But that's just it -- it doesn't work, so no end of story yet.
The gods seem to have done a lot of changing to the VM system which isn't sorted out yet (performance can still be a problem), the IDE driver is still in horrible shape performance-wise and as of -test9 has recently had new bug(s) introduced, apparently in an attempt to fix old ones. Unusual things like non-512-byte sector support in SCSI don't seem to be working and various drivers haven't caught up to all the changes in the subsystems and aren't working (for example, the AC'97 sound driver is broken again, *grrr*) and so forth and so on.
Basically, a lot of central things (i.e. not drivers) were redone for 2.4 to make Linux more scalable across a number of platforms and operating contexts, and now they're all working hard on getting things to settle down a little (i.e. basically, bugfixing everywhere).
Be patient. You don't want it released as it is now -- you wouldn't like the result... I'm using the 2.4.0-test series and still experiencing hard lockups, reboots, and bad interactive performance, though I'd say things are generally moving in the right direction...
Here's what I've spent on Windows already, and it's not even my primary environment:
(rounded to the nearest $10 increment)
Windows 2.0 = $100
Windows 3.1 = $150
Windows 95a upgrade = $90
Windows 98 upgrade = $90
Windows NT 4.0 (trying to get away from unstable 95/98 installs) = $260
Windows 2000 upgrade = $120
So I've laid out $810 already (before sales tax) on Windows, which has never even been my primary operating system. Next time I have to upgrade my Windows install to stay current so that I can exchange files with "The Outside World" I will probably exceed $1000 if sales tax is considered.
Amount spent on Linux over the years? $50.00 for ten boxes of blank floppies that I used to hold downloaded Slackware versions 2.x and 3.x until it went CD/Zip, and after that nothing because I've been downloading my distro CD contents on the net to the same 640MB MO disk over and over again now for several years.
Amount spent on MacOS over the years for my Mac machines? $0.00 -- Apple has always had MacOS (though a slightly out-of-date version) available on-line at their ftp site.
Only Microsoft will still happily sell you a decade-old version of their operating system for full retail price.
I'm going to seal my backpack and fill it up with LN2. This will allow me to keep my Journada supercooled, and I will be able to take it out and get crazy framerates in Doom!
If I have thick enough gloves, I should be fine.
This plan has several added benefits: I can always have supercooled Pepsi with me and if I say an extremely attractive female and start to lose control of myself, I can just dump my backpack over my head and be cooled off.
The truth is that though some convergence is possible, the "one true device" convergence that some seem to want is unrealistic.
If we try to merge a camera with a cell phone with a datebook with a pager with a web server with a word processor with a smart card with an inkless notepad with a calculator with a web browser, the result is a device which is completely unusable for any function. To browse the web, watch TV or work on documents, for example, a large display is physically necessary for our eyes. On the other hand, a cell phone, a pager, a calculator, and so on should be tiny in order to be carried and pocketed. There's no way to make these devices converge short of wearing the One True Device on your head and projecting directly into your eye like some advocate and others already do...
But I don't want to wear my cellphone on my head and operate it with eye movement, and I don't think I would be attracted to a girl who was wearing a plastic headdress and talking with her eyes to someone else while I was trying to talk to her. Maybe this is backward thinking and old fashioned, but I want to carry my cell phone in my pocket and leave it on my dash, and I want to input text with a keyboard onto a large, flat, paper-like surface that lets me see an entire document at once, but also lets me turn my head and see the commercial that's playing right now in between lines of input.
I ran VMWare+Win98 on an AMD K6-2/450 system with 256MB RAM and performance was great. Of course, I was just using it for Office 97, but for me, that was the point.
I certainly had no complaints -- sound and networking worked well (to my amazement) and the graphics did as well -- I ran an 800x600 Windows desktop on my 1280x1024 Linux desktop and it was very convenient and eliminated all need to reboot.
I have used Caldera OpenLinux since 1.1 when it still shipped with Looking Glass. I currently have eDesktop 2.4 installed.
I have always had several distributions installed at once, but the only two which have consistenly had shares of my hard drive(s) since I first tried them are Slackware and Caldera OpenLinux. Why?
It is done well. Quality counts, and some distributions over the years have not had it.
Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 was the first to ever get my rather odd printer setup correct during install.
The LISA installer (which can still be chosen, even on the latest 2.4 release), with saved configuration & network install capability and great module support, is IMHO the best Linux installer to date in terms of power and of hardware preconfiguration.
LISA also allows me to choose every single package I want in the system so that I can assemble just what I want and cut out wasted megabytes.
Source nearly always compiles "right out of the box" on OpenLinux systems with devel packages installed, while other distributions (esp. Debian and, in the past, Red Hat) have choked on some percentage of source code.
Over the years, I've found it to be more stable than many other distributions.
