I know a couple of medical transciptionists, and WP5.1 is king. Why? Because when you're typing 120 WPM you can't afford to reach for the mouse. Because they all have these medical dictionary modules that are written for WP5.1. And because when your word processor is your job, you really don't give a rat's ass if it has a GUI or not.
You're right, I've never installed OpenBSD. But as my first post said: "unless it's told to you explicitly on first login". Now I know it is.
Re:OpenBSD = Coordinated Innovation
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OpenBSD 3.3 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My problem is not that's there's a single easily overlooked line in the FAQ that mentions an "afterboot". My problem is with the previous poster's attitude.
"man afterboot" is hardly a common UNIX way of finding out about necessary post installation tasks. To expect everyone to know that it's there, even after reading every word of the FAQ, is assuming too much. It's all in the attitude. A simple "your answer can be found in 'man afterboot'" is much better than "I don't know what to tell you if you can't do that much without more hand-holding."
OpenOffice is slow, but not THAT slow. I suspect that you have a bad build or something.
Anyway, I suspect it was "fast enough" in my story, because I already had an instance running. But it's still slower than MSOffice, which is why I was surprised my boss thought my desktop was snappier.
I suspect that his impression came not from the speed of any individual action, but from the overall workflow.
How the hell is someone supposed to know that there's a manpage for "afterboot"? Unless it's told to you explicitly on first login, only seasoned OpenBSD users will even know that it's there.
I wonder if a semi-unification of writing and speech, like unifying the writing of sylables (something like "nite" instead of "night") would help the iliteracy problem in the US in any way.
Nah, it won't help the illiteracy problem. Literacy is getting worse with no change in the language or spelling. It's a social problem, not a language problem.
But why does English have such "wierd" spelling? Two reasons. One is that it borrowed heavily from Latin, Saxon, German, French, Spanish, as well as their spelling. The second problem was the spelling reform. The spelling reform happened both too late and too early. It happened too late because some spellings were already codified for pronunciations that had sinced changed. And it happened too early since the language has continued to change since then.
If you think the silent letters in English spelling is bad, take a look at French! No offense to the French, but your spellings, while very consistant, have little relation anymore to the pronunciation.
This is a possible reason why Microsoft Windows 98(tm) running on a 100mhz Pentium seems so much snappier for minor UI-interaction tasks (pulling down a menu) than a same-vintage Gnome on identical hardware.
I'm running KDE on a P4 1.4Ghz machine. My boss runs Win2k on a P4 1.5Ghz machine. I'm assuming that KDE performance is roughly comparable to Gnome performance.
Anyway, my boss comes by and asks for some information. I bring it up by opening a Konqueror file manager window to an NFS mount, then opening the file in OpenOffice. He thanked me, then remarked how much snappier my desktop was than his. Huh? That was NFS plus OpenOffice, in case you didn't notice. Everyone on Slashdot tells me that X/KDE is slower than M$/Windows. They tell me so often that I was starting to believe it.
So I started paying more attention to the speed issue between KDE and Win2k. I've come to two conclusions. One is that the X11 process doesn't have a high priority by default. The other is that KDE doesn't have application resources (icons) embedded into the executable. I only notice "sluggishness" when I'm doing CPU or filesystem intensive stuff in the background, like a compile. Funny thing, I notice an even worse sluggishness under the same conditions in Win2k.
I've also noticed that Win2k doesn't do nearly a half the things that KDE does. In terms of just the graphics, all Windows does is draw some primitives on the screen. For a draw versus draw comparison, Win2k is going to beat X11/Qt every day of the week. But for real work, KDE beats Win2k hands down. I click on an mp3 file in Konqueror and kaboodle opens up almost immediately. The same thing under Win2k takes about three to five seconds for an embedded MediaPlayer to appear in the explorer sidebar. Running fifty different applications under KDE imposes no performance hit. But the same under Win2k makes a significant hit. Copying five thousand files from one directory to another (on the same partition) is almost instantaneous under KDE. Under Windows this can be almost painful to watch. This is really the filesystem (UFS2+S versus NTFS), but the user isn't going to care.
Why do people think that Windows is faster than KDE/Gnome? Because they've been told so hundreds of times. For minor UI interactions, they're right. But for the complete GUI as a whole, they're wrong.
The people who want DirectFB seem to be the same people who complain that they can't get a 648FR in Doom. "It's that damn networking transparency stuff in X! It's slowing me down!"
