Not only that, but there may be something else to consider.
1) OpenOffice.org is available for several platforms. 2) Ximian is working on putting Evolution integration into OpenOffice.org. 3) Ximian is porting Evolution 2.0 to Windows. 4) ??? 4) I think that "Profit!" fits in here somewhere.
Nevertheless, it may be a very good strategy to begin to pull away the strict dependance upon MS Office and Outlook/Exchange. Microsoft still charges Exchange server "seat licenses", but this is just one small step that may very well make a significant impact, especially when MS Office itself is taken out of the equation, and can be replaced with OO.o and Evolution.
Novell is getting to be pretty crafty. Maybe we need to give them a bit more credit?;)
You too? I've been using the webmail system for YEARS now, on Linux, through Firefox or Epiphany. I've considered buying "Connector", but they don't officially support Slackware (even though the RH9 packages are supposed to work).
This is DAMN FINE NEWS. I'm a big fan of Evolution, and this GPL plugin will make it even better than ever. GPLing the plugin will make it much easier to slide Linux onto Windows networks with Exchange servers, with minimal (or no) interference.
I'm sorry, but you can't make a statement like that and not back it up. How exactly is this the case? Even if it really is true, how can it hurt to have a defrag tool available? Is it really true that there is _NEVER_ instances where a Linux filesystem can be so fragmented as to negatively impact performance? Let's try to be logical, shall we?
Why is it hard to understand that UNIX filesystems are designed to have minimal impact on performance due to their design?
These are multiuser operating systems that are designed to make frequent requests from multiple users at any given time. Things *are* going to be strewn across the drive, but there is a reason that there is no noticable impact on performance.
UNIX filesystems are engineered to avoid appending old files and scattering data about in the same manner that MSDOS and Windows FAT filesystems do. These filesystems don't fill every single free "crack" on the drive in the way that MSDOS filesystems do. FAT filesystems are designed to write into the first available location, or "hole", often spanning across several of these as well, for writing a single file. This is what causes the "fragmentation" on a Microsoft filesystem. The clustering algorithms that UNIX/Linux machines use use help to prevent "fragmentation", by which Windows users expererience.
Bear in mind that FAT/FAT32 was based off of a design that was optimized for writing small amounts of data to *floppy disks* and small capacity drives with very limited amounts of space. Later in the life of DOS and Windows, the "fragmentation" issues became terrible, typically as drive capacities got to be larger and filesizes increased by a great degree. NTFS resolves many of these issues, but still carries a few of the FAT traits in spite of it being a totally different filesystem (based off of HPFS). Potentially, it still writes to tiny, empty, blocks of free space, but its tree-based structure doesn't limit the performance due to "fragmentation" like we experienced on DOS/Win9x. However, I think that the biggest problem on Windows machines is the way drives are typically partitioned, more than anything else. Things get removed and installed frequently, to the same locations of the drive, with user-created data overlapping the locations of important system and swapfiles. NTFS, in most respects, doesn't actually need defrag. In fact, when I ran Windows 2000 for a few years, defrag provided almost no improvement, at least not to the same degree as it did on Windows 98. You can defrag all you like, but it's unlikely that even an NTFS partition will experience more than 3-5% total fragmention.
I hope that is "logical enough" for you. I think that, perhaps, you need to ditch the old DOS/Windows "I MUST DEFRAG" mentality in order to really understand this. Filesystems (especially journalling types) have greatly changed since the days of DOS.
Most people don't have their/home directory tied into their root partition. Often, they are even on seperate drives. Even if a defrag program were used, there would be very little benefit. You're not constantly writing new files in and out of the same space as the root partition in that respect.
And even if someone does put their/home directory on the root partiton, the modern Linux filesystems practically negate the need for defragmentation, due to their designs (as well as OS and drive design).
I use ReiserFS, because on average - it is a faster filesystem than EXT3 for most desktop purposes. I personally feel that EXT3, however, is a more reliable FS when it comes to recovering bad data on the hard disks. I recently had some failures due to a failing motherboard, which corrupted some data on my drive, but the reiserfsk tools have cryptic descriptions for failures and don't always seem to do the job right when it comes to recovering bad data. I've had reiserfsck work properly, but the few times that I have had hard drive failures, I've had little success in recovering bad data on a ReiserFS partition.
I must admit though, that any problems I've had on a ReiserFS system weren't necessarily the fault of the filesystem (instead were related to failing hardware). I've run several machines, with multiple drives, which all use ReiserFS. It's been quite reliable in that sense.
