They don't pre-install Linux, but they are somewhat clueful about it, and they will sell most laptops without Windows.
I recently got the PowerPro A 2:38, a re-branded ASUS. It is a butt-kicking Linux powerhouse. Pretty much everything works out of the box on Kubuntu Feisty (not the camera, and I haven't tried the modem).
I looked at converting an Access application to Base, but it simply isn't up to it. It is OK if you have a few tables and have a few simple forms with 1 to 1 form-DB field correspondence. But any real logic is going to be very hairy. Programming in general under OOo needs to be easier and MUCH better documented.
In my Kubuntu Feisty install, Hibernate takes about as long as shutting down and starting it back up about as long as a normal start.
Of course, all the apps are still there so that helps. But it's not nearly as efficient as, say, a Mac where you can close the lid any time, open it back up again and have it right there in 2 seconds.
> Frankly, there are a lot of us who have become fed up waiting for working open source drivers for our hardware and would rather just plug a black box in and be done with it.
Of course, as soon as you take that attitude, you have lost the battle for Freedom.
Granted, I got a new laptop with an nVidia chip (I couldn't find any high-res 17" laptops with an Intel GMA chip) and I use their proprietary kernel module, but I'm not happy about that in the least. Sure hope Nouveau(sp?) gets there this year.
I am very happy with the result. With very little tweaking, it recognized everything I care about:
* Firewire -- I've captured DV video with it * eSATA -- ordered a SATA-2 drive and an Icy Dock enclosure from Newegg. It's twice as fast as the internal drive and huge, perfect for video editing * 3D -- glxgears gives over 5000 fps, only drawback is the proprietary kernel module * Bluetooth * Sound * Standard stuff -- DVD, USB, etc
Haven't yet tried the camera or external video output.
I think Herd 5 is already very close to production quality, but I had a scare when updating with Adept. Fortunately it got worked out. When it is truly final I will be heavily promoting Feisty to friends.:)
I just installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 on my new ASUS laptop with Intel 3945 wireless. It recognized it immediately on the default install and let me connect to my home router. Didn't have to do anything else!
> I think I want to take my whack at building a Linux replacement for the MS monopoly. This is SlashDot's Mission, right?
I'm totally with you there.
The biggest challenge, I think, is that there is quite a bit of software out there that organizations depend on that totally ties together the whole MS stack and makes their operations easy. So it effectively ties them not only to Windows, but also to Office, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Really sad.
Even sadder may be the fact that the open source community probably does not have many people who understand fully what this software does. I know I don't.
I think what MUST happen for World Domination is a pretty big effort to understand all these solutions, and get solutions that are just as featureful AND just as easy, and build them on top of Linux, OpenOffice, Postfix/opengroupware/whatever, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc.
I would argue that these solutions don't even need to be open source, they just need to exist on the open source stack. Certainly bonus points of they are open source.
Of course this will never work if we don't get a large number of people together (probably at least 100) to join in the fun. I know I would be in, but probably unqualified to lead it....
since you seen to know what you're talking about...:)
I've been trying to figure out if an ExpressCard eSATA interface would work with Linux and, if so, with just the in-kernel SATA driver or would it require something additional?
Since ExpressCard supposedly uses PCIe internally, my strong hunch is that it would work just fine with the in-tree driver, but even extensive Googling did not come up with anyone who had actually tried it.
Just trying to find some confirmation before plunking down hundreds of dollars for a multi-hundred-gigabyte lightning fast external laptop drive subsystem.:)
That is even the case here in Ecuador. We can get GSM phones (locked to Porta, but unlockable) with fully functioning Bluetooth. And Porta is doing just fine without forcing me to buy ring tones from them.
It's just amazing how much crap the American consumer takes from corporations. Hardly anyone is boycotting Sony because of rootkits, hardly anyone is crying foul over crippled phones. And there's got to be hundreds more examples!
GPS street nav software is one of the lesser mentioned needs for the non-Windows world. Not even the Mac has anything decent in this area (surprised the heck out of me when I tried to find one recently).
It's listed as "untested" in Crossover's DB. Sure wish someone would test it and report.
I actually recently tried it under Wine 0.9.28, and the result was encouraging. I could browse the map. But some parts of the UI did not work right. It only crashed if I clicked a certain tab.
