To me the answer to this question is obvious. The construction of explosive devices (and probably impromptu weapons, not to mention makeshift communications equipment) would require more engineering knowledge than virtually anything else.
Have a relatively old firearm, and need it fixed? Engineer. Have an old car, and need it fixed? Engineer. Have an old computer, and need it fixed? You get the idea.;)
Last I checked, the person who handled explosives in a group of soldiers was also referred to as an engineer.
I'm now running Jaunty, and have been for probably the last four months, since the video card in my FreeBSD box died.
I give Jaunty credit for not pissing me off to the extent where I've been actively motivated to get rid of it, but that is about the most positive thing I can say for it. Pretty much all Ubuntu is good for is either listening to mp3s, maybe doing some scripting after making my own build of vim, and vegetating in front of Firefox. It's got even better since I wrote my own xsession and got back under Ratpoison.
If I try and do literally anything else however, frustration is usually the result. Multimedia editing in particular is virtually impossible in Linux, although that is not Shuttleworth's fault. The Ubuntu community also are not people who a sane individual would want to go anywhere near, but then again, that is also standard for Linux.
I have also always considered Debian to be one of the primary sources of emotional pain in my life, and it still underpins Ubuntu. Even doing something as fundamental as changing my $PATH is a source of frustration; I cannot find out where it is set. It is predictable that Debian's developers feel that/etc/profile is not good enough for them.
If you want to use Ubuntu, and you know what you are doing, follow the instructions here in order to avoid GNOME, ubuntu-desktop, pulseaudio, and associated eldritch horrors. Ubuntu's binary packaging is generally extremely dubious, but then again, FreeBSD is the only system where I've ever felt entirely comfortable installing pre-built binaries; quality binary packaging apparently does not exist for Linux at all.
We had William Shatner. It's odd; I never really liked TOS in general, in terms of the TV series, but for some reason warmed up to the characters during the movies. Yes, I always thought Kirk was a jerk, and truthfully that was one of the main reasons why I was grateful for TNG; having a captain who wasn't a pain in the neck. At the time, however, I wasn't aware that Shatner was a member of the, "starring as himself," class of acting.
Truthfully, I've never really understood why the "method," is considered a legitimate style of acting. As far as I'm concerned, it isn't. You have someone with a very set personality, who basically changes their name for an hour, (or two, or however long they play the role) and that is literally the only thing about them that changes. That isn't acting; which is also why you need to make sure when casting such actors, that they already fit the character you have in mind. Sarah Michelle Gellar is another prototypical example, where Buffy is concerned.
The "method," to my mind was basically invented as a term for legitimising hacks who were still capable of doing reasonably well, as long as they were typecast.
As a contrast, look at the difference between Gary Oldman's character Zorg, in The Fifth Element, and his turn as Commissioner Gordon in the Batman films. You can also look at virtually any role played by Geoffrey Rush; he is never the same person in any role.
Being rich in America is like being rich in Cuba: life's cool. Meanwhile, being poor in America is like being poor in Cuba: life sucks. In the latter case, what differs is the handout you get and who you can get away criticising sufficiently loudly.
Go to work, send your kids to school. Follow fashion, act normal. Walk on the pavements, watch T.V. Save for your old age, obey the law.
For me there never was a war. It's KDE, hands down. The most popular option is never the highest quality.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. -- Matthew 7:13-14
Have you ever tried FreeBSD? I'm not trying to be an overly pushy evangelist, here; if you like Debian, keep it by all means. If you've never evaluated FreeBSD before though, I'd invite you to do so. I much prefer its' audio system to Linux's myself, and ports is a much more capable package management system than virtually anything I've seen for Linux as well, although apt-get can be good too, as long as the individual package is maintained by someone sane.
...is that it ran Ubuntu as easily, inside 1 Gb of ram. Gnome is a disastrously bloated beast.
My two computers are each single core 3 Ghz; one with 2 Gb of ram, and one with 1.
Although I am currently using Ubuntu, more commonly, I run FreeBSD, and with only a few X conceits, (Firefox, Eterm, claws-mail, and the fact that I find screen bothersome, and running mplayer in X is also less bother than using SVGAlib) am to computing as the Amish are to non-electrical persuits. My X wm under FreeBSD is ratpoison, I use mplayer for media files, Firefox for watching YouTube, claws for mail, and vim and ed as text editors. Occasionally I'll even fire up lynx in an Eterm, because I enjoy dodging Flash spam on some sites. I could also run OpenOffice, (which I don't, because I consider office suites to be primarily for technophobic Boomers, to be truly blunt) and record/edit video with ffmpeg/avidemux; or if I wanted to get fancy, open movie editor.
