Too bad linux is still stuck with single threaded X.
That's not the problem, your videocard is not threaded so a multithreaded X server will not buy you any significant speed increase.
A good multi-threading windowing toolkit is whats needed. Qt 3.0 is supposed to fill this gap, However I've had very good results with GTK+ too. I ported some code over from BeOS and it runs beautifully under Linux/X. Unfortunately GTK+ uses one big fat global app lock for GUI threading but with careful design you can get impressive results.
And I don't think musicians will be happy with the idea that they need to install a patch in order to get low latencies. It should be default so that developers can just assume everyone will have it.
That is coming in the 2.5.x kernel series. But don't let that stop you to start experimenting:)
-adnans (who just recorded another 2 hours of video + audio under linux, without dropping a single frame:)
Re:Anything better than Esound?
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 2
Get a soundcard that does hardware mixing. The Trident 4DWave NX series of cards do this quite nice and cheap. You get 32 audio devices to play with (i.e. you can open up to 32 audio apps simultaneously). Of course you can run esound as one of the 32 to increase this in software. The Live! cards supposedly do this too. All this with ALSA drivers of course.
Just install the Pine.rc file that's shipped with mutt (at least in Debian). This will give you Pine key bindings in mutt, which should ease the switchover. But in the end switching from pine to mutt is like switching from joe to vi(m); painful, but well worth it! And just like joe ---> vi(m), you will never look back..... trust me:)
VNC requires relatively speedy machines on both sides of the connection. Have you tried using VNC on a 486 class box? It's close to unusable and you better have a 100Mbit network between endpoints since it's a huuuge bandwidth hogger (hence the increased CPU requirements). X, on the other hand is quite snappy on 10Mbit + 486 hardware.
If you need to keep "sessions" alive you can try something like the xmove program, available from the Debian repository at least. It lets you migrate X clients from server to server, with some restrictions.
I don't think so. The length of a jiffy (the timer interrupt) in Linux is 10ms. However, the quantum is 50ms. Most processes are not preempted within the 10ms jiffy.
If there is no other process to run (with a higher priority) of course the kernel will let the current process run its full timeslice. However, any process that needs attention and has a higher priority than the current running one preempts it and gets to run (within 10-20ms). Scheduling quantum doesn't matter at this point. If you push up the HZ counter to 1000 (1ms timer interrupt) you can pretty much guarantee a soft-realtime process that needs attention every few ms to run correctly , assuming you make sure it has a higher priority than normal. You will notice that properly written apps do exactly this.
That's my point. QNX and BeOS both run in userspace, just like X, and run a good deal faster.
"run a good deal faster", and what runs a good deal faster? The BeOS UI is certainly much slower on my box these days, but I suspect that has something to do with the AMD-challenged optimizations in the Be kernel. Haven't tried QNX recently. Point is that with properly prioritized processes you can make Linux just as responsive as for example BeOS. The advantage BeOS has is that it does this automatically for you, it's a single user OS, with no security. (I'll take multi-user Linux over it anyday though!)
t
they are not transparent to applications
What do you mean, not transparent?
Umm, the BeOS messaging system can shunt 90,000 messages per second around the system (on a PII 300). Nothing on UNIX is anywhere *near* that number. Even QNX can't do above 40K.
Where are you getting these numbers from? And what constitutes sending a message?
1) X runs on UNIX. Unicies are almost always server-oriented systems, and tend to have very short thread quantums. For example, the quantum on Linux 2.4 is 50ms (down from 100+ on 2.2).
This is simply not true. Both your 2.2 and 2.4 numbers are dead wrong. Linux on x86 has always had a timeslice of 10ms. It has always been 1ms on 64-bit Linux platforms (Alpha). BTW, you can modify the timeslice very easily by editting/usr/src/linux/include/asm/param.h and setting the HZ define at 1000. Yes, the timeslice is mostly dependant on this single define. You will notice that for x86 it is at 100 by default. To get the timeslice you simple divide 1000ms by the HZ value. So for 2.2 and 2.4 you get 1000 / 100 = 10ms. I have a standard patch that's applied to all fresh kernels that put HZ at 1000 on my boxes. It's kind of ludicrous to have 10ms timeslices on a 1.4GHZ Thunderbird *g*. Oh, and if you need smaller timeslices, witout having to modify your kernel lookup the manpage of sched_setscheduler
show much improved access times, even when the GUI is in a userspace server (as in BeOS or QNX)
X is in userpace.