I'll be getting a laptop soon, and it looks like I'll have to buy a Windows license *only* for this app. I'd love nothing more than to pay Codeweavers instead of Microsoft, but I'm not sure if that's possible.
Well my experience was a bit different. I had no prior video editing experience, but have wanted to get into it and figured, what the heck, I'll try Cinelerra.
I admit that it was not super-easy to pick up, but after going through two or three sites with attempts at documentation, and trying things, I got the hang of it in a few days. Without much trouble, I was able to produce what I thought were some cool effects. Example: I had the main screen panning around a still image, while in the corner there was a small window of video from my DV cam, *rotating*. Useful? I dunno, but it looked cool.
Unfortunately I haven't had reason to use it since, so those skills rusted. But I hope to get back to it this year, and my previous experience convinced me that it certainly is a valuable Free Software program.
Well I'll admit to thinking it was a great idea when it got started. Back in the late 90s, there were polls about which applications people wanted for Linux. Two consistently topped the list: Quicken/Quickbooks and Delphi.
When they first announced its availability, at a price of a whopping $999 for the non-enterprise version, I immediately realized they didn't have a clue. No wonder almost no one bought it. When they announced that the price had dropped to $200, I ordered a copy immediately. It was nice, and I enjoyed playing with it, but it was somewhat buggy.
I also ordered the upgrade to Kylix 2. It had definite improvements, but it was still rather inconsistent, with a Winelib IDE, an infernal Motif based help system, and producing Qt applications. There was a lot of annoyance in the user community that the promised PostgreSQL driver was too long in coming.
When I switched from Red Hat to Gentoo, I never was able to get Kylix installed correctly. I haven't used it since.
I still believe there could be a market for this kind of tool -- if the company producing it actually came through with a great product that could produce apps for multiple platforms with minimal changes. Looks like Java or Python (take your pick) is the closest we're gonna get.
I don't know about everyone else, but I've found that Skype's "free" calls from the US to other US phones to be horrible.
I've used Skype for almost two years now, and call quality to landlines has generally been good, at least acceptable. When I was in the States last June (I live in Ecuador), I made some free calls to my parents' landline and cell phone from a 3mb DSL connection. It sucked rocks! We could barely understand each other. Calling the very same number from the jungle of Ecuador over a 128kb DSL connection and paying Skype's 2.2 cents a minute, the connection was fine.
Also calling 1-800 numbers with Skype from Ecuador, which does not cost anything, sometimes renders horrible quality (and sometimes it is OK).
In any case, I think their "promotion" was a horrible idea. I would have gladly payed the 2.2 cents a minute from the States to get as good a connection as I do in Ecuador. I wonder how many people think badly of their service because of that.
I know of other nonprofits that are shunning open source for the entire Microsoft stack for one reason -- "foundational software." This software handles all their donations, contacts, personnel, etc., and binds it tightly to the M$ stack.
This is something we in the Free Software community need to address, soon, assuming we want to help nonprofits standardize on open code. Does anyone know if a viable solution that currently exists and would not be scorned by thier leadership?
I'd like to see something that does the same things, but runs on Linux and has ties to OpenOffice, Firefox, PostgreSQL, etc.
For those who whine about "open source zealots who whine about open source drivers":
LWN.net (as usual) has a great write-up of the reasons to insist on open source drivers.
There are several good reasons. Open source drivers are *important*. It cannot be said that one truly supports Linux if one only does so with closed drivers.
I'll be in the market for a monster computer early next year. Planned to go AMD, but since there is no PCIe based card with open source drivers, I think I will have to go with Intel just to get their GMA3000 integrated graphics. It's that important.
(Although, the reverse engineered R300 drivers might be good enough by then. If so, AMD might be an option.)
Probably by users clicking on "this is spam" in their mail program. Yeah that can be abused, but it shouldn't be taken seriously until quite a lot of users do that for any given message or mail server.
> ii) What happens after it is marked as spam?
It should remove all the tokens for users who haven't seen it yet.
> iii) Why/How would it work better than the current methods already used with SMTP, POP3 etc systems?
I think all this translates to significantly less bandwidth usage for any spam that does show up.
> Already many ISPs are tagging email as spam in the headers, and users can just configure their mail clients to handle such mails differently, if they trust the ISP's spam filters.
