Just learn how to set CFLAGS when you build a Debian package and quit wasting time with Yet Another Distro.
Yes, because we all know what a wonderful thing a monoculture is.
I've just realised...the main reason why I find this attitude so offensive is because it is genuinely anti-intellectual. People who think like this want as little choice as possible for the simple reason that they want to think as little as possible. Making a reasoned choice between alternatives requires having to think; you want to avoid that at all costs. Hence, your seeking to deride multiple choice of distributions.
I'm glad I don't think like that...I can't imagine how horrible it must be to willingly have such a small mind.
Right now there are 220,000 files, some ~100 bytes and others ~0-4k. Just to support portage. Space-age filesystems or not that's a lot of tiny files to be scattered around and updated piecemeal. What happens is that gentoo starts taking more and more time to do syncs and searches, not to mention everything else slowing down.
Ports gets around that via a few different ways:- The core source system uses make, tcsh, and the db more or less only. There might be some ruby glue to control the db, but AFAIK most of the ruby stuff controls installing of binary packages. Compiling from source is pretty much pure tcsh and make, because it doesn't need to be anything else. As for synching, that's easy...CVS or portsnap, take your pick. Not sure how portsnap works exactly, but it seems to be even more simple than CVS. Searching is also dead easy...either go to freshports or use "find/usr/ports."
Re:Compiling distros is for distro maintainers
on
Is Gentoo in crisis?
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· Score: 1
Compiling distros is for distro maintainers and people who can't find a distro for what they need.
Are you remotely aware of how ignorant, narrow minded, and unspeakably moronic in general you make yourself look when you make such statements?
One example of why compiling yourself can be a good idea:- You're wanting a system for older/less powerful hardware...and rather than relying on dynamically linked binaries, for the core toolchain you decide to statically link against dietlibc in order to save as much space as possible.
Another example is that you might have a dual core system, while the binaries of a package that are available were specifically intended for uniprocessor machines. If someone else has written multiprocessor patches, or you can write them yourself, you can then recompile the app to get full dual core support. You might also want to compile with i686 optimisations rather than the generic 386, as some of us do.
Yet another reason might be that there's a security patch that's just been released for your favourite app. Although your distro provider might normally be great in providing timely security updates for packages, there are concievable reasons why you might find one before they do. Maybe you're using a particularly unusual application which isn't supported by the distro. Maybe the distro makers have had to process an unusually large number of updates that day, and they just haven't got around to that one yet. Either way, if you have the source of the app and the patch, you can apply the patch and recompile to get a patched binary yourself.
Yet another reason might be if security is something you care about in another sense. Say the binary package you're going to install is unsigned, but you *are* able to get signed, checksummed source. The prudent thing to do in such a case would be to download the secure source and compile it yourself, rather than installing an unsigned and potentially compromised binary on your system, thus possibly exposing yourself to back doors.
As you can hopefully see, there are valid reasons for compiling individual applications from source.
Please learn to use your brain. If your brain is unaccustomed to being used, (as I strongly suspect in your case) you may find that it hurts the first few times you attempt to use it...however in time, you may also find that you actually enjoy doing so. You will notice other benefits as well; namely that use of your brain will allow you to avoid engaging in stupid, irrational, destructive behaviour or adherence to the kinds of ideas which tend to cause such behaviour.
I dual boot Ubuntu Edgy Eft with Gnome and Beryl. I can play WoW with it, listen to my mp3s with it, surf the web with it, watch YouTube with it, read/write email with it, do office stuff etc...the only two things I'm not doing with Linux yet are watching DVDs (I tried that earlier tonight and had some weird problems) and using my webcam...and the latter is only because I haven't bothered to install the drivers yet.
I haven't completely weaned myself off XP yet, but I'm working on it. I advocate Ubuntu though to anyone who wants to find out for themselves that desktop Linux, even though it may not have been in the past, is now a genuinely viable reality.
HL2 blows compared to the first game; graphics alone don't cut it...you need to put some effort into a few other aspects of game design as well. Before you sold your souls, you apparently understood that. Then you did the usual thing these days and allowed yourselves to be assimilated by corporate middlemen in the form of Vivendi.