2) It's badly designed
The design is about 20 years old, and still going strong. The developer didn't have the hindsight of what hardware would be developed over the years. Luckily enough they tought of X extensions. Oh wait, X extensions are bad right? Don't tell that to the Xv and RENDER extension that are taking full advantage of my cutting edge NVidia GPU!!
X uses the much more general (and much slower) UNIX domain sockets
Local sockets are really fast (and very low latency). For large transfers X uses shared memory
anyway. And thanks to XAA the amount of communication is kept to a minimum.
...when GUIs like Photon (on QNX) implement all the features of X plus more in less than a meg, one has to fault elements of X's design
Try TinyX. Your arguments, while true to some extend, are really not convincing enough to call X "badly designed". You are using outdated facts to draw conclusions. X is here to stay. Whining about it is not going to make it less useful. You could spend your time better by helping out Be and BeOS, be-fan. A 3ms timeslice doesn't do me any good if it doesn't boot on my box. Too bad the juicy parts are closed source no??!
Oh, I finally decided to put my BeBox in long term storage. Perhaps in 20 years it will fetch a nice price. I'm betting it'll bootup witout too much trouble, assuming I can still find a CMOS battery that fits.
Of course you completely ignored the various compression techniques in use today. Also you are assuming that 48KHZ is a 1 bit mono signal. However soundcards typically have a datarate of 48KHZ * 16-bits * 2 channels = 1.5Mbit / second . That comes pretty close to basic DSL. Taking into account modulation / error correction, that should still leave a sizable amount of IP bandwidth available...
Simply put an extra 0 on the HZ #define line. Make sure you recompile everything (including your modules). BTW, HZ is already at 1024 for Alpha architectures. Looking forward to that becoming standard on x86 as well with 1GHZ+ boxes becoming standard and all:)
As for the "SilkenMouse" option, it is on by default on XFree 4.x but you can enabled it with Option "SilkenMouse" "1" in your device section.
X11 lacks such basic features as totally integrated anti-aliasing (extensions, in general, suck)
Please. Extensions rule! They allow you to incorporate new features while keeping backward compatibilty. Who would have though that X would be getting a Plan9 based 2D rendering system with hardware accelleration, alpha blending, AA text, and whatnot!! Extensions made this possible.
X11 lacks a standard toolkit
Blimy, that's a feature!!!
X11 lacks high performance
Mwuhahaha, that's bullshit! My NVIDIA card is as fast as in Windows (2D and 3D), muuuuuuuch faster than in BeOS (since BeOS lacks MTRR support for AMD CPU's/chipsets and is generally AMD optimization challenged). I don't know if I should take anything you say serious these days. I have the feeling it's simply a side effect of your bitterness and/or frustration with the Be situation, seeing you call yourself "be-fan". I feel for you./me looks at his dust-covered BeBox.
low memory use, and low latency.
Dude, my X server eats a whopping 5MB at startup. Pixmap caching and other stuff lets the process grow, but hey that's what bloody RAM is for no? As to "low latency"? Huh? This isn't audio we're talking about. If you mean "responsiveness". If X is not responsive enough for you recompile your Linux kernel with HZ = 1000 (which gives you 1ms timeslices instead of 10). I can only speak from my own experience and that is that X is smooth as Silk these days. (BTW, Make sure your X server has "SilkenMouse" enabled)
I just recorded a full 2 hour of the NBA playoffs from my BT848 card, all while happily browsing and compiling away. Not a *single* audio/video frame was dropped. Converting the Nuppelvideo file to DIVX as I type this. Gotta love it! I smell a MediaOS in the making *grin*
manufacturers should and the hardware will probably have a longer usefull life. (long term support)
Heh, this is exactly the reason why I bought an NVidia card, believe it or not. I waited almost 2 years for Matrox to come out with quality 3D drivers for their hardware, but that still has not happened. The lasest mga DRI drivers are still flaky for me. However, I've had nothing but rock solid performance from the (closed source) NVidia drivers. The kernel parts of the NVidia driver are open source so upgrading to a new kernel requires a simple recompile of the NVdriver sources (running CVS 2.4.5-xfs right now, cutting edge). And if NVidia sucks, so does Matrox, since parts of their drivers are closed closed source too. IMHO right now NVidia provides the best video card support for Linux on x86 hardware and by hiring Mark Vojkovich and paying him to work on XFree it proves (to me) they are quite serious about Linux/XFree86.