About the only thing I don't do is game, although World of Warcraft runs just fine on it if I feel the urge, as does Quake and a number of older games that I still find satisfying.
The Republican party needs to be disbanded; forcibly if necessary. Whenever there is the potential for doing something suicidally stupid, totalitarian, or both, the Grand Old Party can be counted on to lead the charge. Truthfully, if we could just get rid of the Right in general, it'd be a major step forward, I tend to think these days.
World of Warcraft Complex but Easy (Difficultly is actually the interaction of players, not the actual game mechanics, e.g. Raiding is an excercise in managing people, the actual mechanics doesn't really get any more complex then a 5 man instance. If people know what to do raids are painless, when people are disorganized, they get harder.)
WoW used to be hard. Granted, it was never as hard as EQ from what everyone said, but the fact that Activision have made it completely mindless now, is one reason why I and a lot of other people don't play it any more. The most successful of the older raiding guilds were complaining about it being too easy before the end of TBC.
Every other RPG out there has followed WoW's example now, as well. It *isn't* what the players want; but try telling that to the suits. The suits have their eye on the stupid 14 year old kid whose grandparents just bought him a new computer, and who won't stay with a game for more than five minutes unless it's sufficiently easy that he can be almost comatose while playing.
Contrary to the Huffington Post blogger hyperbole this is not "tantamount to giving up on net neutrality". It is deferring to Congress to define laws on net neutrality, rather than asserting wide regulatory powers by reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunication service. There are some good aspects to this approach.
Wide regulatory powers are exactly what is needed. Anyone who supports, in any way, the right of corporations like Verizon to even exist, is a suicidal, ignorant fool, who does not deserve to continue to survive, and who very possibly will not. Corporations must be given nothing. They must be starved, driven back, and ultimately destroyed.
They do not truly serve human beings. They do not serve life in any form. The only purpose of their existence is the accumulation of fiat currency, and if they are permitted to continue to exist, eventually, *no* form of carbon-based life will.
The net neutrality issue is only one aspect of the subjugation, tyranny, and ultimately, total desolation that they create.
I'm currently using Jaunty Jackalope, and have been for around 3-4 days now, after the video card in my aging FreeBSD box finally gave up the ghost. Jaunty sure as hell might not be FreeBSD, but it is surprisingly tolerable; especially after the nightmare I had with Intrepid.
With that said, I've learned that there are a few things you can do, to make Ubuntu bearable.
1. The first single thing I do on any new Ubuntu install (I've used Hardy, Intrepid, and now Jaunty) is the following:-
sudo ed/boot/grub/menu.lst %s/quiet splash// wq
This causes the system to display its' bootup messages again, so that if it becomes unbootable, you actually have a prayer of the problem being diagnosed and fixed.
2. Avoid using an nVidia video card. I had one in the system I was using Intrepid with, and it gave me constant problems. This machine has an onboard Intel card, and it has been perfectly fine.
3. If you know how to, rip out Pulse/ALSA and compile OSS 4. Pulse causes audio distortion at even moderate volume, for some inexplicable reason.
4. If you can get gdm to recognise it, use something other than GNOME. I've been meaning to reinstall Ratpoison.
They're even trying to move video games, one of the few remaining reasons for power-hungry PCs, to run on the back end and stream to your TV. I'm still not convinced this will work for all game types, but it does demonstrate the push towards irrelevancy of high-powered home computers.
There's a very simple reason why they're trying to do that. More money for them, and less freedom for us.
When you no longer have a PC, or games where you can set up LAN connections locally, eventually you end up with a scenario where everyone is using a multiplayer backend game via monthly subscription, a la World of Warcraft. Then everything else will become subscription based, and you'll also have all design decisions for content made by idiots like Tom Chilton, the guy who has run WoW into the ground, and who ran Ultima Online into the ground before that. They won't want you to be able to edit anything, or control anything. You'll just be a good little ovine consumer; exactly what they want.
That's one of the great things about competition. If your bank has a board who are afflicted with sufficiently chronic mental retardation, as to think that putting all of their vital data in a single place, on Google's servers, is really a good idea, you can find a competing bank which hasn't done that.
