn't say how much work a proper conversion requires, thankfully more PS2 games are starting to appear with 60hz options for the huge majority of people with TVs that are quite capable of displaying NTSC (or at least PAL 60hz - which does exist) anyway. Sad to say but crap conversions are alive and well.
Not such a valid reason these days, since the vast majority of modern TV sets (and lets face it, how many people likely to buy a PS2/Xsux/Gamecube *really* will be using an ancient television?) sold in Europe are more than capable of displaying NTSC signals. Makes sense really since the TV manufacturers don't have to make everything twice.
Additionally, how the images are output to TV at hardware level has nothing to do with the game software at all.
It's just another excuse to fix prices.
Lots of people are mentioning postfix and qmail - personally I'd recommend exim (www.exim.org) which has proved itself everywhere I've used it, to be an excellent MTA. English config files, flexibility, all manner of database lookups as well as flat files, speed and reliability. To top things off it's an easy migration since it works as a drop-in replacement for sendmail if you so wish.
8 has that bug too.
:)
A particular variant of Ultrasparc II chips suffer from it, and even with the alleged patches it never entirely goes away.
I used to be a Sun fan, but with the modern machines tendency to suffer hardware failures as a regular thing (especially E250s with memory and motherboards), and the huge performance gap between them and linux (or HP-UX boxes for that matter), I can't see N1 actually working very well. Long gone are the days of the IPC and IPX, machines you could stomp on, kick, run in dusty dirt ridden corners in carpeted rooms behind a desk[1], and generally not treat very carefully, and they would keep on running
james
[1] I have done all of these things[2].
[2] Not to E250s though, they break all on their own.
I'll probably get modded as a troll for this, but:
Despite this being currently of questionable factual quality - IF the make a slight infringement of the GPL, but their product takes off and starts to help linux in general against the Microsoft monopoly, perhaps that is a greater goal.
If someone said to me that if United Linux would have to break the GPL in some way, but their actions would result in say a 20% desktop share by the end of next year, I would say thats a worthwhile sacrifice.
There's a greater issue here folks, and it affects computing as a whole, not just open source software. Microsoft need to have a competitor or we're all fucked.
If they need the software why can't they fucking well pay for it? ;)
Most people wouldn't steal a car from a car dealership just because they needed one, so why software? If it was food I'd have a lot of sympathy - but fucking software? Anyone who "needs" hardcore circuit design software should pay for it.
Personally, I'd tell your boss to go fuck his job. Long hours, constant work including weekends, lack of sleep - do it long enough and you'll head right along down to RSI-city with the rest of us poor sods with painful wrist/finger/arm problems.
Use your head, your arms are not designed to bash out code 15 hours a day - change your career while you still have one[1].
james
[1] Mine was only partially fucked - I got lucky with a slight case of pain for the rest of my life , with a matching set of muscle relaxant pills and anti inflammatories. Nice.
We have goldmine where I work.
;) You have to be running the iHeat server on an NT/whatever box, but there is a linux client. It comes as rpm or deb, and appears to basically vnc you into a very cut down windows session with the client launcher. It probably uses vnc code.
It is expensive, astonishingly expensive. It is bug ridden to the point of being unbelievable. It loses records. It requires almost daily reboots on all associated servers, even the call ticket generators. It is simply one of the worst piles of utter shite I have experienced in the workplace.
However, there *IS* a linux client
I think he must have meant Gorilla Marketing. This is where you throw away your computers and move into selling bananas to apes - a far more profitable endeavor that trying to be a freelance programmer without a list of completed projects.
Try this on a debian (potato) box:
apt-get install jserv
Look in absolute horror as it trawls the kitchen sink down, including xfree.
This isn't debians fault, exactly - the package is fully featured, but it's useless for people who just want the core functionality.
The only place I've seen this done right, so far, is the FreeBSD ports system - mod_php being a good example, it asks you what support you want before checking dependancies.
I'd imagine the same goes for gentoo, which I will try one day - but I'm currently using SuSE because I've been through the whole slackware/roll your own/freebsd/redhat/etc mill so many times that I'm now happy to just use one that works, but isn't necessarily bang up to date with package versions.