I guess that the only way you're going to get true reliability is to make redundant backups.
It is pretty amazing that the original GameBoy stomped the rivals from NEC, Atari, and Sega. I personally own a TurboExpress, which is a fantastic portable, even though it is a battery hog. Even today, the GBA is now finally topping the TurboExpress' capabilities of more than 10 years ago. The dot-matrix monochrome display of the original GBA didn't stop it from being the number one portable in the world though. It simply had the best portable game library of any of the systems, for that era. Sure, Gamegear had a few good ones. TurboExpress had an incredible library of excellent Japanese games that never made it to the US or Europe, but the handful of US game releases were often pretty fun. Nobody could ever top Nintendo's selection of quality games though.
Backwards compatibility is probably the key feature of the GBA that's also made it hold up to more recent competitors, like the Wonderswan and NGP Color, both of which are very capable portables, but never seemed to really take off or get the same library of games. Newer things, like the GP32, still haven't caught on in most parts of the world.
At 25, I still enjoy portable games on occasion. The problem is that the GBA's screen is way too small for me, and requires a damn floodlamp to be able to see the screen. The GBA SP fixed the light issue, but I've been waiting until the "Nes version" is released in a month or so.
I finished playing Golden Sun a few days ago and wanted to transfer my character data to Golden Sun 2, but the silly 6-page password wouldn't work. It takes about 20 minutes to type the thing in. So, I killed two birds with one stone and picked up a Gameboy Player for my Gamecube. Now I can play my games on a 32" screen, and it supported the link cable which allowed me to link Golden Sun to Golden Sun: The Lost Age to transfer my character data.
Let's just say that I am very happy with my purchase of the GameBoy Advance Player. Graphics are largely on-par with the SNES and Genesis of old. They might be, perhaps, a bit blockier in some respects, since they are games that are designed for a portable, but it's entirely possible that I am just used to flashy 3D graphics these days.
The graphics aren't the issue though. These recent GBA games are some of the most enjoyable games that are being released on any system. Graphics can't change that. There is something special about the games of the SNES era. They were generally quite fine. A lot of that is lost today, when companies try way to hard to make games as glitzy as possible on game consoles.
If you base your game buying decisons solely on the quality of the graphics, you are missing out on a lot of great games. It's your loss though, not mine.
Because Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid TS, Killer 7, and Resident Evil sure do represent Mickey Mouse... That was an abvious troll if I've ever seen one.
Not particularly. Geeks will normally just by the fastest CPU for the right price. For many years, that has been AMD. Intel is getting to be more competitive, but Athlons still perform better (in most respects) than a Pentium 4 of the same price.
There's a reason why AMD has slowly been gaining on Intel for market share, and that reason is why they accounted for 52% of desktop CPUs that shipped in a recent week. The "Intel Inside" campaign is wearing off, especially when Intel is trying to compete with AMD by releasing their own 64 bit CPUs that are based off of AMD's pioneering X86-64 chips. Who's doing the reverse engineering now?
Funny, but far from insightful. Here's a message from the IT manager at my college...
"IT Resources used to fight the recent Sasser Worm here on campus include 72 Help Desk Tickets, 110 Help Desk calls, 25 hours of IT staff time, and 3200 infection events affecting 375 PCs to date. These numbers do not reflect the hours of productivity lost by users and there continue to be problems associated with Sasser so these numbers will grow."
Your comment means nothing, considering that the *ONLY* machines on campus that were not affected were the handful of Apple, Linux, and HP UX machines. None of these (including Linux) require very much effort to maintain if you have competent admins. Sasser, on the other hand, was installing on machines that get patched *DAILY* by script, forcefully through automatic patching, and are even behind a firewall to the Internet. Somebody was likely to accidently have brought a machine from off-campus, plugged into the network, and started all of the PCs into a rebooting frenzy. We ALL wasted time fighting with this, even if we weren't part of IT support, and many people lost important work from the forced reboots while working on school work or other things.
I use Freeshell.org and have a MetaARPA account, which allows for SSH tunneling via port 443 (secure HTTP), which is open on most networks. Works very well, and only requires a small donation to Freeshell.org. The tunneling allows me to use X-Chat, or I can just log in via SSH, through port 443, and use a text-based client like IRSSI.
http://freeshell.org/index.cgi?access
I think that $36 per year is pretty reasonable for the MetaARPA features (only equals $3 per month). Of course, you can always just do the same thing on a box at home, but you're still going to have to use a cable modem or something if you want to have a somewhat usable connection.