I therefore am not interested in hearing your opinions about much of anything...and I consider it hypocrisy that you criticise Microsoft. You've done well enough on the corporate sellout scorecard yourselves in recent years.
I feel as though I've got a pretty good idea as to what type of mentality drives the people who put the flamebait and troll tags on this article...I want to suggest something though.
Rather than simply attempt to shout down (and basically censor) anyone you happen to disagree with, why not actually try and refute what they believe via logical argument?
Surely it isn't because (heaven forbid) you don't believe your emotionalism actually has a logical basis, deep down?
...but not because he actually is one. It's more primarily because he's saying things that you don't want to hear.
A lot of Linux users demonstrably are Communist. You can deny it for as long as you like, but I see overwhelming evidence for it here all the time.
I will admit that I've never understood why so many Linux users seem to insist on staying in the closet with regards to their Marxist inclinations. Why not be honest and admit it? You'll get a lot more respect if you do. You'll also get a lot more credibility if, instead of simply flaming people like the guy who wrote TFA and calling him a troll, you actually logically refute his points if you think they're invalid.
So, once I do that, all of my hardware will just work?
For the most part, yes. Printer support is a bit weak, and you might also have some trouble with winmodems...and if you have something truly weird and exotic, then you might possibly have to scratch around a bit. There's a very large number of sound cards that work though...a ton of hard drive controllers and hard drives, and I also haven't come across a CD-ROM drive in a long time that wasn't supported by Linux. USB is supported, and I'm constantly surprised by the amount of USB hardware that I hear about Ubuntu supporting, which you'd expect to be Windows only.
Try installing it...if you have more than two pieces of hardware at the most that aren't supported, I'll be very surprised.
Personally, I'm a little annoyed at RMS' arrogant and loudmouthed politicking of late. My feeling is that RMS' general orneriness has extended into the GPLv3 and added a bunch of provisions he knew would cause nothing but contention in the community, and gain us nothing material.
I can explain that for you:- Vista.
Given that Vista is as autocratic as it is, not to mention unpopular, the reason why the FSF has been increasingly throwing its' weight around in the last two years or so is because they believe that due to more and more people abandoning Microsoft, they will have said Windows refugees over a barrel. Look for Stallman and his people, as well as members of the Debian Project (especially the latter given that Ubuntu is the primary mainstream distro, and is a Debian derivative) to become ever more aggressive and strident in their opposition to the use of binary video card drivers, as an example. They're going to get that way because they are starting to feel that they have control of a group of end users who have no choice but to capitulate to their demands if said end users want to be able to use a computer at all. Stallman also now has a monopoly lock on a crucial piece of operating system infrastructure; the C compiler. There is no other genuinely viable FOSS C compiler in existence, other than GCC.
This is the dark side of collectivism...you might have people producing software "for the common good," but it will also generally mean that said producers (or more accurately, those who falsely appoint themselves to represent said producers) will try to make adherence to their ideology a contractual requirement for the continued right to use the software. Said tyrants will try to maintain that such is only fair and reasonable, but I know what I think of it. In functional terms, the FSF basically amounts to a de facto trade union for programmers...and as anyone reasonably versed in economic or political history knows, unionism isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Union leaders can not only attempt to hold people outside the union hostage, (via strikes, or in the FSF's case, threatening to revoke the software distribution rights of companies they don't like) but can also have a tendency to be just as tyrannical as commercial employers towards the workers they supposedly represent.
Stallman has always had the attitude that anybody who uses Linux is on his turf and basically has to accept him as an ideological authority figure, and as Linux moves closer and closer to becoming genuinely mainstream, his expression of that opinion is only going to get louder and more adamant...as will the chorus of support for it from his cultists.
There are those of us who feel that the degree of similarity between the names Stallman and Stalin is slightly more than a coincidence.;-)
First, The GPLv3 is refering to only GPLv3 covered item. It cannot impose a restriction on GPLv2 or earlier covered items.
As it stands right now, maybe not...but you can bet your boots that RMS will likely be pushing for retroactive changes to v2 if it looks like v3 isn't going to be adopted widely enough for his liking.
Contrary to the claims of just about every distro in existence to be able to perform massive in-place upgrades, the authors of the Linux From Scratch book issue a very stern warning (which I agree with) about such.