It was the first to ship with an office suite (StarOffice 3.1 with OpenLinux 1.x) and an integrated environment that was pre-configured and usable (Looking Glass, then later, KDE 1.0).
It stays reasonably current (i.e. early adoption or availability of glibc 2.0, 2.1, egcs, bash 2.0, kernel 2.2, while some [debian, slackware] hung back for long periods of time).
It does all this while (I repeat) remaining very stable -- OpenLinux 1.3 and eDesktop 2.4 have especially been very, very solid all the way around.
So I hope that Caldera sticks to tradition and doesn't end up looking more like SCO, which is a pile of buggy, nearly unusable swill that nobody should buy when *BSD can be downloaded and Solaris is still available.
Caldera is looking for some of SCO's customers here, that's all (at least, I hope that's all). It doens't seem like they really got much software IP, so hopefully we're not looking at some bastardized "SCOpenLinux" or something... That might finally pull OpenLinux/eDesktop off of my hard drive and I'd be left with Slackware, which is where I started my Linux adventure all those years ago... *sniff*
Well, all I can say is that after seeing the last beta and now reading up on what's changed since then, it seems like KDE is only two hops and a skip away from being the de facto standard for the Linux desktop, and a very, very impressive one at that. Did anyone imagine in 1995 with the latest state-of-the-art FVWM on their desktop that Linux could be like this?
So why not fix this silly licensing issue once and for all, so that KDE's position and influence can be consolidated and Linux newbies don't have to be scared any more by aggressive GPL priests? It's the last thing holding KDE back, and there's nothing more aggrivating than watching an excellent product fizzle in the face of a stupid, minor, easily-fixable problem.
Yes, okay, so it means contacting every KDE code developer past and present and getting permission to add a line to the license. Yes, one or two code chunks probably won't make it because the author won't be found. Rewrite them! There won't be that many, and look how fast KDE development can work! It's time to stop the laziness and do it, boys and girls, before you take this thing past 2.0 and before it really hurts a great project.
Please? Pretty please? I'll buy you all free beer for a week. We all will, one by one. You can stay drunk for the rest of your life (*ahem* when not working on KDE) at no charge! Imagine!
I'm still sacrificing goats every day in hopes that a miracle happens and Newton is resurrected along with the later MessagePads and their successors.
Tried Palm. Just not the same. Tried CE. Puked on my shoes and had to buy new ones. Tried some of the off-brand PDAs with teensy no-name embedded "operating systems" and had a good laugh. After it all, dug out and looked at my MP2100 with its cracked screen and bawled like a baby...
Don't get me wrong... Palms/Visors/&co. are light and cute and run a long time on batteries... But they're also impossible to read, inelegant when it comes to handwriting, low-res, low-powered, and just plain primitive.
I was inside Caldera for a little while, and I can say that Caldera definitely does care about the Linux community and giving back.
What many Linux users may be confusing with "not giving back" is Caldera's work with many commercial products (i.e. NetWare services, Netscape browser, device drivers) which are important for many corporate Linux users, but which often can't be given back to the community because Caldera doesn't actually own the product -- but they want to make it available for Linux anyway, which necessarily means binary only and paid for. This seems to get under the skin of a lot of Linux users, who feel that it's "corporate cooperation" or something.
Those things that are done in-house (i.e. the first versions of the RPM packager, the Lizard installer, various device drivers) have been released as open source -- and for some reason, most Linux users don't credit them for it anyway. Nobody remembers that RPM originated with Caldera, and I can't count the number of time's I've seen comments on Caldera's failure to open source Lizard -- comments which are completely incorrect, since everyone can go to the Caldera ftp site right now and download Lizard, with source code and popular open source license...
Slashdot Mirror
The gods seem to have done a lot of changing to the VM system which isn't sorted out yet (performance can still be a problem), the IDE driver is still in horrible shape performance-wise and as of -test9 has recently had new bug(s) introduced, apparently in an attempt to fix old ones. Unusual things like non-512-byte sector support in SCSI don't seem to be working and various drivers haven't caught up to all the changes in the subsystems and aren't working (for example, the AC'97 sound driver is broken again, *grrr*) and so forth and so on.
Basically, a lot of central things (i.e. not drivers) were redone for 2.4 to make Linux more scalable across a number of platforms and operating contexts, and now they're all working hard on getting things to settle down a little (i.e. basically, bugfixing everywhere).
Be patient. You don't want it released as it is now -- you wouldn't like the result... I'm using the 2.4.0-test series and still experiencing hard lockups, reboots, and bad interactive performance, though I'd say things are generally moving in the right direction...
If you want to watch it evolve, check out the linux-kernel mailing list.
(rounded to the nearest $10 increment)
So I've laid out $810 already (before sales tax) on Windows, which has never even been my primary operating system. Next time I have to upgrade my Windows install to stay current so that I can exchange files with "The Outside World" I will probably exceed $1000 if sales tax is considered.