My platform of choice is Linux/x86 (AMD), at least for the next year, and that's exactly the useful lifetime of my video hardware.
BTW, upgrading kernels is not a hassle at all. I have a nice script that is run after every kernel compile, pulls in the external modules effortlessly (bttv2, nvidia, alsa)
The RandR extension, which just made it into XFRee86 CVS will allow for just that. However applications must be modified slightly to take advantage of the Resize and Rotate extension. Actually they only need to respond to the X event that notifies the app that the root window has changed size (and possibly color depth). This shouldn't be too hard for well written apps. And chances are good that once support for this makes it into populair toolkits, applications written against them will get support for free (think RENDER). Don't expect widespread support untill XFree 4.1+ makes it into distro's though...
I own(ed) a G400 dual head TV Out capable card but recently switched to a Geforce2 MX400. The quality of the MX400 is much better than the G400 (not surprising since the G400 is almost 2 years old). The MX400 also has the added benefit of hardware OpenGL and RENDER support on the TV-out as opposed to the G400.
Konqueror TV. Finally browsing on a TV becomes viable. At 800x600 text is very reasonable and the screen is big enough for most webpages.
Quake III. This really rocks!! If Loki keeps pumping out games there won't be need for a separate console, at least not in my house.
You don't need a PS2 in order to do that. Get a Geforce2 MX400 and
the latest NVidia drivers. Hook the s-video port up to your TV (PAL or NTSC)
and enjoy! I have successfully played Quake 3 on my TV, excellent picture
quality and very fast too!
Here's proof. And here is Konqueror displaying/. This card will even display the console at bootup if you only have your
TV hooked up, unlike the Matrox cards.
Now that my favorite project, ALSA, is also moving to Sourceforge I'm more concerned about it becoming a single point of failure. Just think about it. If Sourceforge goes down for an extended period of time imagine the chaos, not to mention the loss in 'productivity' in the OSS community. I will probably be one of the last developers moving to it...on the other hand, they provide an excellent service, one that would cost an OSS developer cash otherwise.
Anyway, my only real gripe with Sourceforge is their usage of Geocrawler for mailing list archiving. Damn, that's one crappy interface!!:( Sorry for ranting...
I already have Myth II, but this would really make my day! Dune II was the first and only game I got hooked on for real. I remember playing it 3 days straight!! Yep, the Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos house campaigns in that order. Of course I was ill for the next 2 days... must had something to do with monitor radiation.. dunno..
My Linux desktop has never been this usable, and it keeps improving by the day/week/month. The good folks at KDE have been doing wonderful work! And the XFree86 gurus have really picked up the ball the last couple of months. From my own experience I;d say we're only starting to compete. The fight is not over... and I'm confident Linux will be one of the last ones standing at the end of the battle.
Concluding that the Linux desktop is a failure simply because a company that writes a silly Linux/Unix file manager for it fails is really, really stupid! Eazel's business plan was flawed beyond believe! They counted on revenues from "services". However, the services they provided were already commodity items (supposed proper package management, free internet disk space).
And then there's this quote:
Such is the way of all movements: either the professionals take over and the movement evolves, or the movement recedes.
No shit! So the Linux desktop attracts some cheap money, but when that money fails, so does the Linux desktop? Give me a f*cking break:)
The only thing that's dead or dying are companies with flawed business plans. And for the record, I don't hope the author of this articles tries to make a living by writing, he'll starve:)
I did however like the gadgets, but taking a look at the last week, with all the Linux related companies going to the dogs, and 4 distributions going "kaput" within less than 6 months time, I would be looking at other alternatives to Linux, especially if my business were going to depend on them.