Their rule of thumb is, if you upgrade *any* element of the core toolchain, (gcc, binutils, and glibc mainly) the only way to be 1000% sure that everything works is to backup your data and reinstall the lot. You might be able to get away with in-place upgrades of minor point releases of those three packages; but to some of us, it's just not worth the risk. Hosed installs of any of those three packages can introduce extremely subtle, but eventually systemic problems which generally don't become obvious until they've completely trashed your system. This sort of thing is one of the main reasons why I have such a problem with binary packages, personally...there are some core packages that just *aren't meant* to be installed in-place as bricks, but need to be compiled and linked into the system in an organic way...they depend on other things in the system, other things depend on them, and if you have the wrong versions it can wreak all kinds of havoc.
Dpkg and rpm might really help a lot of people...I'm not arguing with that. If you need or want Linux and you don't have the knowledge to compile your own, they can give you a working system quickly.
However, those of us who can cook for ourselves also know that fast food is never as healthy or tasty as something you prepare yourself.
Ok, I think I've got a box sitting around at home that could handle it. What are the steps to getting this up and running?
Go here and download the Kubuntu ISO/cd image, and burn that to a CD...you can do that with Nero or something similar in Windows if your computer has a CD recorder, as most do these days.
Once you've done that...if you're putting it on another, lower end machine which doesn't have anything else on its' hard drive that you want...simply put the CD in its' drive and reboot the machine. It should boot up into the LiveCD...and when it does that, there should also be a shortcut on the desktop that comes up to run an installer program which can format the hard drive and install the contents of the Live CD onto the hard drive. Once that is done, simply take the CD out of the drive and reboot the computer again, and it should be installed.
The world in general needs to break the addictive, destructive relationship with the "premium content" providers. Google would do the public a far greater service if it simply put ads in the user-made vids, (assuming it absolutely has to, of course) and avoided forming any type of relationship with big media entirely.
The film companies and record labels need to be sent a message that they cannot indefinitely push the viewing public around, bully them, sue them, and otherwise treat them like cattle, without there being deeply negative consequences for them. If someone becomes willing to do this, big media might start treating people a bit better.
Suspicions verified. Linux is subsidized by large corporations.
Mission accomplished because you killed off the little guy in the market.
My refutation of this is distrowatch.com.;) Yes, there are commercial distros, and yes, they do throw money at the kernel. I personally don't have any problem with Linus being a millionaire...he's earned it, as far as I'm concerned.
Don't like corporate distros though? Fine...download Debian, Blag, Gentoo, or Sorceror, (to name but a few) and be happy.:)
No average joe computer user will ever pick linux over windows as long as linux looks like something out of the late 80s.
I have just one acronym for you, my friend...KDE.
Seriously. Go get Kubuntu, and have a look at it. Other Linux DEs might still look like they were ported from the Amiga, but KDE has definitely entered the 21st century.
I know the heavy downloaders of torrent/usenet are being subsidised by the majority of casual webbers/mailers paying for the service
Most of them must be on dialup then, since my average download rate with torrents is 20k/sec, when my ISP is giving me 150k/sec.
I agree with people who are saying that it isn't the backbones which are responsible for the congestion; it's mainly caused by:-
a) There are still way too many people on dialup, and b) The "assymetrical" part of the ADSL acronym. Like I said, I get 150k/sec down, but I only get 25k/sec up. We need large scale residential adoption/deployment of SDSL. If everyone had the same speed both downstream and up, it'd go a long way to resolving a lot of problems.
The thing to realise is that with p2p, it's residential end users who are more or less creating their own subnet. The backbone/s would come into a bit, sure...but seeing as with p2p you're mostly getting stuff from other end users, it's said end users' upstream bandwidth that matters...and ISPs really think in terms of downstream only.
3) ESR wants RPM to be statically linked so this can't happen.
Unfortunately, ESR hasn't looked at the realities of a modern distribution. Statically linking key applications used to be a good idea, but Linux today has a lot of pieces that won't function without shared libraries.