If anyone needs information on how to tunnel with SSH, please please feel free to ask.
The only problem is that it isn't capable of being upgraded, takes twice as long to copy data, and newer versions aren't backwards compatible with the last one unless you spend days porting your data to function on the new one. Oh, and the standard monochrome "flip-book" display only runs at 0.5 FPS.
I've actually attempted to run a few viruses on my Slackware machine, through WINE, without any success. This was simply for testing purposes. In many cases, the environments are just too different for the virus to function properly. WINE often crashes in this case. Even then, Linux doesn't automatically load any of the the WINE "emulation layer" code on system startup, and only loads it when you run WINE. Still, WINE is not run as root (unless you are stupid), and anything that could possibly damage the machine would be restricted to a user's home directory, unable to affect the actual Linux OS and libraries, or the critical WINE stuff.
Sasser is a worm that requires access to port 445 and needs to hit a machine that runs the LSASS authentication code on Windows machines (which WINE doesn't use). As someone mentioned, it might be possible to run LSASS in some form or fashion, but there would be no reason to do it.
Yeah. Seriously... How many engineers would they hire without strong math backgrounds? Coming from an engineering education, I can say that it is ALL about math. It's really just a poor excuse for seeking the bottom line - the cheapest worker. Truly, there isn't really anything wrong with that. At least they could be honest though.
If you haven't used it for some time, you probably aren't aware that the font support and rendering have become top-notch. It also has sub-pixel hinting (which I have off, since I have a CRT).
I think that it just depends on what you are used to using. A GIMP user with a lot of experience with the program, may have the same problems when migrating to Photoshop. I know I do. I'm not very familiar with anything but Photoshop basics, but I'm quite familiar with GIMP.
Many of problems that the author sites in the review are problems that are native to the Mac version. I agree that GIMP does need some help in many areas, but the program isn't ideal for Macs right now, without some work.
A) It requires an X11 server on top of the MacOS. B) The filesystem issue is related to the fact that GIMP wasn't designed for OSX, even if it can be compiled for it. C) The font issues are related to the fact that it is using a different font renderer than OSX. There is no sub-pixel hinting going on in his makeshift X-server, and it looks like it is using an inferior render.
Really, I don't disagree with the reviewer. They are legitimate points, but the majority of the problems are simply related to the Mac install. In regards to other complaints...
Tools *ARE* organized; e.g. first row has selection tools, and fourth row has drawing tools.
I'm not sure what was up with his copy, but JPEG images (over 30 MB) open up within a fraction of a second for me.
The "reviewer" hasn't familiarized himself with how the drawing tools work to get them to function properly. I personally feel that this person is just looking for a Photoshop clone, which GIMP is not. It is similar to Photoshop in the sense that it performs most of the same functions, but it is not a clone by design. The UI seems practical to some of us; even novice users that I know. But hey... To each his own. Again, the GIMP does deserve criticism in some respects, but 3/4 of the problems that the reviewer sited were not the fault of GIMP or its design.
In addtion to cron/crond, there is a program called "webcam" for unix machines, that captures a video device node to a jpeg, and uploads it via FTP. Simple, but powerful.
There are several programs that do the same thing as well.
Re:This reminds me of an old convo I had ...
on
Tuning Linux VM swapping
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't normally make my swaps more than 512 MB on my Linux machines. In fact, when I had 1204 MB of RAM on my last machine, it only ever touched the swap once (when I was compiling Mozilla). The machine was so responsive with 1024 MB of RAM, it virtually never needed to use the swap with that much RAM.
Now that I have a newer machine, and RAM prices have increased (had to replace SDRAM with DDR), I only have 512 MB in my home machine. It seems to be nearly as responsive, practically never needing to touch the swap. I've only ever seen it use a few MB of the swapfile. When partitioning my Linux drives, I almost always have more than one drive in the machine. HDA1 normally gets the root partition. HDB1 is normally my swap, at the front 512 MB of the drive, followed by home on HDB2. This system makes everything snappy.
Even on my work machine, which is only a p3 450 with 256 MB of RAM, things operate quite well under Gnome 2. I have two drives in that machine as well, and the swap is on a seperate drive from the root partition. Programs can load from one drive while simultaneously swapping (if necessary) to a second drive. Even with Gnome 2 running, in addition to my browser and several other apps, only a few KB of space is being used on the swap.