But still the full body of the spam message has to travel the whole way on the network. IM2000 should cut into that.
Maybe you're right that it can be solved better with crypto. All I know is that SMTP as is, having the assumption that the Internet can be trusted, is broken and needs serious work.
> Wow now it looks like the same problem as SMTP doesn't it?
To a lesser extent, I think.
IM2000 would only work with one or more centralized blacklists, and that can also be done with SMTP. Couple differences:
1. in IM2000 the mail would normally not be transferred from the source ISP until it was requested for viewing. (Of course, some users would likely batch download mail.) So spam would not need to waste so much bandwidth if the receiver recognized it as such before downloading it.
2. Say a spam is sent to a million people. In IM2000, a blacklist might kick in after a few dozen poeple transferred it. That would save the other hundreds of thousands from having to even see it.
We just started having gmail bounce mail from us either today or yesterday.
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- <yoderm@gmail.com>
(reason: 550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited)
----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.: >>> DATA <<< 550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited <<< 550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our <<< 550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been <<< 550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit <<< 550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review <<< 550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. 1si830441qbh 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
Which is bullcrap. I just grepped the mail logs; we've sent less than 200 messages to them in the last 5 weeks, and other computers are firewalled off from port 25 outbound. They have to go through the mail server.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, Larry Wall is an evolutionist.
As is Francis Collins, the leader of the human genome project. He is a Christian who has contributed quite a bit!
I strongly recommend PowerNotebooks.
;)
They don't pre-install Linux, but they are somewhat clueful about it, and they will sell most laptops without Windows.
I recently got the PowerPro A 2:38, a re-branded ASUS. It is a butt-kicking Linux powerhouse. Pretty much everything works out of the box on Kubuntu Feisty (not the camera, and I haven't tried the modem).
As always, check ResellerRatings:
PowerNotebooks
Dell
HP
Gateway
Any questions?
I looked at converting an Access application to Base, but it simply isn't up to it. It is OK if you have a few tables and have a few simple forms with 1 to 1 form-DB field correspondence. But any real logic is going to be very hairy. Programming in general under OOo needs to be easier and MUCH better documented.
In my Kubuntu Feisty install, Hibernate takes about as long as shutting down and starting it back up about as long as a normal start.
Of course, all the apps are still there so that helps. But it's not nearly as efficient as, say, a Mac where you can close the lid any time, open it back up again and have it right there in 2 seconds.
In general, that is pretty sound advice.
However, on a new laptop especially, no way could you make the case that Edgy is better than Feisty.
1. Wireless is much better integrated into Feisty. It worked with my Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 out of the box. Didn't have to do anything.
2. Some new laptop sound chips (ALC882 for one) only work with a 2.6.19+ kernel. Feisty has it, Edgy doesn't.
I started using Feisty at Herd 5 when I got my new laptop, and I'm thrilled with it. There have been a couple minor hiccups, but it's been stable.
> Frankly, there are a lot of us who have become fed up waiting for working open source drivers for our hardware and would rather just plug a black box in and be done with it.
Of course, as soon as you take that attitude, you have lost the battle for Freedom.
Granted, I got a new laptop with an nVidia chip (I couldn't find any high-res 17" laptops with an Intel GMA chip) and I use their proprietary kernel module, but I'm not happy about that in the least. Sure hope Nouveau(sp?) gets there this year.
Suit yourself. But that store is ranked virtually perfectly on resellerratings. I as a customer am as happy as everyone who has commented there.
I recently got a laptop with an eSATA port. Then got an Icy Dock enclosure and a Samsung 500GB SATA-II drive from Newegg.
I can hotplug the thing in both Windows and Linux. Speed is twice as fast as the internal drive (according to hdparm -t). I'm thrilled with it!
Might as well put in a plug for those of you looking for butt-kicking Linux laptop setups.
:)
I just ordered this rebranded ASUS Z84JP and immediately installed Kubuntu Feisty Herd 5 on it.
I am very happy with the result. With very little tweaking, it recognized everything I care about:
* Firewire -- I've captured DV video with it
* eSATA -- ordered a SATA-2 drive and an Icy Dock enclosure from Newegg. It's twice as fast as the internal drive and huge, perfect for video editing
* 3D -- glxgears gives over 5000 fps, only drawback is the proprietary kernel module
* Bluetooth
* Sound
* Standard stuff -- DVD, USB, etc
Haven't yet tried the camera or external video output.