If rpm had been designed the way it should have been, this wouldn't be an issue. Used ports before? If not, I invite you to install FreeBSD for a week or so. It's a worthwhile experience, and it will also give you exposure to the one package management system in existence (in my experience anywayz) which actually works in a sane and halfway reliable manner.
Its' biggest secret is that the only hard coded binaries are make and the db engine. The people who designed it didn't write the whole thing in C purely in order to look cool, and thus, ports is a largely textual system which you don't need a degree in computer science to be able to understand.
Given what ESR has written, I've never been able to understand why he uses the more canned/"user friendly," distributions. I would have expected him to use something a lot more old school, like Slackware or LFS with pkgsrc.
As for Alan Cox, he's the kernel team's resident GNU troll...he was pestering Linus for a while on kerneltrap about migrating the kernel to version 3 of the GPL. Raymond has his ideosyncracies, but being Stallman's bitch and aggressively advocating that the rest of us become the same isn't one of them.
Raymond is a fairly extreme narcissist, with some political ideas that I definitely do not agree with, but at the same time I have an enormous amount of respect for his writings where software is concerned. If you've never read this before, you might want to go and check it out...it's an awesome book IMHO.
People are probably going to call me a hypocrite for the above, given the amount of time I devote here to trashing Stallman...but one of the biggest differences between the two men is that I've never seen Raymond display the attitude, "This is how you must think," the way Stallman does. He writes what he does, but then it's entirely up to us as to whether we want to accept it or not. In the book I linked above, he actually lists reasons for ignoring him.
I'm also aware that people who worship Stallman consider Raymond a moral sellout...but that's part of the whole point. Raymond's position is about advocating that people should be able to be self-determining; Stallman's is creating a rigid moral code and then vitriolically condemning people when they don't follow it. I know which I prefer...and which I consider to be more about genuine freedom.
The only thing I could think of myself would be the fat, vfat/fat32 and NTFS support. Even there his case is probably weak though...although he would probably have enough there to get at least the developers of that support under the DMCA.
Australia has a natural abundance of alternate energy sources and a highly educated and intelligent population.
Educated? Maybe. Intelligent? Do you live here? I do, and apart from my countrymen's contributions to some of the sciences, online I've discovered that I have more credibility in a discussion if I avoid mentioning where I'm from. I'll also have a lot less difficulty believing that they have a brain in their heads when they've voted Howard out.
This government, much like the US administration, has used fear as the primary basis of their reelection strategy since they gained office.
John Howard is the single worst thing to have ever happened to this country. He is a fascist quisling of corporate interests and George W Bush. When Keating was in power, I thought he was evil. Then Howard got in, and I realised just how wrong and misguided I had truly been.
I was taught from my father's knee to believe that the rivalry between Liberal and Labour was almost spiritual, with the Labour party representing the infernal regions. As a seven year old I saw the Transformers cartoons at the time as an analogy for Australian federal politics...I thought Paul Keating and Starscream were a pretty good match.;) There was a time when Hawke and Megatron fit, too...as well as Malcom Fraser and Optimus Prime.
I feel that during the 80s and earlier, Liberal also genuinely would have been worth voting for. However, at the last federal election, whatever small sense of nationalism I have told me that Howard being in office had never been in the country's best interests. I would have liked voting independent, but these days, voting independently is effectively the same as voting informally...so I voted Labour. I will continue to do so at least for as long as Howard is in power, and until the Liberal party get someone who my conscience is comfortable with allowing me to vote for.
Linux is nothing more than the kernel to the system
Without which the much-lauded "GNU operating system," would not function at all. I'm aware of Stallman and his worshippers having tried to belittle the kernel's importance in recent years; it gets in the way of Stallman being able to compulsively seek credit for everything he possibly can.
If the kernel is such a trivial thing, I really wish that someone associated with the FSF would prove that and write their own. That way they could take the completed GNU system and go away.
We could replace the entire GNU system in fairly short order with the BSD utilities and TenDRA, and it'd also mean we wouldn't have to keep listening to Stallman and his army of cultic zombies constantly reminding the rest of us that we supposedly owe them our lives. It'd be fantastic.
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Just learn how to set CFLAGS when you build a Debian package and quit wasting time with Yet Another Distro.
Yes, because we all know what a wonderful thing a monoculture is.