I'm still praying for the DDOS equivalent of Judgement Day that I know eventually is going to hit Google. I really want it to come, and get it over with, because once Google has had its' system owned with sufficient severity, that will hopefully get the mutton-headed idea of cloud computing out of everyone's heads, once and for all.
Centralised dumb terminal is a BAD IDEA. It was tried, 30 years ago. It failed, and it is going to fail again. It is basic engineering sense, that you do not design a system of any kind, with a single point of failure.
As for Steve Jobs, I don't care what he thinks, and truthfully I never have. He has traditionally sold desktops for twice the price of a PC, which I've thus never been able to afford, and more recently he's branched out into selling pointless handheld status symbols, to consumerist lemmings. I'm sure one of said lemmings will likely respond in angry protest to that statement, but I really don't care.
The only thing that Apple have done right, which I give them praise for, or really care about in any way, is the fact that with OSX, they moved to being based on BSD. Given that I literally believe that BSD was the manner in which God intended man to interact with a computer, it follows that I also think that such was an inspired decision on Apple's part, but I also believe that the rest of humanity would benefit from doing likewise.
Depends on what you're doing. Some of us actually like a lighter system. They tend to run somewhat faster on old hardware; and there's also the point that the less you can install, the less can potentially break/crash/go berserk and trash the system. Also, if he is doing it for a Linux class, it would pay for the students to learn the fundamentals.
You're a few years late. Desktop Linux died on the vine back in 2005. These days I use FreeBSD, because it's more stable, easier to configure, cares more about standards, has package management which actually works, and is just generally more sane all round. The only thing Linux has going for it competitively, is the fact that the FSF make more heat and noise.
If commercial vendors were to discover how much more consistent FreeBSD was, they might move to supporting that instead.
Source link here, although your distro should have it in repo. It will take entire folders and turn them into a playlist, and it does it on the console, without the need for XULRunner. It's written in Python as well, so hacking it to support video players should be second nature for most of you.
How much is the PS3 now; about $400 AUD? I can get a second hand PC with a 3 Ghz processor and at least 1 Gb of RAM for less than that. Some places will include an LCD monitor in that price, although if they don't, a refurbished one of those will cost you $100. With that, you can do everything that you'd want to do on a PS3 running Linux, and no soldering iron required. The last console I owned was a CBS Colecovision; for me it's been all PC ever since.
I know; I'll probably also get the usual illiterate, Trotskyite, Eurotrash 14 year old from Stallman's drone army, spluttering in rage in response to this, but I really don't care. If you're one of the people who is obsessed with the cool factor of running Linux on devices which weren't intended for it, I'd suggest you get a life. If you're also one of the brainwashed cultists who thinks that the entire planet needs to be brought under the unholy dominion of Richard Stallman, then again, get a life. Forcible deprogramming might help in the latter case, too.
But Sony are needlessly being evil, corporate douchebags about this, I hear you say? Tell me something I don't know. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if such was part of Sony's corporate motto; being enthusiastically evil at every possible opportunity, is fairly simply what they do.
The answer is simple, though, Slick. Vote with your wallet, because being the corporate reptiles that they are, that's all they care about.
>>Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system
>Is switching supposed to be straightforward? I've heard stories, but still it seems daunting.
Yes, it absolutely is supposed to be straightforward. When I use either Slackware, FreeBSD, or Arch, I use a ~/.xinitrc file, in which I specify a list of startup applications, and the window manager is listed last. I do not use xdm/gdm at all. If I've got two window managers on my system, I will make a new.xinitrc for each wm, and then name them appropriately; so say,.xinitrc.ratpoison,.xinitrc.enlightenment, etc.
When I want to change to another window manager, all I need to do is, "cp ~/.xinitrc.enlightenment ~/.xinitrc" and then type startx.
>>even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work
>WFM
This SHOULD NOT be done, via an application. It is utterly moronic; hell, even if you want to make some sort of brain-dead, plastic front end for an end user, is it really so hard to generate an fstab as that program's output?
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Starving the beast is probably our only available means of killing it. Wars of attrition generally do take a long time to win.
To me the answer to this question is obvious. The construction of explosive devices (and probably impromptu weapons, not to mention makeshift communications equipment) would require more engineering knowledge than virtually anything else.
Have a relatively old firearm, and need it fixed? Engineer. ;)
Have an old car, and need it fixed? Engineer.
