Actually, I'd say the lack of a "find drivers" button is usually a *good* thing... because you shouldn't need it. With Linux, all of the nice, up-to-date drivers come with the kernel, so any time you upgrade you get them upgraded too! In fact, the only time we need such a button is when we have the stupid non-free drivers which can't be distributed with the kernel. I, for one, would be plenty happy to have the Nvidia driver included with the kernel by default, but until Nvidia decides to open-source it, I guess we're stuck downloading and installing it, just like on Windows.
Actually, on top of the above, I think it also has to do with the personality-type of the user: Aside from a slight bit of DOS when I was about 8(i.e. "a:, install" etc), I'd been windows-only and rarely used a command line until I tried Linux at about 15. Sometime in the next year I ended up switching to it, and now, five years later, I can't live without my command line handy. It's just/so/ convienient to have all that scripting power right there, and access to everything I want, instantly. Of course, that isn't to say I don't like having a nice GUI desktop environment... but I love having shell access.
*snip* do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations). *snip*
Um... I just did this on my N900 running a debian-based system and busybox's ash. I get the exact same output for both. And it looks fine. I just installed bash 4.2, and tried again. Same thing.
I dunno. Sitting between the processor and the OS... Sounds a lot like a Linux system running Windows in a VM. And, they are right, that *would* improve matters, thanks to snapshots and virtual hardware.:P
Yeah, true. Unfortunately, it won't solve the problem. Someone'll just get control of one of the signing keys, and then we'll have non-removable, trusted malware!
Yeah, true. I'm going with Google's favored webm in this mess because FF supports it natively and Google *will* protect it. Because they don't want to be paying streaming fees on Youtube, and having a backup option keeps MPEG-LA at bay...
Sounds like it'll make downloading streaming videos easier. I'm all for it - Messing with rtmpsuck and the like is definitely annoying for those sites that you can't just get the url from the source...
Eh, back before Youtube was big, some people used to use Flash for animations(like cartoons, not gif's), and then use Flash to display it. These days, you might still use Flash to create it, but then usually it gets rendered to video before being distributed.
I have to say, here in NE Washingon we have two counties: Spokane, which has a privately-run electric company, a large customer base(quite a bit of city area, which means high density). We also have Pend Oreille, which sits just to the north, is quite poor, has almost no city -- so there's much more wire runs per home -- and a government run PUD. Which do you think has higher rates? If you said "Spokane, by a factor of 3-4" you'd be right! Oh, and as far as replacing generating equipment goes, Pend Orille has been doing quite a bit of refitting lately, and it brought the rates up... by a quarter of a cent. Which is still at least 3x cheaper than neigboring Spokane. Now, please tell me how a private company running things can do better?
Actually, isn't that what the whole debacle about ionice etc is for? Being able to give some tasks low priority, depending on command or w/e.
Admittedly, I was really disappointed with the stock behaivior on Debian - Copying over many GB of files with cp to a network share basically brought things to a standstill. Worst part was that it would attempt to aggressively cache these files, until it r out of spare ram and then swapping inactive applications. So, leaving the PC for a couple of hours... Yeah. Fixed that problem with proper application of the swappiness value... but it could be better.
Worst thing I notice is that reading/writing to USB can make things freeze for a few seconds as it works. Really annoying when you have a quad-core chip and 4GB of ram... and are trying to do stuff on the main drive, which *isn't* busy.
I'd be willing to try any solution you've come up with if it can solve that little problem.
Erm, isn't that what we already do, at least on Linux? I mean, the application simply uses read/write and possibly seek against an arbitrary filename - it's up to the OS and FS to handle actually getting or saving the data. Which means that the application doesn't know or care whether the file's on spinning media, a slow flash drive, SSD or cached in system ram! The only thing that may not be optimal is that we have the sync() function, which usually won't return until the data has actually been saved to disk, though it's possible to change that functionality at the risk of data loss or corruption if the PC dies unexpectedly.
Interesting. Do you have a patch-set with all of these improvements handy or something? I'd be interested to see if they make any difference on my quad-core box...
...And my software raid5 of 3 640GB drives gets 175MB/sec linear read(at the beginning, of course) . I just don't see the point: The OS should be doing the caching to spare ram already, and well, adding more memory never hurt.
I thought it was just the fact that modern hosts have better connections and higher quotas... And a lot are hosted on things like Blogspot, which has the massive power of Google behind it - No mere huge number of viewers will being *that* down!
Oh, most definitely. I've had more fun messing with the internals of stuff than I ever used to have; I've learned Python and just find it great for coding in, and, above all, the "everything is a file" methodology is *really+* nice - Nothing like messing with raw disks the same as with files, and vice-versa.