I've just realised...the main reason why I find this attitude so offensive is because it is genuinely anti-intellectual. People who think like this want as little choice as possible for the simple reason that they want to think as little as possible. Making a reasoned choice between alternatives requires having to think; you want to avoid that at all costs. Hence, your seeking to deride multiple choice of distributions.
I'm glad I don't think like that...I can't imagine how horrible it must be to willingly have such a small mind.
Right now there are 220,000 files, some ~100 bytes and others ~0-4k. Just to support portage. Space-age filesystems or not that's a lot of tiny files to be scattered around and updated piecemeal. What happens is that gentoo starts taking more and more time to do syncs and searches, not to mention everything else slowing down.
/usr/ports."
Ports gets around that via a few different ways:-
The core source system uses make, tcsh, and the db more or less only. There might be some ruby glue to control the db, but AFAIK most of the ruby stuff controls installing of binary packages. Compiling from source is pretty much pure tcsh and make, because it doesn't need to be anything else. As for synching, that's easy...CVS or portsnap, take your pick. Not sure how portsnap works exactly, but it seems to be even more simple than CVS. Searching is also dead easy...either go to freshports or use "find
Compiling distros is for distro maintainers and people who can't find a distro for what they need.
Are you remotely aware of how ignorant, narrow minded, and unspeakably moronic in general you make yourself look when you make such statements?
One example of why compiling yourself can be a good idea:- You're wanting a system for older/less powerful hardware...and rather than relying on dynamically linked binaries, for the core toolchain you decide to statically link against dietlibc in order to save as much space as possible.
Another example is that you might have a dual core system, while the binaries of a package that are available were specifically intended for uniprocessor machines. If someone else has written multiprocessor patches, or you can write them yourself, you can then recompile the app to get full dual core support. You might also want to compile with i686 optimisations rather than the generic 386, as some of us do.
Yet another reason might be that there's a security patch that's just been released for your favourite app. Although your distro provider might normally be great in providing timely security updates for packages, there are concievable reasons why you might find one before they do. Maybe you're using a particularly unusual application which isn't supported by the distro. Maybe the distro makers have had to process an unusually large number of updates that day, and they just haven't got around to that one yet. Either way, if you have the source of the app and the patch, you can apply the patch and recompile to get a patched binary yourself.
Yet another reason might be if security is something you care about in another sense. Say the binary package you're going to install is unsigned, but you *are* able to get signed, checksummed source. The prudent thing to do in such a case would be to download the secure source and compile it yourself, rather than installing an unsigned and potentially compromised binary on your system, thus possibly exposing yourself to back doors.
As you can hopefully see, there are valid reasons for compiling individual applications from source.
Please learn to use your brain. If your brain is unaccustomed to being used, (as I strongly suspect in your case) you may find that it hurts the first few times you attempt to use it...however in time, you may also find that you actually enjoy doing so. You will notice other benefits as well; namely that use of your brain will allow you to avoid engaging in stupid, irrational, destructive behaviour or adherence to the kinds of ideas which tend to cause such behaviour.
I dual boot Ubuntu Edgy Eft with Gnome and Beryl. I can play WoW with it, listen to my mp3s with it, surf the web with it, watch YouTube with it, read/write email with it, do office stuff etc...the only two things I'm not doing with Linux yet are watching DVDs (I tried that earlier tonight and had some weird problems) and using my webcam...and the latter is only because I haven't bothered to install the drivers yet.
I haven't completely weaned myself off XP yet, but I'm working on it. I advocate Ubuntu though to anyone who wants to find out for themselves that desktop Linux, even though it may not have been in the past, is now a genuinely viable reality.
HL2 blows compared to the first game; graphics alone don't cut it...you need to put some effort into a few other aspects of game design as well. Before you sold your souls, you apparently understood that. Then you did the usual thing these days and allowed yourselves to be assimilated by corporate middlemen in the form of Vivendi.
I therefore am not interested in hearing your opinions about much of anything...and I consider it hypocrisy that you criticise Microsoft. You've done well enough on the corporate sellout scorecard yourselves in recent years.
I feel as though I've got a pretty good idea as to what type of mentality drives the people who put the flamebait and troll tags on this article...I want to suggest something though.