I dunno - try SuSE 8.0, it spotted everything on:
:)
1: Dell desktop machine, with TNT2 card on PCI bus overriding crap on-board Mach64.
2: Home machine, built from spares. Twin cpu, onboard scsi, onboard IDE, megaraid, USB camera, voodoo3
3: Dell server, brand new percraid raid card, problematic e1000 based intel network ports (dual)
It 'just worked' on all of the above, and was childs play to get installed and configured.
I'm extremely impressed
Well - perhaps I haven't been using Solaris NFS enough to see the horrors then. (I'm not a big Sun/Solaris fan - it's expensive, it's not as reliable as it used to be, and it's somewhere near the bottom in performance, even post tuning. I'm really getting bored now of swapping in new memory and motherboards on E250s in particular). I'll have to admit to not having used Suns NFS regularly since Solaris 2.5 and Sunos 4.0.x on IPC and IPX machines.
Just because you have your first Unix sysadmin job does not mean that your experience is significant.
Oh my, I'm very sorry sir - how DARE I question you, since you obviously know everything there is to know. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe it was just the fact that I've not used Solaris for NFS nearly as much as Digital Unix/True64, Irix, or HP-UX. I'll hand my notice in at work tomorrow, explaining that apparently my employment history was bogus, the references fake, and that the past years have all been a drug/alcohol induced haze.
What do you propose to do on Solaris when it tells you "umount: filesystem busy", accessing any files on it just hangs, and fuser -c tells you no processes have that filesystem busy?
Try using lsof, it tends to spot more than fuser. Using soft mounts can help enourmously, but as you know they open up a whole new world of pain. I think it's an acceptable one however, assuming the timeout values are increased to compenstate for quick network or server glitches. File integrity is compromised, allegedly, because processes won't wait for the remote server to come back and the write to complete successfully - but if a server goes down during an NFS write, do you actually want to trust that write anyway? I'm a paranoiac so I don't. Admittedly that's sidestepping the problem you've posed - which can only be solved by knocking the client down if lsof and fuser yield no useful killable results. You never want to be in that position though.
I've yet to find a better alternative to NFS, maybe CODA is up to the task - not had the time to investigate that, hopefully soon in an upcoming project.
E was great, I loved it. When/if E17 finally appears (and works on FreeBSD properly, the CVS one doesn't), I'll be one of the first to install it. For the moment I use KDE and Windowmaker at home/work respectively.
;-) All was not lost - due to customer requests they now have a lightweight native X client for their remote app service.
Anyway, The war for the desktop is not home users. Home users mean nothing in the big picture, save a nice treat if we can hook some of them. The majority of Microsofts monopoly is comprised of company desktops. Company desktops are often used for nothing other than email, browsing, and office apps. If we provide decent alternatives for each of these, while maintaining an extremely low cost per workstation (remember commercial licenses are more expensive), then we can compete.
Enter SuSE linux, Galeon, and OpenOffice.
SuSE: installs cleanly, and just works. I've been on the FreeBSD trail for some time now after getting sick of the annoying way in which rpm dists upgrade (or don't). SuSE has impressed me from start to finish. It knew my hardware, it installed with minimal interference, it even came with nice default themes for Window Managers, and updated just fine from their site when I told it to.
Galeon: Minor work for the sysadmin types to get this set up as a simple-to-install package with a new enough version, but they're the only ones in a corp. environment who will have to do this. It uses the mozilla rendering engine, it does Flash, Java, tabbed browsing, etc.
OpenOffice: Grab version 1 (or buy SO 6 from Sun). Again this just works. Printing just works. It even gets Excel formulas right now, and seems highly stable and usable.
As for email clients - take your pick....
We're starting to roll out Linux where I work, directly due to the increased costs that come with MS Licensing 6.0. Great for us you may say, but some companies have essential apps that don't exist for Linux. Do your homework and lobby the vendor. We use a hideous mess of a Call Handling/Kitchen Sink type application called Goldmine. Avoid it if you can, before it gets as far as test implementation
I think this year, and possibly the next, will truly decide if Linux will get anywhere or not in the corporate desktop environment. If it does, we enter a winning situation where multiple operating systems are available and practical for all (Joe uses Linux at work and likes it..), as choices - and that's what was really important in the first place.