I can't see most desktop Linux users needing more than 512 MB of swapfile space, assuming that they have at least 256 MB of RAM. The general rule of thumb, though, is to put the swap partition at the front of the drive for the best performance, in the event that it does need to get used.
I've really been impressed with Linux's memory management, even in the 2.2/2.4 series kernels. I've heard that 2.6 even makes some improvements as well. When I used Windows 2000, on the other hand, it INSISTED on using the swap even with a gig of RAM, even after I tweaked it for the best performance. I even used a RAID0 array, and Linux is still faster and more efficient at managing memory WITHOUT the RAID array. I was surprised that the array wasn't even really needed on Linux for fantastic disk access speeds with my 3 year old 7200 RPM drives.
Of course, the rules will be different for server application. More swap is probably a necessary thing. It's possible, however, that users of Linux (on the desktop) may not even need a swapfile with more than 512 MB of RAM.
Well, one example that is tough to get working on Windows or Linux is the Rage Fury MAXX. It's a card that ATI abandoned, with good reason. Its dual-GPU design makes it a hassle to maintain and program.
I'm not aware of any PCI S3 cards that don't work in XF86. VGA, Perhaps, but virtually any card that might even be depreciated could probably run with a Vesa or Framebuffer driver of sorts. If you are using a card that old, you probably don't need any sort of limited accelleration (if there even is any).
Linux has "kernel audio mixing support" if your hardware supports it. Stop buying cheapo DirectX audio chips that rely on software mixers and you won't have a problem. Your crappy integrated i810 has problems for a reason.
Also, I can't think of any video chips these days that aren't supported. Everything from ATI/nVidia/PowerVR/S3/Intel/etc., has some 3D support through either opensource or closed drivers. Hell, even the SGI Volari chips have Linux drivers. Talk about obscure.
I assume you are talking about font installation in your post. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Simply dragging and dropping fonts to the.fonts folder in your home directory, on Linux, takes care of fonts and makes them ready to use on most Linux distributions. After you simply drag and drop them in, and they are ready to go.
It is, however, more difficult to install system-wide fonts, since they have to be put into a place like/usr/share/fonts though. That's just the nature of the permissions system, which requires root access for system-wide file installs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but there may be something else to consider.
;)
1) OpenOffice.org is available for several platforms.
2) Ximian is working on putting Evolution integration into OpenOffice.org.
3) Ximian is porting Evolution 2.0 to Windows.
4) ???
4) I think that "Profit!" fits in here somewhere.
Nevertheless, it may be a very good strategy to begin to pull away the strict dependance upon MS Office and Outlook/Exchange. Microsoft still charges Exchange server "seat licenses", but this is just one small step that may very well make a significant impact, especially when MS Office itself is taken out of the equation, and can be replaced with OO.o and Evolution.
Novell is getting to be pretty crafty. Maybe we need to give them a bit more credit?
You too? I've been using the webmail system for YEARS now, on Linux, through Firefox or Epiphany. I've considered buying "Connector", but they don't officially support Slackware (even though the RH9 packages are supposed to work).
This is DAMN FINE NEWS. I'm a big fan of Evolution, and this GPL plugin will make it even better than ever. GPLing the plugin will make it much easier to slide Linux onto Windows networks with Exchange servers, with minimal (or no) interference.
Why is it hard to understand that UNIX filesystems are designed to have minimal impact on performance due to their design?
These are multiuser operating systems that are designed to make frequent requests from multiple users at any given time. Things *are* going to be strewn across the drive, but there is a reason that there is no noticable impact on performance.
UNIX filesystems are engineered to avoid appending old files and scattering data about in the same manner that MSDOS and Windows FAT filesystems do. These filesystems don't fill every single free "crack" on the drive in the way that MSDOS filesystems do. FAT filesystems are designed to write into the first available location, or "hole", often spanning across several of these as well, for writing a single file. This is what causes the "fragmentation" on a Microsoft filesystem. The clustering algorithms that UNIX/Linux machines use use help to prevent "fragmentation", by which Windows users expererience.