Have an old computer, and need it fixed? You get the idea.
Last I checked, the person who handled explosives in a group of soldiers was also referred to as an engineer.
That pretty much sums up my own initial mental response, yes.
I'm now running Jaunty, and have been for probably the last four months, since the video card in my FreeBSD box died.
I give Jaunty credit for not pissing me off to the extent where I've been actively motivated to get rid of it, but that is about the most positive thing I can say for it. Pretty much all Ubuntu is good for is either listening to mp3s, maybe doing some scripting after making my own build of vim, and vegetating in front of Firefox. It's got even better since I wrote my own xsession and got back under Ratpoison.
If I try and do literally anything else however, frustration is usually the result. Multimedia editing in particular is virtually impossible in Linux, although that is not Shuttleworth's fault. The Ubuntu community also are not people who a sane individual would want to go anywhere near, but then again, that is also standard for Linux.
I have also always considered Debian to be one of the primary sources of emotional pain in my life, and it still underpins Ubuntu. Even doing something as fundamental as changing my $PATH is a source of frustration; I cannot find out where it is set. It is predictable that Debian's developers feel that /etc/profile is not good enough for them.
If you want to use Ubuntu, and you know what you are doing, follow the instructions here in order to avoid GNOME, ubuntu-desktop, pulseaudio, and associated eldritch horrors. Ubuntu's binary packaging is generally extremely dubious, but then again, FreeBSD is the only system where I've ever felt entirely comfortable installing pre-built binaries; quality binary packaging apparently does not exist for Linux at all.
We had William Shatner. It's odd; I never really liked TOS in general, in terms of the TV series, but for some reason warmed up to the characters during the movies. Yes, I always thought Kirk was a jerk, and truthfully that was one of the main reasons why I was grateful for TNG; having a captain who wasn't a pain in the neck. At the time, however, I wasn't aware that Shatner was a member of the, "starring as himself," class of acting.
Truthfully, I've never really understood why the "method," is considered a legitimate style of acting. As far as I'm concerned, it isn't. You have someone with a very set personality, who basically changes their name for an hour, (or two, or however long they play the role) and that is literally the only thing about them that changes. That isn't acting; which is also why you need to make sure when casting such actors, that they already fit the character you have in mind. Sarah Michelle Gellar is another prototypical example, where Buffy is concerned.
The "method," to my mind was basically invented as a term for legitimising hacks who were still capable of doing reasonably well, as long as they were typecast.
As a contrast, look at the difference between Gary Oldman's character Zorg, in The Fifth Element, and his turn as Commissioner Gordon in the Batman films. You can also look at virtually any role played by Geoffrey Rush; he is never the same person in any role.
That is acting.
Being rich in America is like being rich in Cuba: life's cool. Meanwhile, being poor in America is like being poor in Cuba: life sucks. In the latter case, what differs is the handout you get and who you can get away criticising sufficiently loudly.
Go to work, send your kids to school.
Follow fashion, act normal.
Walk on the pavements, watch T.V.
Save for your old age, obey the law.
Repeat after me: I am free.
For me there never was a war. It's KDE, hands down. The most popular option is never the highest quality.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
-- Matthew 7:13-14
Have you ever tried FreeBSD? I'm not trying to be an overly pushy evangelist, here; if you like Debian, keep it by all means. If you've never evaluated FreeBSD before though, I'd invite you to do so. I much prefer its' audio system to Linux's myself, and ports is a much more capable package management system than virtually anything I've seen for Linux as well, although apt-get can be good too, as long as the individual package is maintained by someone sane.
...then please explain this to me.
Why does PulseAudio exist?
...is that it ran Ubuntu as easily, inside 1 Gb of ram. Gnome is a disastrously bloated beast.
My two computers are each single core 3 Ghz; one with 2 Gb of ram, and one with 1.
Although I am currently using Ubuntu, more commonly, I run FreeBSD, and with only a few X conceits, (Firefox, Eterm, claws-mail, and the fact that I find screen bothersome, and running mplayer in X is also less bother than using SVGAlib) am to computing as the Amish are to non-electrical persuits. My X wm under FreeBSD is ratpoison, I use mplayer for media files, Firefox for watching YouTube, claws for mail, and vim and ed as text editors. Occasionally I'll even fire up lynx in an Eterm, because I enjoy dodging Flash spam on some sites. I could also run OpenOffice, (which I don't, because I consider office suites to be primarily for technophobic Boomers, to be truly blunt) and record/edit video with ffmpeg/avidemux; or if I wanted to get fancy, open movie editor.