To be fair... 2GB is *plenty* web-capable. Even 1GB is plenty on Linux, provided you don't open *too* many tabs at once.
Also, OS was taken care of - Ubuntu. And yes, it'd run perfectly fine on that box. I know you may not consider it a real OS, but... As far as loading the OS, you have a point, but most people *would* have an old box around, or at least a friend with a PC from which to load it(bootable USB stick). Screen's a problem, though around here you can find free CRTs, and even in-good-shape used LCDs are !ess than $50. Keyboard and mouse are a problem, but you can usually pick up a set for $5, if you don't have a friend with a spare set for free. Camera and microphone? Um... No need. I've almost never used my webcam, and you'd probably not be using a microphone either unless you're gaming. If you decide you need one of those, they can be had for $0.99 off ebay(which, surprisingly, are actually very good!)
You seem to be thinking in terms of a nice, complete system verus a bare-bones box, which may very well be used as a replacement for an old, failing box. In which case, you'd probably have all the extra bits handy. Also, remember that ram and the like can be upgraded easily in the future, so there's no need to put a lot in a bare-bones system.
60mb/sec? I've never gotten over ~20, even in linear-read from a drive I know can do 80. Still, even a typical SD card is usually a bit faster than a CD due to less seek time. Which is important for installing or booting.
...And for $700 you can build a top-of-the-line, amd-based gaming machine off Newegg that will run just about everything you throw at it. But that, like your couple of builds, are *still* way above what was managed with the $200 machine.
This is honestly true - an optimized set of applications, and even a real low power chip(like the ARM ones in smartphones) is plenty for browsing and such. However, then we run into things like Flash, which sucks the life out of almost anything. Honestly, once we get hardware-accelerated decoding of VP8 available on Linux, and a proper plugin for FF/chrome which allows it to be used with HTML5 video... then that will be less of a problem as *most* youtube videos have webm versions.. But until then... *sigh*. You either need to run it with a small window, or have a powerful CPU...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'd say the lack of a "find drivers" button is usually a *good* thing... because you shouldn't need it.
With Linux, all of the nice, up-to-date drivers come with the kernel, so any time you upgrade you get them upgraded too!
In fact, the only time we need such a button is when we have the stupid non-free drivers which can't be distributed with the kernel. I, for one, would be plenty happy to have the Nvidia driver included with the kernel by default, but until Nvidia decides to open-source it, I guess we're stuck downloading and installing it, just like on Windows.
Mod. Parent. UP.
Actually, on top of the above, I think it also has to do with the personality-type of the user: Aside from a slight bit of DOS when I was about 8(i.e. "a:, install" etc), I'd been windows-only and rarely used a command line until I tried Linux at about 15. Sometime in the next year I ended up switching to it, and now, five years later, I can't live without my command line handy. It's just /so/ convienient to have all that scripting power right there, and access to everything I want, instantly.
Of course, that isn't to say I don't like having a nice GUI desktop environment... but I love having shell access.
Ooh, I second that!
It'd also be great for breaking any sort of drm that relies on privledged apps in the OS. Great!
Ah. I must have misread.
*snip*
do 'ps', looks sane enough, now, do 'ps|cat', and suddenly you see the hard-to-manage man behind the curtain that can crop up in various situations).
*snip*
Um... I just did this on my N900 running a debian-based system and busybox's ash.
I get the exact same output for both. And it looks fine.
I just installed bash 4.2, and tried again. Same thing.
Please elaborate what I *should* have gotten?
I dunno. Sitting between the processor and the OS... Sounds a lot like a Linux system running Windows in a VM. And, they are right, that *would* improve matters, thanks to snapshots and virtual hardware. :P
Yeah, true. Unfortunately, it won't solve the problem. Someone'll just get control of one of the signing keys, and then we'll have non-removable, trusted malware!
Mod prent funny... but true.
Yeah, true. I'm going with Google's favored webm in this mess because FF supports it natively and Google *will* protect it. Because they don't want to be paying streaming fees on Youtube, and having a backup option keeps MPEG-LA at bay...
Sounds like it'll make downloading streaming videos easier. I'm all for it - Messing with rtmpsuck and the like is definitely annoying for those sites that you can't just get the url from the source...
Eh, back before Youtube was big, some people used to use Flash for animations(like cartoons, not gif's), and then use Flash to display it. These days, you might still use Flash to create it, but then usually it gets rendered to video before being distributed.