Instead of throwing out X just to please a tiny segment of gamers, let's take a sensible approach. Win32 didn't become obsolete when DirectX showed up. In fact, they seem to work nicely together. Why can't the same thing happen in *NIX land? Why must it be one or the other? Have DirectFB tell X that it's going to use this region on the screen, and then have X promise it won't do anything in that region.
p.s. This may be the way that DirectFB is designed. I'm not sure. But I do know everytime the name "DirectFB" comes up, people crawl out of the woodwork complaining that a general purpose solution isn't optimal for their specific purpose task.
Just goes to show that attempts to name a system after its components is wrongheaded. Perhaps whoever puts together the distribution should be the one to name it. Hey! That's what happens now!
No kidding. A couple of weeks ago at work I was in the lab with a coworker. I wanted to show him something so I typed in www.google.com, but unfortunately mispelled it. Up pops this german porn site with no need to be a member to see the goods. Yikes, let's close this before the boss comes by. But up pops three more windows. Now the boss is entering the lab. Close, close, close. Two more windows pop up, one of which is full screen with a close up of a euroboxmunchathon. Click, click, click. Oh please oh please don't walk over here mr boss man. The big windows finally close but several tiny popups appear with rows of explicit and animated banner ads. Coworker is crapping his pants. Damn, the boss is heading this way. Power switch... Whew...
No, I do use a shell. But that shell isn't necessarily bash. It might be sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, etc. The point is, the choice of shell is up to the user. Completely optional and replaceable components are not justifications for naming an OS.
Putting Pirelli tires (bash) on a dodge doesn't make it a Pirelli/Dodge. Assembling the engine with Stanley tools (gcc) doesn't make it a Stanley/Dodge.
It's not clear to me either. I don't know where some of these people get their bandwidth from, but downloading a complete movie is just too painful for me, and I have a 1.5Mbps connection.
VOD isn't going to replace DVD (or any subsequent physical media) any more than PDF replaced paper bound books.
You can never have enough choice. But there are times when you don't want to make a choice. Please understand the difference.
You can never have enough choice, because the choices you want to make for me are not going to be the same as the choices I would make for you. And we do NOT want a dictator running our systems for us! Even under Windows you have twenty different text editors, twenty different web browsers, twenty different media players, etc. The choice is there because the users want that choice.
But at the same time, installation is not the appropriate time to make a newbie choose between a bewildering variety of applications. The "cram everything you can into one DVD" distros are making a big mistake. The initial install should provide the bare necessities and some well thought out defaults. Everything else can be installed later through the "Install More Software" icon on the desktop.
Is the KDE vs Gnome choice daunting for the new user? Then install one or the other as the default. But do not attempt to ban, destroy or eliminate the other! You do not have to prevent me from exercising my choice in order for you to exercise yours.
The very fact that I don't know whether something like that exists, much less where to get it, is exactly why people use windows.
There is not operating system, not even Windows, that can do that. You're living in fantasy land if you think there is.
I bought a new printer over the weekend. Under Windows I was required to insert the CDROM that came with the printer. There was nothing automatic about it. When Windows detects that there is new hardware, it merely demands that you give it the manufacturer supplied driver.
And then there's the fact that Debian has more packages than any other system I've seen. The version currently in beta ("testing" in Debian terms) has almost 11000 packages.
Considering that Debian has a much higher granularity in its packages, this isn't saying much. Under Debian you might have libfoo, libfoo-devel, and libfoo-docs. Under NetBSD you would have just libfoo. So you're essentially saying "mine's twenty centimeters, how many inches is yours?"
Especially when there is a kernel patch required for a security upgrade, which then implies a userland rebuild.
Rebuilding the kernel does not imply rebuilding world. Similarly, rebuilding one userland app does not imply rebuilding any others.
The last security advisory for my system (FreeBSD) took about five minutes to apply. If you read the advisories, they'll tell you how to apply them without building everything. For example, here are the instructions for fixing the remote vulnerability in the cvs server (FreeBSD-SA-03:01.cvs, 2003-02-04):
2) To patch your present system:
The following patch has been verified to apply to FreeBSD 4.6, 4.7, and 5.0 systems.
a) Download the relevant patch from the location below, and verify the detached PGP signature using your PGP utility.
If you switch out that component, what do you have?
A broken system. And not just merely broken, but so kaput that you must either reinstall a new OS from scratch, or put that kernel back in.
Contrary to the words of RMS, LinusOS is not merely The GNU System with the Hurd swapped out. It's impossible to take a running GNU/Hurd system, exchange the kernel with Linux, and have it run. It doesn't work that way.
Ever wonder why it's taking Debian so long with Debian GNU/Hurd and even longer with Debian GNU/NetBSD? Because you can't merely swap out the kernel! Duh!
p.s. But I will agree with you that most stuff called "Linux software" is not Linux software at all, but generic Unix software.