Amount spent on Linux over the years? $50.00 for ten boxes of blank floppies that I used to hold downloaded Slackware versions 2.x and 3.x until it went CD/Zip, and after that nothing because I've been downloading my distro CD contents on the net to the same 640MB MO disk over and over again now for several years.
Amount spent on MacOS over the years for my Mac machines? $0.00 -- Apple has always had MacOS (though a slightly out-of-date version) available on-line at their ftp site.
Only Microsoft will still happily sell you a decade-old version of their operating system for full retail price.
If I have thick enough gloves, I should be fine.
This plan has several added benefits: I can always have supercooled Pepsi with me and if I say an extremely attractive female and start to lose control of myself, I can just dump my backpack over my head and be cooled off.
crack... crack...
If we try to merge a camera with a cell phone with a datebook with a pager with a web server with a word processor with a smart card with an inkless notepad with a calculator with a web browser, the result is a device which is completely unusable for any function. To browse the web, watch TV or work on documents, for example, a large display is physically necessary for our eyes. On the other hand, a cell phone, a pager, a calculator, and so on should be tiny in order to be carried and pocketed. There's no way to make these devices converge short of wearing the One True Device on your head and projecting directly into your eye like some advocate and others already do...
But I don't want to wear my cellphone on my head and operate it with eye movement, and I don't think I would be attracted to a girl who was wearing a plastic headdress and talking with her eyes to someone else while I was trying to talk to her. Maybe this is backward thinking and old fashioned, but I want to carry my cell phone in my pocket and leave it on my dash, and I want to input text with a keyboard onto a large, flat, paper-like surface that lets me see an entire document at once, but also lets me turn my head and see the commercial that's playing right now in between lines of input.
I certainly had no complaints -- sound and networking worked well (to my amazement) and the graphics did as well -- I ran an 800x600 Windows desktop on my 1280x1024 Linux desktop and it was very convenient and eliminated all need to reboot.
I have always had several distributions installed at once, but the only two which have consistenly had shares of my hard drive(s) since I first tried them are Slackware and Caldera OpenLinux. Why?
It is done well. Quality counts, and some distributions over the years have not had it.
So I hope that Caldera sticks to tradition and doesn't end up looking more like SCO, which is a pile of buggy, nearly unusable swill that nobody should buy when *BSD can be downloaded and Solaris is still available.
Caldera is looking for some of SCO's customers here, that's all (at least, I hope that's all). It doens't seem like they really got much software IP, so hopefully we're not looking at some bastardized "SCOpenLinux" or something... That might finally pull OpenLinux/eDesktop off of my hard drive and I'd be left with Slackware, which is where I started my Linux adventure all those years ago... *sniff*
So why not fix this silly licensing issue once and for all, so that KDE's position and influence can be consolidated and Linux newbies don't have to be scared any more by aggressive GPL priests? It's the last thing holding KDE back, and there's nothing more aggrivating than watching an excellent product fizzle in the face of a stupid, minor, easily-fixable problem.
Yes, okay, so it means contacting every KDE code developer past and present and getting permission to add a line to the license. Yes, one or two code chunks probably won't make it because the author won't be found. Rewrite them! There won't be that many, and look how fast KDE development can work! It's time to stop the laziness and do it, boys and girls, before you take this thing past 2.0 and before it really hurts a great project.
Please? Pretty please? I'll buy you all free beer for a week. We all will, one by one. You can stay drunk for the rest of your life (*ahem* when not working on KDE) at no charge! Imagine!
Just fix it!
Tried Palm. Just not the same. Tried CE. Puked on my shoes and had to buy new ones. Tried some of the off-brand PDAs with teensy no-name embedded "operating systems" and had a good laugh. After it all, dug out and looked at my MP2100 with its cracked screen and bawled like a baby...
Don't get me wrong... Palms/Visors/&co. are light and cute and run a long time on batteries... But they're also impossible to read, inelegant when it comes to handwriting, low-res, low-powered, and just plain primitive.
What many Linux users may be confusing with "not giving back" is Caldera's work with many commercial products (i.e. NetWare services, Netscape browser, device drivers) which are important for many corporate Linux users, but which often can't be given back to the community because Caldera doesn't actually own the product -- but they want to make it available for Linux anyway, which necessarily means binary only and paid for. This seems to get under the skin of a lot of Linux users, who feel that it's "corporate cooperation" or something.
Those things that are done in-house (i.e. the first versions of the RPM packager, the Lizard installer, various device drivers) have been released as open source -- and for some reason, most Linux users don't credit them for it anyway. Nobody remembers that RPM originated with Caldera, and I can't count the number of time's I've seen comments on Caldera's failure to open source Lizard -- comments which are completely incorrect, since everyone can go to the Caldera ftp site right now and download Lizard, with source code and popular open source license...