Rather than simply attempt to shout down (and basically censor) anyone you happen to disagree with, why not actually try and refute what they believe via logical argument?
Surely it isn't because (heaven forbid) you don't believe your emotionalism actually has a logical basis, deep down?
...but not because he actually is one. It's more primarily because he's saying things that you don't want to hear.
A lot of Linux users demonstrably are Communist. You can deny it for as long as you like, but I see overwhelming evidence for it here all the time.
I will admit that I've never understood why so many Linux users seem to insist on staying in the closet with regards to their Marxist inclinations. Why not be honest and admit it? You'll get a lot more respect if you do. You'll also get a lot more credibility if, instead of simply flaming people like the guy who wrote TFA and calling him a troll, you actually logically refute his points if you think they're invalid.
So, once I do that, all of my hardware will just work?
For the most part, yes. Printer support is a bit weak, and you might also have some trouble with winmodems...and if you have something truly weird and exotic, then you might possibly have to scratch around a bit. There's a very large number of sound cards that work though...a ton of hard drive controllers and hard drives, and I also haven't come across a CD-ROM drive in a long time that wasn't supported by Linux. USB is supported, and I'm constantly surprised by the amount of USB hardware that I hear about Ubuntu supporting, which you'd expect to be Windows only.
Try installing it...if you have more than two pieces of hardware at the most that aren't supported, I'll be very surprised.
Personally, I'm a little annoyed at RMS' arrogant and loudmouthed politicking of late. My feeling is that RMS' general orneriness has extended into the GPLv3 and added a bunch of provisions he knew would cause nothing but contention in the community, and gain us nothing material.
;-)
I can explain that for you:- Vista.
Given that Vista is as autocratic as it is, not to mention unpopular, the reason why the FSF has been increasingly throwing its' weight around in the last two years or so is because they believe that due to more and more people abandoning Microsoft, they will have said Windows refugees over a barrel. Look for Stallman and his people, as well as members of the Debian Project (especially the latter given that Ubuntu is the primary mainstream distro, and is a Debian derivative) to become ever more aggressive and strident in their opposition to the use of binary video card drivers, as an example. They're going to get that way because they are starting to feel that they have control of a group of end users who have no choice but to capitulate to their demands if said end users want to be able to use a computer at all. Stallman also now has a monopoly lock on a crucial piece of operating system infrastructure; the C compiler. There is no other genuinely viable FOSS C compiler in existence, other than GCC.
This is the dark side of collectivism...you might have people producing software "for the common good," but it will also generally mean that said producers (or more accurately, those who falsely appoint themselves to represent said producers) will try to make adherence to their ideology a contractual requirement for the continued right to use the software. Said tyrants will try to maintain that such is only fair and reasonable, but I know what I think of it. In functional terms, the FSF basically amounts to a de facto trade union for programmers...and as anyone reasonably versed in economic or political history knows, unionism isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Union leaders can not only attempt to hold people outside the union hostage, (via strikes, or in the FSF's case, threatening to revoke the software distribution rights of companies they don't like) but can also have a tendency to be just as tyrannical as commercial employers towards the workers they supposedly represent.
Stallman has always had the attitude that anybody who uses Linux is on his turf and basically has to accept him as an ideological authority figure, and as Linux moves closer and closer to becoming genuinely mainstream, his expression of that opinion is only going to get louder and more adamant...as will the chorus of support for it from his cultists.
There are those of us who feel that the degree of similarity between the names Stallman and Stalin is slightly more than a coincidence.
First, The GPLv3 is refering to only GPLv3 covered item. It cannot impose a restriction on GPLv2 or earlier covered items.
As it stands right now, maybe not...but you can bet your boots that RMS will likely be pushing for retroactive changes to v2 if it looks like v3 isn't going to be adopted widely enough for his liking.
Contrary to the claims of just about every distro in existence to be able to perform massive in-place upgrades, the authors of the Linux From Scratch book issue a very stern warning (which I agree with) about such.