Last time I did the same experiment, GNU was just a minor player along with everyone else. Of course, I did not include any non-OS stuff in the statistics. Emacs is not part of an OS. Then again, neither is gcc (gasp) or bash (double gasp). Ones needs to take care in differentiating the operating system from the development system and user environment.
What is not unified about the FreeBSD "API"? Actually, FreeBSD's libc is more unified than Linux's glibc, simply because it adheres closer to the standards.
Another thing BSD is missing is a proper video display.
Huh? Do you even know what you are talking about? Of course not! FreeBSD uses XFree86-4.3 just like Linux does.
The video display code in the Linux kernel is far better than BSD's.
What video display code are you talking about? The only video code in the Linux kernel is DRI, and guess what? FreeBSD has it too!
The last thing BSD lacks is name recognition - everyone's heard of Linux.
But more people have heard of Unix than have heard of Linux. And BSD is a real Unix while Linux is not. Or look at Mac OSX, which has more users than Linux while still being a genuine BSD.
On Unix systems, novices know they have no idea what is going on, and experts know that they know what is going on. On Windows systems, novices think they know what is going on, and experts know that they do not know what is going on.
True, true, how true. Have you ever seen a Unix user mess up the system by thinking they were smarter than the sysadmin? I sure haven't. But I've seen plenty of Windows systems messed up, and entire networks taken down, because most Windows users think they know everything.
If it will make a great server, then it will make an even better client.
I'm using FreeBSD as my desktop at work and at home. What am I missing that I could have if I used Linux? Beats me! I've got DRI, MPlayer, multichannel audio, KDE, Gnome, CUPS, USB, Wine, OpenOffice, Java, etc.
Of course, it take slightly more effort to administer the system, but in some quarters this is actually a Good Thing(tm). It's more than suitable for the company desktop, because the IT department is going to be administering it and not the users.
Actually it's pretty damn good. By a few accounts, Tomcat runs better on FreeBSD than on Linux. However, FreeBSD does not have official certification from Sun. Which means you have to build Java from source instead of using an official FreeBSD binary.
And of course, the "official" binary for Linux works under FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should have shown him KDE running on something other than Linux.
"Do you KDE guys say 'Linux' or 'GNU/Linux'?"
"Actually we say 'BSD/NetBSD'..."
I know a couple of medical transciptionists, and WP5.1 is king. Why? Because when you're typing 120 WPM you can't afford to reach for the mouse. Because they all have these medical dictionary modules that are written for WP5.1. And because when your word processor is your job, you really don't give a rat's ass if it has a GUI or not.
...an e-mail is in Root's mail queue...
You're right, I've never installed OpenBSD. But as my first post said: "unless it's told to you explicitly on first login". Now I know it is.
My problem is not that's there's a single easily overlooked line in the FAQ that mentions an "afterboot". My problem is with the previous poster's attitude.
"man afterboot" is hardly a common UNIX way of finding out about necessary post installation tasks. To expect everyone to know that it's there, even after reading every word of the FAQ, is assuming too much. It's all in the attitude. A simple "your answer can be found in 'man afterboot'" is much better than "I don't know what to tell you if you can't do that much without more hand-holding."
OpenOffice is slow, but not THAT slow. I suspect that you have a bad build or something.
Anyway, I suspect it was "fast enough" in my story, because I already had an instance running. But it's still slower than MSOffice, which is why I was surprised my boss thought my desktop was snappier.
I suspect that his impression came not from the speed of any individual action, but from the overall workflow.
"man afterboot"???? WTF?
How the hell is someone supposed to know that there's a manpage for "afterboot"? Unless it's told to you explicitly on first login, only seasoned OpenBSD users will even know that it's there.
I wonder if a semi-unification of writing and speech, like unifying the writing of sylables (something like "nite" instead of "night") would help the iliteracy problem in the US in any way.
Nah, it won't help the illiteracy problem. Literacy is getting worse with no change in the language or spelling. It's a social problem, not a language problem.
But why does English have such "wierd" spelling? Two reasons. One is that it borrowed heavily from Latin, Saxon, German, French, Spanish, as well as their spelling. The second problem was the spelling reform. The spelling reform happened both too late and too early. It happened too late because some spellings were already codified for pronunciations that had sinced changed. And it happened too early since the language has continued to change since then.
If you think the silent letters in English spelling is bad, take a look at French! No offense to the French, but your spellings, while very consistant, have little relation anymore to the pronunciation.
I've got a 32Meg video card, and top tells me that X is 38772K. So it's really ony 5.9Megs. Same as other people are saying...