What do failing distributions and/or companies have to do with the viability of Linux as an embedded OS?
Here's something new: "The world doesn't revolve around you!"
Just because YOU don't have a need for games on Linux it doesn't mean no one else has either. I personally love having Q3, Myth2, Shogo and UT for my Linux box, as a means of entertainment. Eagerly awaiting my Tribes2/SMAC bundle from Tuxgames.
If you don't have a need for Linux games, don't buy them, simple no?
I think it sends a special kind of signal hidden in the overscan area which then activates a special Macrovision chip in your VCR. These chips are a requirement so every VCR has one. There are electronic workarounds (example) however. Of course you can do like me and get a cheap DXR3 / H+ decoder card and installed the hacked Linux drivers which have Macrovision disabled (*).
-adnans
(*) Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement for DVD piracy. I use the DXR3/ H+ without Macrovision for archival purposes only.... >:-)
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Too bad linux is still stuck with single threaded X.
.
:)
:)
That's not the problem, your videocard is not threaded so a multithreaded X server will not buy you any significant speed increase.
A good multi-threading windowing toolkit is whats needed. Qt 3.0 is supposed to fill this gap, However I've had very good results with GTK+ too. I ported some code over from BeOS and it runs beautifully under Linux/X. Unfortunately GTK+ uses one big fat global app lock for GUI threading but with careful design you can get impressive results
And I don't think musicians will be happy with the idea that they need to install a patch in order to get low latencies. It should be default so that developers can just assume everyone will have it.
That is coming in the 2.5.x kernel series. But don't let that stop you to start experimenting
-adnans (who just recorded another 2 hours of video + audio under linux, without dropping a single frame
Get a soundcard that does hardware mixing. The Trident 4DWave NX series of cards do this quite nice and cheap. You get 32 audio devices to play with (i.e. you can open up to 32 audio apps simultaneously). Of course you can run esound as one of the 32 to increase this in software. The Live! cards supposedly do this too. All this with ALSA drivers of course.
-adnans
What are you smoking? Only reality.sgi.com is going away.
Just install the Pine.rc file that's shipped with mutt (at least in Debian). This will give you Pine key bindings in mutt, which should ease the switchover. But in the end switching from pine to mutt is like switching from joe to vi(m); painful, but well worth it! And just like joe ---> vi(m), you will never look back..... trust me :)
-adnans
VNC requires relatively speedy machines on both sides of the connection. Have you tried using VNC on a 486 class box? It's close to unusable and you better have a 100Mbit network between endpoints since it's a huuuge bandwidth hogger (hence the increased CPU requirements). X, on the other hand is quite snappy on 10Mbit + 486 hardware.
If you need to keep "sessions" alive you can try something like the xmove program, available from the Debian repository at least. It lets you migrate X clients from server to server, with some restrictions.
-adnans
Never buy stock based on your religious believes.
-adnans
I don't think so. The length of a jiffy (the timer interrupt) in Linux is 10ms. However, the quantum is 50ms. Most processes are not preempted within the 10ms jiffy.
If there is no other process to run (with a higher priority) of course the kernel will let the current process run its full timeslice. However, any process that needs attention and has a higher priority than the current running one preempts it and gets to run (within 10-20ms). Scheduling quantum doesn't matter at this point. If you push up the HZ counter to 1000 (1ms timer interrupt) you can pretty much guarantee a soft-realtime process that needs attention every few ms to run correctly , assuming you make sure it has a higher priority than normal. You will notice that properly written apps do exactly this.
That's my point. QNX and BeOS both run in userspace, just like X, and run a good deal faster.
"run a good deal faster", and what runs a good deal faster? The BeOS UI is certainly much slower on my box these days, but I suspect that has something to do with the AMD-challenged optimizations in the Be kernel. Haven't tried QNX recently. Point is that with properly prioritized processes you can make Linux just as responsive as for example BeOS. The advantage BeOS has is that it does this automatically for you, it's a single user OS, with no security. (I'll take multi-user Linux over it anyday though!)
t they are not transparent to applications
What do you mean, not transparent?