Bear in mind that FAT/FAT32 was based off of a design that was optimized for writing small amounts of data to *floppy disks* and small capacity drives with very limited amounts of space. Later in the life of DOS and Windows, the "fragmentation" issues became terrible, typically as drive capacities got to be larger and filesizes increased by a great degree. NTFS resolves many of these issues, but still carries a few of the FAT traits in spite of it being a totally different filesystem (based off of HPFS). Potentially, it still writes to tiny, empty, blocks of free space, but its tree-based structure doesn't limit the performance due to "fragmentation" like we experienced on DOS/Win9x. However, I think that the biggest problem on Windows machines is the way drives are typically partitioned, more than anything else. Things get removed and installed frequently, to the same locations of the drive, with user-created data overlapping the locations of important system and swapfiles. NTFS, in most respects, doesn't actually need defrag. In fact, when I ran Windows 2000 for a few years, defrag provided almost no improvement, at least not to the same degree as it did on Windows 98. You can defrag all you like, but it's unlikely that even an NTFS partition will experience more than 3-5% total fragmention.
I hope that is "logical enough" for you. I think that, perhaps, you need to ditch the old DOS/Windows "I MUST DEFRAG" mentality in order to really understand this. Filesystems (especially journalling types) have greatly changed since the days of DOS.
Most people don't have their /home directory tied into their root partition. Often, they are even on seperate drives. Even if a defrag program were used, there would be very little benefit. You're not constantly writing new files in and out of the same space as the root partition in that respect.
/home directory on the root partiton, the modern Linux filesystems practically negate the need for defragmentation, due to their designs (as well as OS and drive design).
And even if someone does put their
I use ReiserFS, because on average - it is a faster filesystem than EXT3 for most desktop purposes. I personally feel that EXT3, however, is a more reliable FS when it comes to recovering bad data on the hard disks. I recently had some failures due to a failing motherboard, which corrupted some data on my drive, but the reiserfsk tools have cryptic descriptions for failures and don't always seem to do the job right when it comes to recovering bad data. I've had reiserfsck work properly, but the few times that I have had hard drive failures, I've had little success in recovering bad data on a ReiserFS partition.
I must admit though, that any problems I've had on a ReiserFS system weren't necessarily the fault of the filesystem (instead were related to failing hardware). I've run several machines, with multiple drives, which all use ReiserFS. It's been quite reliable in that sense.
I guess that the only way you're going to get true reliability is to make redundant backups.
It is pretty amazing that the original GameBoy stomped the rivals from NEC, Atari, and Sega. I personally own a TurboExpress, which is a fantastic portable, even though it is a battery hog. Even today, the GBA is now finally topping the TurboExpress' capabilities of more than 10 years ago. The dot-matrix monochrome display of the original GBA didn't stop it from being the number one portable in the world though. It simply had the best portable game library of any of the systems, for that era. Sure, Gamegear had a few good ones. TurboExpress had an incredible library of excellent Japanese games that never made it to the US or Europe, but the handful of US game releases were often pretty fun. Nobody could ever top Nintendo's selection of quality games though.
Backwards compatibility is probably the key feature of the GBA that's also made it hold up to more recent competitors, like the Wonderswan and NGP Color, both of which are very capable portables, but never seemed to really take off or get the same library of games. Newer things, like the GP32, still haven't caught on in most parts of the world.
At 25, I still enjoy portable games on occasion. The problem is that the GBA's screen is way too small for me, and requires a damn floodlamp to be able to see the screen. The GBA SP fixed the light issue, but I've been waiting until the "Nes version" is released in a month or so.
I finished playing Golden Sun a few days ago and wanted to transfer my character data to Golden Sun 2, but the silly 6-page password wouldn't work. It takes about 20 minutes to type the thing in. So, I killed two birds with one stone and picked up a Gameboy Player for my Gamecube. Now I can play my games on a 32" screen, and it supported the link cable which allowed me to link Golden Sun to Golden Sun: The Lost Age to transfer my character data.
Let's just say that I am very happy with my purchase of the GameBoy Advance Player. Graphics are largely on-par with the SNES and Genesis of old. They might be, perhaps, a bit blockier in some respects, since they are games that are designed for a portable, but it's entirely possible that I am just used to flashy 3D graphics these days.
The graphics aren't the issue though. These recent GBA games are some of the most enjoyable games that are being released on any system. Graphics can't change that. There is something special about the games of the SNES era. They were generally quite fine. A lot of that is lost today, when companies try way to hard to make games as glitzy as possible on game consoles.
If you base your game buying decisons solely on the quality of the graphics, you are missing out on a lot of great games. It's your loss though, not mine.