Their rule of thumb is, if you upgrade *any* element of the core toolchain, (gcc, binutils, and glibc mainly) the only way to be 1000% sure that everything works is to backup your data and reinstall the lot. You might be able to get away with in-place upgrades of minor point releases of those three packages; but to some of us, it's just not worth the risk. Hosed installs of any of those three packages can introduce extremely subtle, but eventually systemic problems which generally don't become obvious until they've completely trashed your system. This sort of thing is one of the main reasons why I have such a problem with binary packages, personally...there are some core packages that just *aren't meant* to be installed in-place as bricks, but need to be compiled and linked into the system in an organic way...they depend on other things in the system, other things depend on them, and if you have the wrong versions it can wreak all kinds of havoc.
Dpkg and rpm might really help a lot of people...I'm not arguing with that. If you need or want Linux and you don't have the knowledge to compile your own, they can give you a working system quickly.
However, those of us who can cook for ourselves also know that fast food is never as healthy or tasty as something you prepare yourself.
Ok, I think I've got a box sitting around at home that could handle it. What are the steps to getting this up and running?
Go here and download the Kubuntu ISO/cd image, and burn that to a CD...you can do that with Nero or something similar in Windows if your computer has a CD recorder, as most do these days.
Once you've done that...if you're putting it on another, lower end machine which doesn't have anything else on its' hard drive that you want...simply put the CD in its' drive and reboot the machine. It should boot up into the LiveCD...and when it does that, there should also be a shortcut on the desktop that comes up to run an installer program which can format the hard drive and install the contents of the Live CD onto the hard drive. Once that is done, simply take the CD out of the drive and reboot the computer again, and it should be installed.
Google and YouTube need the premium videos.
The world in general needs to break the addictive, destructive relationship with the "premium content" providers. Google would do the public a far greater service if it simply put ads in the user-made vids, (assuming it absolutely has to, of course) and avoided forming any type of relationship with big media entirely.
The film companies and record labels need to be sent a message that they cannot indefinitely push the viewing public around, bully them, sue them, and otherwise treat them like cattle, without there being deeply negative consequences for them. If someone becomes willing to do this, big media might start treating people a bit better.
Doesn't anyone remember that this used to exist for UO? It was also considered a Good Thing.
I'd been wondering when it was going to exist for WoW.
Suspicions verified. Linux is subsidized by large corporations.
;) Yes, there are commercial distros, and yes, they do throw money at the kernel. I personally don't have any problem with Linus being a millionaire...he's earned it, as far as I'm concerned.
:)
Mission accomplished because you killed off the little guy in the market.
My refutation of this is distrowatch.com.
Don't like corporate distros though? Fine...download Debian, Blag, Gentoo, or Sorceror, (to name but a few) and be happy.
No average joe computer user will ever pick linux over windows as long as linux looks like something out of the late 80s.
;)
I have just one acronym for you, my friend...KDE.
Seriously. Go get Kubuntu, and have a look at it. Other Linux DEs might still look like they were ported from the Amiga, but KDE has definitely entered the 21st century.
Try it...you just might like it.
I know the heavy downloaders of torrent/usenet are being subsidised by the majority of casual webbers/mailers paying for the service
Most of them must be on dialup then, since my average download rate with torrents is 20k/sec, when my ISP is giving me 150k/sec.
I agree with people who are saying that it isn't the backbones which are responsible for the congestion; it's mainly caused by:-
a) There are still way too many people on dialup, and
b) The "assymetrical" part of the ADSL acronym. Like I said, I get 150k/sec down, but I only get 25k/sec up. We need large scale residential adoption/deployment of SDSL. If everyone had the same speed both downstream and up, it'd go a long way to resolving a lot of problems.
The thing to realise is that with p2p, it's residential end users who are more or less creating their own subnet. The backbone/s would come into a bit, sure...but seeing as with p2p you're mostly getting stuff from other end users, it's said end users' upstream bandwidth that matters...and ISPs really think in terms of downstream only.
I love it...ROFL.
3) ESR wants RPM to be statically linked so this can't happen.
Unfortunately, ESR hasn't looked at the realities of a modern distribution. Statically linking key applications used to be a good idea, but Linux today has a lot of pieces that won't function without shared libraries.