I think Herd 5 is already very close to production quality, but I had a scare when updating with Adept. Fortunately it got worked out. When it is truly final I will be heavily promoting Feisty to friends.
I just installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 on my new ASUS laptop with Intel 3945 wireless. It recognized it immediately on the default install and let me connect to my home router. Didn't have to do anything else!
:)
Kubuntu rocks, try it!
> I think I want to take my whack at building a Linux replacement for the MS monopoly. This is SlashDot's Mission, right?
....
I'm totally with you there.
The biggest challenge, I think, is that there is quite a bit of software out there that organizations depend on that totally ties together the whole MS stack and makes their operations easy. So it effectively ties them not only to Windows, but also to Office, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Really sad.
Even sadder may be the fact that the open source community probably does not have many people who understand fully what this software does. I know I don't.
I think what MUST happen for World Domination is a pretty big effort to understand all these solutions, and get solutions that are just as featureful AND just as easy, and build them on top of Linux, OpenOffice, Postfix/opengroupware/whatever, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc.
I would argue that these solutions don't even need to be open source, they just need to exist on the open source stack. Certainly bonus points of they are open source.
Of course this will never work if we don't get a large number of people together (probably at least 100) to join in the fun. I know I would be in, but probably unqualified to lead it
Hi,
... :)
:)
since you seen to know what you're talking about
I've been trying to figure out if an ExpressCard eSATA interface would work with Linux and, if so, with just the in-kernel SATA driver or would it require something additional?
Since ExpressCard supposedly uses PCIe internally, my strong hunch is that it would work just fine with the in-tree driver, but even extensive Googling did not come up with anyone who had actually tried it.
Just trying to find some confirmation before plunking down hundreds of dollars for a multi-hundred-gigabyte lightning fast external laptop drive subsystem.
That is even the case here in Ecuador. We can get GSM phones (locked to Porta, but unlockable) with fully functioning Bluetooth. And Porta is doing just fine without forcing me to buy ring tones from them.
It's just amazing how much crap the American consumer takes from corporations. Hardly anyone is boycotting Sony because of rootkits, hardly anyone is crying foul over crippled phones. And there's got to be hundreds more examples!
GPS street nav software is one of the lesser mentioned needs for the non-Windows world. Not even the Mac has anything decent in this area (surprised the heck out of me when I tried to find one recently).
It's listed as "untested" in Crossover's DB. Sure wish someone would test it and report.
I actually recently tried it under Wine 0.9.28, and the result was encouraging. I could browse the map. But some parts of the UI did not work right. It only crashed if I clicked a certain tab.
I'll be getting a laptop soon, and it looks like I'll have to buy a Windows license *only* for this app. I'd love nothing more than to pay Codeweavers instead of Microsoft, but I'm not sure if that's possible.
Well my experience was a bit different. I had no prior video editing experience, but have wanted to get into it and figured, what the heck, I'll try Cinelerra.
I admit that it was not super-easy to pick up, but after going through two or three sites with attempts at documentation, and trying things, I got the hang of it in a few days. Without much trouble, I was able to produce what I thought were some cool effects. Example: I had the main screen panning around a still image, while in the corner there was a small window of video from my DV cam, *rotating*. Useful? I dunno, but it looked cool.
Unfortunately I haven't had reason to use it since, so those skills rusted. But I hope to get back to it this year, and my previous experience convinced me that it certainly is a valuable Free Software program.
Well I'll admit to thinking it was a great idea when it got started. Back in the late 90s, there were polls about which applications people wanted for Linux. Two consistently topped the list: Quicken/Quickbooks and Delphi.
When they first announced its availability, at a price of a whopping $999 for the non-enterprise version, I immediately realized they didn't have a clue. No wonder almost no one bought it. When they announced that the price had dropped to $200, I ordered a copy immediately. It was nice, and I enjoyed playing with it, but it was somewhat buggy.
I also ordered the upgrade to Kylix 2. It had definite improvements, but it was still rather inconsistent, with a Winelib IDE, an infernal Motif based help system, and producing Qt applications. There was a lot of annoyance in the user community that the promised PostgreSQL driver was too long in coming.