Sure,
Because Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid TS, Killer 7, and Resident Evil sure do represent Mickey Mouse... That was an abvious troll if I've ever seen one.
Excellent, Smithers!
Exactly. This is why we have FLAC and redundant backup systems.
Not particularly. Geeks will normally just by the fastest CPU for the right price. For many years, that has been AMD. Intel is getting to be more competitive, but Athlons still perform better (in most respects) than a Pentium 4 of the same price.
There's a reason why AMD has slowly been gaining on Intel for market share, and that reason is why they accounted for 52% of desktop CPUs that shipped in a recent week. The "Intel Inside" campaign is wearing off, especially when Intel is trying to compete with AMD by releasing their own 64 bit CPUs that are based off of AMD's pioneering X86-64 chips. Who's doing the reverse engineering now?
Your comment means nothing, considering that the *ONLY* machines on campus that were not affected were the handful of Apple, Linux, and HP UX machines. None of these (including Linux) require very much effort to maintain if you have competent admins. Sasser, on the other hand, was installing on machines that get patched *DAILY* by script, forcefully through automatic patching, and are even behind a firewall to the Internet. Somebody was likely to accidently have brought a machine from off-campus, plugged into the network, and started all of the PCs into a rebooting frenzy. We ALL wasted time fighting with this, even if we weren't part of IT support, and many people lost important work from the forced reboots while working on school work or other things.
I use Freeshell.org and have a MetaARPA account, which allows for SSH tunneling via port 443 (secure HTTP), which is open on most networks. Works very well, and only requires a small donation to Freeshell.org. The tunneling allows me to use X-Chat, or I can just log in via SSH, through port 443, and use a text-based client like IRSSI.
http://freeshell.org/index.cgi?access
I think that $36 per year is pretty reasonable for the MetaARPA features (only equals $3 per month). Of course, you can always just do the same thing on a box at home, but you're still going to have to use a cable modem or something if you want to have a somewhat usable connection.
If anyone needs information on how to tunnel with SSH, please please feel free to ask.
The only problem is that it isn't capable of being upgraded, takes twice as long to copy data, and newer versions aren't backwards compatible with the last one unless you spend days porting your data to function on the new one. Oh, and the standard monochrome "flip-book" display only runs at 0.5 FPS.
I've actually attempted to run a few viruses on my Slackware machine, through WINE, without any success. This was simply for testing purposes. In many cases, the environments are just too different for the virus to function properly. WINE often crashes in this case. Even then, Linux doesn't automatically load any of the the WINE "emulation layer" code on system startup, and only loads it when you run WINE. Still, WINE is not run as root (unless you are stupid), and anything that could possibly damage the machine would be restricted to a user's home directory, unable to affect the actual Linux OS and libraries, or the critical WINE stuff.
Sasser is a worm that requires access to port 445 and needs to hit a machine that runs the LSASS authentication code on Windows machines (which WINE doesn't use). As someone mentioned, it might be possible to run LSASS in some form or fashion, but there would be no reason to do it.
Yeah. Seriously... How many engineers would they hire without strong math backgrounds? Coming from an engineering education, I can say that it is ALL about math. It's really just a poor excuse for seeking the bottom line - the cheapest worker. Truly, there isn't really anything wrong with that. At least they could be honest though.
I don't understand what the problem is with Linux's font support. It's actually quite good.
i ng.org/katana.png
http://borgerding.org/fonts.png
http://borgerd
If you haven't used it for some time, you probably aren't aware that the font support and rendering have become top-notch. It also has sub-pixel hinting (which I have off, since I have a CRT).
I think that it just depends on what you are used to using. A GIMP user with a lot of experience with the program, may have the same problems when migrating to Photoshop. I know I do. I'm not very familiar with anything but Photoshop basics, but I'm quite familiar with GIMP.
Many of problems that the author sites in the review are problems that are native to the Mac version. I agree that GIMP does need some help in many areas, but the program isn't ideal for Macs right now, without some work.
A) It requires an X11 server on top of the MacOS.
B) The filesystem issue is related to the fact that GIMP wasn't designed for OSX, even if it can be compiled for it.
C) The font issues are related to the fact that it is using a different font renderer than OSX. There is no sub-pixel hinting going on in his makeshift X-server, and it looks like it is using an inferior render.
Really, I don't disagree with the reviewer. They are legitimate points, but the majority of the problems are simply related to the Mac install.