Umm, the BeOS messaging system can shunt 90,000 messages per second around the system (on a PII 300). Nothing on UNIX is anywhere *near* that number. Even QNX can't do above 40K.
Where are you getting these numbers from? And what constitutes sending a message?
-adnans
1) X runs on UNIX. Unicies are almost always server-oriented systems, and tend to have very short thread quantums. For example, the quantum on Linux 2.4 is 50ms (down from 100+ on 2.2).
/usr/src/linux/include/asm/param.h and setting the HZ define at 1000. Yes, the timeslice is mostly dependant on this single define. You will notice that for x86 it is at 100 by default. To get the timeslice you simple divide 1000ms by the HZ value. So for 2.2 and 2.4 you get 1000 / 100 = 10ms. I have a standard patch that's applied to all fresh kernels that put HZ at 1000 on my boxes. It's kind of ludicrous to have 10ms timeslices on a 1.4GHZ Thunderbird *g*. Oh, and if you need smaller timeslices, witout having to modify your kernel lookup the manpage of sched_setscheduler
...when GUIs like Photon (on QNX) implement all the features of X plus more in less than a meg, one has to fault elements of X's design
This is simply not true. Both your 2.2 and 2.4 numbers are dead wrong. Linux on x86 has always had a timeslice of 10ms. It has always been 1ms on 64-bit Linux platforms (Alpha). BTW, you can modify the timeslice very easily by editting
show much improved access times, even when the GUI is in a userspace server (as in BeOS or QNX)
X is in userpace.
2) It's badly designed
The design is about 20 years old, and still going strong. The developer didn't have the hindsight of what hardware would be developed over the years. Luckily enough they tought of X extensions. Oh wait, X extensions are bad right? Don't tell that to the Xv and RENDER extension that are taking full advantage of my cutting edge NVidia GPU!!
X uses the much more general (and much slower) UNIX domain sockets
Local sockets are really fast (and very low latency). For large transfers X uses shared memory anyway. And thanks to XAA the amount of communication is kept to a minimum.
Try TinyX. Your arguments, while true to some extend, are really not convincing enough to call X "badly designed". You are using outdated facts to draw conclusions. X is here to stay. Whining about it is not going to make it less useful. You could spend your time better by helping out Be and BeOS, be-fan. A 3ms timeslice doesn't do me any good if it doesn't boot on my box. Too bad the juicy parts are closed source no??!
Oh, I finally decided to put my BeBox in long term storage. Perhaps in 20 years it will fetch a nice price. I'm betting it'll bootup witout too much trouble, assuming I can still find a CMOS battery that fits.
-adnans
Of course you completely ignored the various compression techniques in use today. Also you are assuming that 48KHZ is a 1 bit mono signal. However soundcards typically have a datarate of 48KHZ * 16-bits * 2 channels = 1.5Mbit / second . That comes pretty close to basic DSL. Taking into account modulation / error correction, that should still leave a sizable amount of IP bandwidth available...
-adnans
/usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h
:)
Simply put an extra 0 on the HZ #define line. Make sure you recompile everything (including your modules). BTW, HZ is already at 1024 for Alpha architectures. Looking forward to that becoming standard on x86 as well with 1GHZ+ boxes becoming standard and all
As for the "SilkenMouse" option, it is on by default on XFree 4.x but you can enabled it with Option "SilkenMouse" "1" in your device section.
-adnans
X11 lacks such basic features as totally integrated anti-aliasing (extensions, in general, suck)
/me looks at his dust-covered BeBox.
Please. Extensions rule! They allow you to incorporate new features while keeping backward compatibilty. Who would have though that X would be getting a Plan9 based 2D rendering system with hardware accelleration, alpha blending, AA text, and whatnot!! Extensions made this possible.
X11 lacks a standard toolkit
Blimy, that's a feature!!!
X11 lacks high performance
Mwuhahaha, that's bullshit! My NVIDIA card is as fast as in Windows (2D and 3D), muuuuuuuch faster than in BeOS (since BeOS lacks MTRR support for AMD CPU's/chipsets and is generally AMD optimization challenged). I don't know if I should take anything you say serious these days. I have the feeling it's simply a side effect of your bitterness and/or frustration with the Be situation, seeing you call yourself "be-fan". I feel for you.
low memory use, and low latency.