This is a possible reason why Microsoft Windows 98(tm) running on a 100mhz Pentium seems so much snappier for minor UI-interaction tasks (pulling down a menu) than a same-vintage Gnome on identical hardware.
I'm running KDE on a P4 1.4Ghz machine. My boss runs Win2k on a P4 1.5Ghz machine. I'm assuming that KDE performance is roughly comparable to Gnome performance.
Anyway, my boss comes by and asks for some information. I bring it up by opening a Konqueror file manager window to an NFS mount, then opening the file in OpenOffice. He thanked me, then remarked how much snappier my desktop was than his. Huh? That was NFS plus OpenOffice, in case you didn't notice. Everyone on Slashdot tells me that X/KDE is slower than M$/Windows. They tell me so often that I was starting to believe it.
So I started paying more attention to the speed issue between KDE and Win2k. I've come to two conclusions. One is that the X11 process doesn't have a high priority by default. The other is that KDE doesn't have application resources (icons) embedded into the executable. I only notice "sluggishness" when I'm doing CPU or filesystem intensive stuff in the background, like a compile. Funny thing, I notice an even worse sluggishness under the same conditions in Win2k.
I've also noticed that Win2k doesn't do nearly a half the things that KDE does. In terms of just the graphics, all Windows does is draw some primitives on the screen. For a draw versus draw comparison, Win2k is going to beat X11/Qt every day of the week. But for real work, KDE beats Win2k hands down. I click on an mp3 file in Konqueror and kaboodle opens up almost immediately. The same thing under Win2k takes about three to five seconds for an embedded MediaPlayer to appear in the explorer sidebar. Running fifty different applications under KDE imposes no performance hit. But the same under Win2k makes a significant hit. Copying five thousand files from one directory to another (on the same partition) is almost instantaneous under KDE. Under Windows this can be almost painful to watch. This is really the filesystem (UFS2+S versus NTFS), but the user isn't going to care.
Why do people think that Windows is faster than KDE/Gnome? Because they've been told so hundreds of times. For minor UI interactions, they're right. But for the complete GUI as a whole, they're wrong.
The people who want DirectFB seem to be the same people who complain that they can't get a 648FR in Doom. "It's that damn networking transparency stuff in X! It's slowing me down!"
Instead of throwing out X just to please a tiny segment of gamers, let's take a sensible approach. Win32 didn't become obsolete when DirectX showed up. In fact, they seem to work nicely together. Why can't the same thing happen in *NIX land? Why must it be one or the other? Have DirectFB tell X that it's going to use this region on the screen, and then have X promise it won't do anything in that region.
p.s. This may be the way that DirectFB is designed. I'm not sure. But I do know everytime the name "DirectFB" comes up, people crawl out of the woodwork complaining that a general purpose solution isn't optimal for their specific purpose task.
Just goes to show that attempts to name a system after its components is wrongheaded. Perhaps whoever puts together the distribution should be the one to name it. Hey! That's what happens now!
p.s. The default shell for Slackware is sh (ash).
No kidding. A couple of weeks ago at work I was in the lab with a coworker. I wanted to show him something so I typed in www.google.com, but unfortunately mispelled it. Up pops this german porn site with no need to be a member to see the goods. Yikes, let's close this before the boss comes by. But up pops three more windows. Now the boss is entering the lab. Close, close, close. Two more windows pop up, one of which is full screen with a close up of a euroboxmunchathon. Click, click, click. Oh please oh please don't walk over here mr boss man. The big windows finally close but several tiny popups appear with rows of explicit and animated banner ads. Coworker is crapping his pants. Damn, the boss is heading this way. Power switch... Whew...
No, I do use a shell. But that shell isn't necessarily bash. It might be sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh, etc. The point is, the choice of shell is up to the user. Completely optional and replaceable components are not justifications for naming an OS.
Putting Pirelli tires (bash) on a dodge doesn't make it a Pirelli/Dodge. Assembling the engine with Stanley tools (gcc) doesn't make it a Stanley/Dodge.
It's not clear to me either. I don't know where some of these people get their bandwidth from, but downloading a complete movie is just too painful for me, and I have a 1.5Mbps connection.
VOD isn't going to replace DVD (or any subsequent physical media) any more than PDF replaced paper bound books.
You can never have enough choice. But there are times when you don't want to make a choice. Please understand the difference.
You can never have enough choice, because the choices you want to make for me are not going to be the same as the choices I would make for you. And we do NOT want a dictator running our systems for us! Even under Windows you have twenty different text editors, twenty different web browsers, twenty different media players, etc. The choice is there because the users want that choice.