About the only thing I don't do is game, although World of Warcraft runs just fine on it if I feel the urge, as does Quake and a number of older games that I still find satisfying.
Simplicity is good for the soul. :)
The Republican party needs to be disbanded; forcibly if necessary. Whenever there is the potential for doing something suicidally stupid, totalitarian, or both, the Grand Old Party can be counted on to lead the charge. Truthfully, if we could just get rid of the Right in general, it'd be a major step forward, I tend to think these days.
The older I get, the harder Left I get.
Which release of Ubuntu is it based on?
World of Warcraft Complex but Easy (Difficultly is actually the interaction of players, not the actual game mechanics, e.g. Raiding is an excercise in managing people, the actual mechanics doesn't really get any more complex then a 5 man instance. If people know what to do raids are painless, when people are disorganized, they get harder.)
WoW used to be hard. Granted, it was never as hard as EQ from what everyone said, but the fact that Activision have made it completely mindless now, is one reason why I and a lot of other people don't play it any more. The most successful of the older raiding guilds were complaining about it being too easy before the end of TBC.
Every other RPG out there has followed WoW's example now, as well. It *isn't* what the players want; but try telling that to the suits. The suits have their eye on the stupid 14 year old kid whose grandparents just bought him a new computer, and who won't stay with a game for more than five minutes unless it's sufficiently easy that he can be almost comatose while playing.
Contrary to the Huffington Post blogger hyperbole this is not "tantamount to giving up on net neutrality". It is deferring to Congress to define laws on net neutrality, rather than asserting wide regulatory powers by reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunication service. There are some good aspects to this approach.
Wide regulatory powers are exactly what is needed. Anyone who supports, in any way, the right of corporations like Verizon to even exist, is a suicidal, ignorant fool, who does not deserve to continue to survive, and who very possibly will not. Corporations must be given nothing. They must be starved, driven back, and ultimately destroyed.
They do not truly serve human beings. They do not serve life in any form. The only purpose of their existence is the accumulation of fiat currency, and if they are permitted to continue to exist, eventually, *no* form of carbon-based life will.
The net neutrality issue is only one aspect of the subjugation, tyranny, and ultimately, total desolation that they create.
I'm currently using Jaunty Jackalope, and have been for around 3-4 days now, after the video card in my aging FreeBSD box finally gave up the ghost. Jaunty sure as hell might not be FreeBSD, but it is surprisingly tolerable; especially after the nightmare I had with Intrepid.
With that said, I've learned that there are a few things you can do, to make Ubuntu bearable.
1. The first single thing I do on any new Ubuntu install (I've used Hardy, Intrepid, and now Jaunty) is the following:-
sudo ed /boot/grub/menu.lst
%s/quiet splash//
wq
This causes the system to display its' bootup messages again, so that if it becomes unbootable, you actually have a prayer of the problem being diagnosed and fixed.
2. Avoid using an nVidia video card. I had one in the system I was using Intrepid with, and it gave me constant problems. This machine has an onboard Intel card, and it has been perfectly fine.
3. If you know how to, rip out Pulse/ALSA and compile OSS 4. Pulse causes audio distortion at even moderate volume, for some inexplicable reason.
4. If you can get gdm to recognise it, use something other than GNOME. I've been meaning to reinstall Ratpoison.
They're even trying to move video games, one of the few remaining reasons for power-hungry PCs, to run on the back end and stream to your TV. I'm still not convinced this will work for all game types, but it does demonstrate the push towards irrelevancy of high-powered home computers.
There's a very simple reason why they're trying to do that. More money for them, and less freedom for us.
When you no longer have a PC, or games where you can set up LAN connections locally, eventually you end up with a scenario where everyone is using a multiplayer backend game via monthly subscription, a la World of Warcraft. Then everything else will become subscription based, and you'll also have all design decisions for content made by idiots like Tom Chilton, the guy who has run WoW into the ground, and who ran Ultima Online into the ground before that. They won't want you to be able to edit anything, or control anything. You'll just be a good little ovine consumer; exactly what they want.
That's one of the great things about competition. If your bank has a board who are afflicted with sufficiently chronic mental retardation, as to think that putting all of their vital data in a single place, on Google's servers, is really a good idea, you can find a competing bank which hasn't done that.