When I switched from Red Hat to Gentoo, I never was able to get Kylix installed correctly. I haven't used it since.
I still believe there could be a market for this kind of tool -- if the company producing it actually came through with a great product that could produce apps for multiple platforms with minimal changes. Looks like Java or Python (take your pick) is the closest we're gonna get.
I don't know about everyone else, but I've found that Skype's "free" calls from the US to other US phones to be horrible.
I've used Skype for almost two years now, and call quality to landlines has generally been good, at least acceptable. When I was in the States last June (I live in Ecuador), I made some free calls to my parents' landline and cell phone from a 3mb DSL connection. It sucked rocks! We could barely understand each other. Calling the very same number from the jungle of Ecuador over a 128kb DSL connection and paying Skype's 2.2 cents a minute, the connection was fine.
Also calling 1-800 numbers with Skype from Ecuador, which does not cost anything, sometimes renders horrible quality (and sometimes it is OK).
In any case, I think their "promotion" was a horrible idea. I would have gladly payed the 2.2 cents a minute from the States to get as good a connection as I do in Ecuador. I wonder how many people think badly of their service because of that.
I know of other nonprofits that are shunning open source for the entire Microsoft stack for one reason -- "foundational software." This software handles all their donations, contacts, personnel, etc., and binds it tightly to the M$ stack.
This is something we in the Free Software community need to address, soon, assuming we want to help nonprofits standardize on open code. Does anyone know if a viable solution that currently exists and would not be scorned by thier leadership?
I'd like to see something that does the same things, but runs on Linux and has ties to OpenOffice, Firefox, PostgreSQL, etc.
Well you could probably get away with running Emacs ...
...
I actually don't care so much about closed source user space software, though I'm hesitant if it must run as root.
But I will to the best of my ability keep binary blobs out of my kernel space. Not worth sacrificing the stability and upgradeability of my kernel.
And that's OK, the GMA3000 probably provides as much 3D as I need
For those who whine about "open source zealots who whine about open source drivers":
LWN.net (as usual) has a great write-up of the reasons to insist on open source drivers.
There are several good reasons. Open source drivers are *important*. It cannot be said that one truly supports Linux if one only does so with closed drivers.
I'll be in the market for a monster computer early next year. Planned to go AMD, but since there is no PCIe based card with open source drivers, I think I will have to go with Intel just to get their GMA3000 integrated graphics. It's that important.
(Although, the reverse engineered R300 drivers might be good enough by then. If so, AMD might be an option.)
Maybe this will teach some people how to spell "you". That is an art form that seems to be lacking among the under-25 crowd these days ...
> i) Who decides it is spam? How?
Probably by users clicking on "this is spam" in their mail program. Yeah that can be abused, but it shouldn't be taken seriously until quite a lot of users do that for any given message or mail server.
> ii) What happens after it is marked as spam?
It should remove all the tokens for users who haven't seen it yet.
> iii) Why/How would it work better than the current methods already used with SMTP, POP3 etc systems?
I think all this translates to significantly less bandwidth usage for any spam that does show up.
> Already many ISPs are tagging email as spam in the headers, and users can just configure their mail clients to handle such mails differently, if they trust the ISP's spam filters.
But still the full body of the spam message has to travel the whole way on the network. IM2000 should cut into that.
Maybe you're right that it can be solved better with crypto. All I know is that SMTP as is, having the assumption that the Internet can be trusted, is broken and needs serious work.
> Wow now it looks like the same problem as SMTP doesn't it?
To a lesser extent, I think.
IM2000 would only work with one or more centralized blacklists, and that can also be done with SMTP. Couple differences:
1. in IM2000 the mail would normally not be transferred from the source ISP until it was requested for viewing. (Of course, some users would likely batch download mail.) So spam would not need to waste so much bandwidth if the receiver recognized it as such before downloading it.
2. Say a spam is sent to a million people. In IM2000, a blacklist might kick in after a few dozen poeple transferred it. That would save the other hundreds of thousands from having to even see it.
So I think it's still better, if not perfect.
Well I just realized I was mistaken about the firewall. Some 'Doze computers did indeed have direct access out 25. I just fixed that.