But at the same time, installation is not the appropriate time to make a newbie choose between a bewildering variety of applications. The "cram everything you can into one DVD" distros are making a big mistake. The initial install should provide the bare necessities and some well thought out defaults. Everything else can be installed later through the "Install More Software" icon on the desktop.
Is the KDE vs Gnome choice daunting for the new user? Then install one or the other as the default. But do not attempt to ban, destroy or eliminate the other! You do not have to prevent me from exercising my choice in order for you to exercise yours.
The very fact that I don't know whether something like that exists, much less where to get it, is exactly why people use windows.
There is not operating system, not even Windows, that can do that. You're living in fantasy land if you think there is.
I bought a new printer over the weekend. Under Windows I was required to insert the CDROM that came with the printer. There was nothing automatic about it. When Windows detects that there is new hardware, it merely demands that you give it the manufacturer supplied driver.
And then there's the fact that Debian has more packages than any other system I've seen. The version currently in beta ("testing" in Debian terms) has almost 11000 packages.
Considering that Debian has a much higher granularity in its packages, this isn't saying much. Under Debian you might have libfoo, libfoo-devel, and libfoo-docs. Under NetBSD you would have just libfoo. So you're essentially saying "mine's twenty centimeters, how many inches is yours?"
Rebuilding the kernel does not imply rebuilding world. Similarly, rebuilding one userland app does not imply rebuilding any others.
The last security advisory for my system (FreeBSD) took about five minutes to apply. If you read the advisories, they'll tell you how to apply them without building everything. For example, here are the instructions for fixing the remote vulnerability in the cvs server (FreeBSD-SA-03:01.cvs, 2003-02-04):
If you switch out that component, what do you have?
A broken system. And not just merely broken, but so kaput that you must either reinstall a new OS from scratch, or put that kernel back in.
Contrary to the words of RMS, LinusOS is not merely The GNU System with the Hurd swapped out. It's impossible to take a running GNU/Hurd system, exchange the kernel with Linux, and have it run. It doesn't work that way.
Ever wonder why it's taking Debian so long with Debian GNU/Hurd and even longer with Debian GNU/NetBSD? Because you can't merely swap out the kernel! Duh!
p.s. But I will agree with you that most stuff called "Linux software" is not Linux software at all, but generic Unix software.
Last time I did the same experiment, GNU was just a minor player along with everyone else. Of course, I did not include any non-OS stuff in the statistics. Emacs is not part of an OS. Then again, neither is gcc (gasp) or bash (double gasp). Ones needs to take care in differentiating the operating system from the development system and user environment.
The first is a unified API.
What is not unified about the FreeBSD "API"? Actually, FreeBSD's libc is more unified than Linux's glibc, simply because it adheres closer to the standards.
Another thing BSD is missing is a proper video display.
Huh? Do you even know what you are talking about? Of course not! FreeBSD uses XFree86-4.3 just like Linux does.
The video display code in the Linux kernel is far better than BSD's.
What video display code are you talking about? The only video code in the Linux kernel is DRI, and guess what? FreeBSD has it too!
The last thing BSD lacks is name recognition - everyone's heard of Linux.
But more people have heard of Unix than have heard of Linux. And BSD is a real Unix while Linux is not. Or look at Mac OSX, which has more users than Linux while still being a genuine BSD.
On Unix systems, novices know they have no idea what is going on, and experts know that they know what is going on. On Windows systems, novices think they know what is going on, and experts know that they do not know what is going on.
True, true, how true. Have you ever seen a Unix user mess up the system by thinking they were smarter than the sysadmin? I sure haven't. But I've seen plenty of Windows systems messed up, and entire networks taken down, because most Windows users think they know everything.
Corporate support from RH, SuSE, and the like is critical for that.
The average computer user (runnning CodeRed) isn't going to be shelling out the big bucks for professional Linux support.
If it will make a great server, then it will make an even better client.
I'm using FreeBSD as my desktop at work and at home. What am I missing that I could have if I used Linux? Beats me! I've got DRI, MPlayer, multichannel audio, KDE, Gnome, CUPS, USB, Wine, OpenOffice, Java, etc.
Of course, it take slightly more effort to administer the system, but in some quarters this is actually a Good Thing(tm). It's more than suitable for the company desktop, because the IT department is going to be administering it and not the users.
Here's my issue. Java support in BSD is spotty.
Actually it's pretty damn good. By a few accounts, Tomcat runs better on FreeBSD than on Linux. However, FreeBSD does not have official certification from Sun. Which means you have to build Java from source instead of using an official FreeBSD binary.
And of course, the "official" binary for Linux works under FreeBSD.