I have to say, here in NE Washingon we have two counties: Spokane, which has a privately-run electric company, a large customer base(quite a bit of city area, which means high density). We also have Pend Oreille, which sits just to the north, is quite poor, has almost no city -- so there's much more wire runs per home -- and a government run PUD.
Which do you think has higher rates?
If you said "Spokane, by a factor of 3-4" you'd be right!
Oh, and as far as replacing generating equipment goes, Pend Orille has been doing quite a bit of refitting lately, and it brought the rates up... by a quarter of a cent. Which is still at least 3x cheaper than neigboring Spokane.
Now, please tell me how a private company running things can do better?
Actually, isn't that what the whole debacle about ionice etc is for? Being able to give some tasks low priority, depending on command or w/e.
Admittedly, I was really disappointed with the stock behaivior on Debian - Copying over many GB of files with cp to a network share basically brought things to a standstill. Worst part was that it would attempt to aggressively cache these files, until it r out of spare ram and then swapping inactive applications. So, leaving the PC for a couple of hours... Yeah.
Fixed that problem with proper application of the swappiness value... but it could be better.
Worst thing I notice is that reading/writing to USB can make things freeze for a few seconds as it works. Really annoying when you have a quad-core chip and 4GB of ram... and are trying to do stuff on the main drive, which *isn't* busy.
I'd be willing to try any solution you've come up with if it can solve that little problem.
Erm, isn't that what we already do, at least on Linux? I mean, the application simply uses read/write and possibly seek against an arbitrary filename - it's up to the OS and FS to handle actually getting or saving the data. Which means that the application doesn't know or care whether the file's on spinning media, a slow flash drive, SSD or cached in system ram!
The only thing that may not be optimal is that we have the sync() function, which usually won't return until the data has actually been saved to disk, though it's possible to change that functionality at the risk of data loss or corruption if the PC dies unexpectedly.
-RobbieThe1st
Interesting. Do you have a patch-set with all of these improvements handy or something? I'd be interested to see if they make any difference on my quad-core box...
...And my software raid5 of 3 640GB drives gets 175MB/sec linear read(at the beginning, of course) . I just don't see the point: The OS should be doing the caching to spare ram already, and well, adding more memory never hurt.
I agree about Facebook belonging there!
I thought it was just the fact that modern hosts have better connections and higher quotas... And a lot are hosted on things like Blogspot, which has the massive power of Google behind it - No mere huge number of viewers will being *that* down!
Oh, most definitely. I've had more fun messing with the internals of stuff than I ever used to have; I've learned Python and just find it great for coding in, and, above all, the "everything is a file" methodology is *really+* nice - Nothing like messing with raw disks the same as with files, and vice-versa.
To be fair... 2GB is *plenty* web-capable. Even 1GB is plenty on Linux, provided you don't open *too* many tabs at once.
Also, OS was taken care of - Ubuntu. And yes, it'd run perfectly fine on that box. I know you may not consider it a real OS, but...
As far as loading the OS, you have a point, but most people *would* have an old box around, or at least a friend with a PC from which to load it(bootable USB stick).
Screen's a problem, though around here you can find free CRTs, and even in-good-shape used LCDs are !ess than $50.
Keyboard and mouse are a problem, but you can usually pick up a set for $5, if you don't have a friend with a spare set for free.
Camera and microphone? Um... No need. I've almost never used my webcam, and you'd probably not be using a microphone either unless you're gaming. If you decide you need one of those, they can be had for $0.99 off ebay(which, surprisingly, are actually very good!)
You seem to be thinking in terms of a nice, complete system verus a bare-bones box, which may very well be used as a replacement for an old, failing box. In which case, you'd probably have all the extra bits handy. Also, remember that ram and the like can be upgraded easily in the future, so there's no need to put a lot in a bare-bones system.
He's being funny, in case you can't tell.
60mb/sec? I've never gotten over ~20, even in linear-read from a drive I know can do 80.
Still, even a typical SD card is usually a bit faster than a CD due to less seek time. Which is important for installing or booting.
...And for $700 you can build a top-of-the-line, amd-based gaming machine off Newegg that will run just about everything you throw at it. But that, like your couple of builds, are *still* way above what was managed with the $200 machine.
This is honestly true - an optimized set of applications, and even a real low power chip(like the ARM ones in smartphones) is plenty for browsing and such. However, then we run into things like Flash, which sucks the life out of almost anything.
Honestly, once we get hardware-accelerated decoding of VP8 available on Linux, and a proper plugin for FF/chrome which allows it to be used with HTML5 video... then that will be less of a problem as *most* youtube videos have webm versions..
But until then... *sigh*. You either need to run it with a small window, or have a powerful CPU...