If rpm had been designed the way it should have been, this wouldn't be an issue. Used ports before? If not, I invite you to install FreeBSD for a week or so. It's a worthwhile experience, and it will also give you exposure to the one package management system in existence (in my experience anywayz) which actually works in a sane and halfway reliable manner.
Its' biggest secret is that the only hard coded binaries are make and the db engine. The people who designed it didn't write the whole thing in C purely in order to look cool, and thus, ports is a largely textual system which you don't need a degree in computer science to be able to understand.
Given what ESR has written, I've never been able to understand why he uses the more canned/"user friendly," distributions. I would have expected him to use something a lot more old school, like Slackware or LFS with pkgsrc.
As for Alan Cox, he's the kernel team's resident GNU troll...he was pestering Linus for a while on kerneltrap about migrating the kernel to version 3 of the GPL. Raymond has his ideosyncracies, but being Stallman's bitch and aggressively advocating that the rest of us become the same isn't one of them.
Raymond is a fairly extreme narcissist, with some political ideas that I definitely do not agree with, but at the same time I have an enormous amount of respect for his writings where software is concerned. If you've never read this before, you might want to go and check it out...it's an awesome book IMHO.
People are probably going to call me a hypocrite for the above, given the amount of time I devote here to trashing Stallman...but one of the biggest differences between the two men is that I've never seen Raymond display the attitude, "This is how you must think," the way Stallman does. He writes what he does, but then it's entirely up to us as to whether we want to accept it or not. In the book I linked above, he actually lists reasons for ignoring him.
I'm also aware that people who worship Stallman consider Raymond a moral sellout...but that's part of the whole point. Raymond's position is about advocating that people should be able to be self-determining; Stallman's is creating a rigid moral code and then vitriolically condemning people when they don't follow it. I know which I prefer...and which I consider to be more about genuine freedom.
The only thing I could think of myself would be the fat, vfat/fat32 and NTFS support. Even there his case is probably weak though...although he would probably have enough there to get at least the developers of that support under the DMCA.
If Torvalds keeps antagonizing GNU
Should the kernel developers adopt version 3 of the GPL without question then, in your view?
Australia has a natural abundance of alternate energy sources and a highly educated and intelligent population.
;) There was a time when Hawke and Megatron fit, too...as well as Malcom Fraser and Optimus Prime.
Educated? Maybe. Intelligent? Do you live here? I do, and apart from my countrymen's contributions to some of the sciences, online I've discovered that I have more credibility in a discussion if I avoid mentioning where I'm from. I'll also have a lot less difficulty believing that they have a brain in their heads when they've voted Howard out.
This government, much like the US administration, has used fear as the primary basis of their reelection strategy since they gained office.
John Howard is the single worst thing to have ever happened to this country. He is a fascist quisling of corporate interests and George W Bush. When Keating was in power, I thought he was evil. Then Howard got in, and I realised just how wrong and misguided I had truly been.
I was taught from my father's knee to believe that the rivalry between Liberal and Labour was almost spiritual, with the Labour party representing the infernal regions. As a seven year old I saw the Transformers cartoons at the time as an analogy for Australian federal politics...I thought Paul Keating and Starscream were a pretty good match.
I feel that during the 80s and earlier, Liberal also genuinely would have been worth voting for. However, at the last federal election, whatever small sense of nationalism I have told me that Howard being in office had never been in the country's best interests. I would have liked voting independent, but these days, voting independently is effectively the same as voting informally...so I voted Labour. I will continue to do so at least for as long as Howard is in power, and until the Liberal party get someone who my conscience is comfortable with allowing me to vote for.
How is this offtopic?
Linux is nothing more than the kernel to the system
Without which the much-lauded "GNU operating system," would not function at all. I'm aware of Stallman and his worshippers having tried to belittle the kernel's importance in recent years; it gets in the way of Stallman being able to compulsively seek credit for everything he possibly can.
If the kernel is such a trivial thing, I really wish that someone associated with the FSF would prove that and write their own. That way they could take the completed GNU system and go away.
We could replace the entire GNU system in fairly short order with the BSD utilities and TenDRA, and it'd also mean we wouldn't have to keep listening to Stallman and his army of cultic zombies constantly reminding the rest of us that we supposedly owe them our lives. It'd be fantastic.