In regards to other complaints...
Tools *ARE* organized; e.g. first row has selection tools, and fourth row has drawing tools.
I'm not sure what was up with his copy, but JPEG images (over 30 MB) open up within a fraction of a second for me.
The "reviewer" hasn't familiarized himself with how the drawing tools work to get them to function properly. I personally feel that this person is just looking for a Photoshop clone, which GIMP is not. It is similar to Photoshop in the sense that it performs most of the same functions, but it is not a clone by design. The UI seems practical to some of us; even novice users that I know. But hey... To each his own. Again, the GIMP does deserve criticism in some respects, but 3/4 of the problems that the reviewer sited were not the fault of GIMP or its design.
Now that's a cool trick! Is there a day we don't learn something new on Linux? ;)
In addtion to cron/crond, there is a program called "webcam" for unix machines, that captures a video device node to a jpeg, and uploads it via FTP. Simple, but powerful.
There are several programs that do the same thing as well.
I don't normally make my swaps more than 512 MB on my Linux machines. In fact, when I had 1204 MB of RAM on my last machine, it only ever touched the swap once (when I was compiling Mozilla). The machine was so responsive with 1024 MB of RAM, it virtually never needed to use the swap with that much RAM.
Now that I have a newer machine, and RAM prices have increased (had to replace SDRAM with DDR), I only have 512 MB in my home machine. It seems to be nearly as responsive, practically never needing to touch the swap. I've only ever seen it use a few MB of the swapfile. When partitioning my Linux drives, I almost always have more than one drive in the machine. HDA1 normally gets the root partition. HDB1 is normally my swap, at the front 512 MB of the drive, followed by home on HDB2. This system makes everything snappy.
Even on my work machine, which is only a p3 450 with 256 MB of RAM, things operate quite well under Gnome 2. I have two drives in that machine as well, and the swap is on a seperate drive from the root partition. Programs can load from one drive while simultaneously swapping (if necessary) to a second drive. Even with Gnome 2 running, in addition to my browser and several other apps, only a few KB of space is being used on the swap.
I can't see most desktop Linux users needing more than 512 MB of swapfile space, assuming that they have at least 256 MB of RAM. The general rule of thumb, though, is to put the swap partition at the front of the drive for the best performance, in the event that it does need to get used.
I've really been impressed with Linux's memory management, even in the 2.2/2.4 series kernels. I've heard that 2.6 even makes some improvements as well. When I used Windows 2000, on the other hand, it INSISTED on using the swap even with a gig of RAM, even after I tweaked it for the best performance. I even used a RAID0 array, and Linux is still faster and more efficient at managing memory WITHOUT the RAID array. I was surprised that the array wasn't even really needed on Linux for fantastic disk access speeds with my 3 year old 7200 RPM drives.
Of course, the rules will be different for server application. More swap is probably a necessary thing. It's possible, however, that users of Linux (on the desktop) may not even need a swapfile with more than 512 MB of RAM.
Well, one example that is tough to get working on Windows or Linux is the Rage Fury MAXX. It's a card that ATI abandoned, with good reason. Its dual-GPU design makes it a hassle to maintain and program.
I'm not aware of any PCI S3 cards that don't work in XF86. VGA, Perhaps, but virtually any card that might even be depreciated could probably run with a Vesa or Framebuffer driver of sorts. If you are using a card that old, you probably don't need any sort of limited accelleration (if there even is any).
Linux has "kernel audio mixing support" if your hardware supports it. Stop buying cheapo DirectX audio chips that rely on software mixers and you won't have a problem. Your crappy integrated i810 has problems for a reason.
Also, I can't think of any video chips these days that aren't supported. Everything from ATI/nVidia/PowerVR/S3/Intel/etc., has some 3D support through either opensource or closed drivers. Hell, even the SGI Volari chips have Linux drivers. Talk about obscure.
I don't really care if it is the #1 OS. I think that some of us would just be happy with a port of "World of Warcraft".
I assume you are talking about font installation in your post. Please correct me if I am wrong.
.fonts folder in your home directory, on Linux, takes care of fonts and makes them ready to use on most Linux distributions. After you simply drag and drop them in, and they are ready to go.
/usr/share/fonts though. That's just the nature of the permissions system, which requires root access for system-wide file installs.
Simply dragging and dropping fonts to the
It is, however, more difficult to install system-wide fonts, since they have to be put into a place like