I'm still praying for the DDOS equivalent of Judgement Day that I know eventually is going to hit Google. I really want it to come, and get it over with, because once Google has had its' system owned with sufficient severity, that will hopefully get the mutton-headed idea of cloud computing out of everyone's heads, once and for all.
Centralised dumb terminal is a BAD IDEA. It was tried, 30 years ago. It failed, and it is going to fail again. It is basic engineering sense, that you do not design a system of any kind, with a single point of failure.
As for Steve Jobs, I don't care what he thinks, and truthfully I never have. He has traditionally sold desktops for twice the price of a PC, which I've thus never been able to afford, and more recently he's branched out into selling pointless handheld status symbols, to consumerist lemmings. I'm sure one of said lemmings will likely respond in angry protest to that statement, but I really don't care.
The only thing that Apple have done right, which I give them praise for, or really care about in any way, is the fact that with OSX, they moved to being based on BSD. Given that I literally believe that BSD was the manner in which God intended man to interact with a computer, it follows that I also think that such was an inspired decision on Apple's part, but I also believe that the rest of humanity would benefit from doing likewise.
Why use less when you can use more?
I'm just sayin'.
Depends on what you're doing. Some of us actually like a lighter system. They tend to run somewhat faster on old hardware; and there's also the point that the less you can install, the less can potentially break/crash/go berserk and trash the system. Also, if he is doing it for a Linux class, it would pay for the students to learn the fundamentals.
You're a few years late. Desktop Linux died on the vine back in 2005. These days I use FreeBSD, because it's more stable, easier to configure, cares more about standards, has package management which actually works, and is just generally more sane all round. The only thing Linux has going for it competitively, is the fact that the FSF make more heat and noise.
If commercial vendors were to discover how much more consistent FreeBSD was, they might move to supporting that instead.
Source link here, although your distro should have it in repo. It will take entire folders and turn them into a playlist, and it does it on the console, without the need for XULRunner. It's written in Python as well, so hacking it to support video players should be second nature for most of you.
How much is the PS3 now; about $400 AUD? I can get a second hand PC with a 3 Ghz processor and at least 1 Gb of RAM for less than that. Some places will include an LCD monitor in that price, although if they don't, a refurbished one of those will cost you $100. With that, you can do everything that you'd want to do on a PS3 running Linux, and no soldering iron required. The last console I owned was a CBS Colecovision; for me it's been all PC ever since.
I know; I'll probably also get the usual illiterate, Trotskyite, Eurotrash 14 year old from Stallman's drone army, spluttering in rage in response to this, but I really don't care. If you're one of the people who is obsessed with the cool factor of running Linux on devices which weren't intended for it, I'd suggest you get a life. If you're also one of the brainwashed cultists who thinks that the entire planet needs to be brought under the unholy dominion of Richard Stallman, then again, get a life. Forcible deprogramming might help in the latter case, too.
But Sony are needlessly being evil, corporate douchebags about this, I hear you say? Tell me something I don't know. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if such was part of Sony's corporate motto; being enthusiastically evil at every possible opportunity, is fairly simply what they do.
The answer is simple, though, Slick. Vote with your wallet, because being the corporate reptiles that they are, that's all they care about.
And how exactly does this differ from commercial network monitoring programs? Other than not costing an obscene amount of money of course.
It isn't GPL licensed. We all know that when it comes to software, there's only really one thing that matters. Right, Comrades? ;)
...but it does have other fringe benefits.
If this does turn out to be another pandemic, there's a very simple vaccine for it, kids. Keep your pants on. ;)
>>Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system
>Is switching supposed to be straightforward? I've heard stories, but still it seems daunting.
Yes, it absolutely is supposed to be straightforward. When I use either Slackware, FreeBSD, or Arch, I use a ~/.xinitrc file, in which I specify a list of startup applications, and the window manager is listed last. I do not use xdm/gdm at all. If I've got two window managers on my system, I will make a new .xinitrc for each wm, and then name them appropriately; so say, .xinitrc.ratpoison, .xinitrc.enlightenment, etc.
When I want to change to another window manager, all I need to do is, "cp ~/.xinitrc.enlightenment ~/.xinitrc" and then type startx.
>>even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work
>WFM
This SHOULD NOT be done, via an application. It is utterly moronic; hell, even if you want to make some sort of brain-dead, plastic front end for an end user, is it really so hard to generate an fstab as that program's output?