Dude, my X server eats a whopping 5MB at startup. Pixmap caching and other stuff lets the process grow, but hey that's what bloody RAM is for no? As to "low latency"? Huh? This isn't audio we're talking about. If you mean "responsiveness". If X is not responsive enough for you recompile your Linux kernel with HZ = 1000 (which gives you 1ms timeslices instead of 10). I can only speak from my own experience and that is that X is smooth as Silk these days. (BTW, Make sure your X server has "SilkenMouse" enabled)
I just recorded a full 2 hour of the NBA playoffs from my BT848 card, all while happily browsing and compiling away. Not a *single* audio/video frame was dropped. Converting the Nuppelvideo file to DIVX as I type this. Gotta love it! I smell a MediaOS in the making *grin*
-adnans
manufacturers should and the hardware will probably have a longer usefull life. (long term support)
Heh, this is exactly the reason why I bought an NVidia card, believe it or not. I waited almost 2 years for Matrox to come out with quality 3D drivers for their hardware, but that still has not happened. The lasest mga DRI drivers are still flaky for me. However, I've had nothing but rock solid performance from the (closed source) NVidia drivers. The kernel parts of the NVidia driver are open source so upgrading to a new kernel requires a simple recompile of the NVdriver sources (running CVS 2.4.5-xfs right now, cutting edge). And if NVidia sucks, so does Matrox, since parts of their drivers are closed closed source too. IMHO right now NVidia provides the best video card support for Linux on x86 hardware and by hiring Mark Vojkovich and paying him to work on XFree it proves (to me) they are quite serious about Linux/XFree86.
My platform of choice is Linux/x86 (AMD), at least for the next year, and that's exactly the useful lifetime of my video hardware.
BTW, upgrading kernels is not a hassle at all. I have a nice script that is run after every kernel compile, pulls in the external modules effortlessly (bttv2, nvidia, alsa)
-adnans
The RandR extension, which just made it into XFRee86 CVS will allow for just that. However applications must be modified slightly to take advantage of the Resize and Rotate extension. Actually they only need to respond to the X event that notifies the app that the root window has changed size (and possibly color depth). This shouldn't be too hard for well written apps. And chances are good that once support for this makes it into populair toolkits, applications written against them will get support for free (think RENDER). Don't expect widespread support untill XFree 4.1+ makes it into distro's though...
-adnans
- Konqueror TV. Finally browsing on a TV becomes viable. At 800x600 text is very reasonable and the screen is big enough for most webpages.
- Quake III. This really rocks!! If Loki keeps pumping out games there won't be need for a separate console, at least not in my house.
-adnansYou don't need a PS2 in order to do that. Get a Geforce2 MX400 and the latest NVidia drivers. Hook the s-video port up to your TV (PAL or NTSC) and enjoy! I have successfully played Quake 3 on my TV, excellent picture quality and very fast too! Here's proof. And here is Konqueror displaying /. This card will even display the console at bootup if you only have your
TV hooked up, unlike the Matrox cards.
-adnans
Now that my favorite project, ALSA, is also moving to Sourceforge I'm more concerned about it becoming a single point of failure. Just think about it. If Sourceforge goes down for an extended period of time imagine the chaos, not to mention the loss in 'productivity' in the OSS community. I will probably be one of the last developers moving to it...on the other hand, they provide an excellent service, one that would cost an OSS developer cash otherwise. Anyway, my only real gripe with Sourceforge is their usage of Geocrawler for mailing list archiving. Damn, that's one crappy interface!! :( Sorry for ranting...
-adnans
I already have Myth II, but this would really make my day! Dune II was the first and only game I got hooked on for real. I remember playing it 3 days straight!! Yep, the Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos house campaigns in that order. Of course I was ill for the next 2 days... must had something to do with monitor radiation.. dunno..
... please?!
Bring it on!!
-adnans
My Linux desktop has never been this usable, and it keeps improving by the day/week/month. The good folks at KDE have been doing wonderful work! And the XFree86 gurus have really picked up the ball the last couple of months. From my own experience I;d say we're only starting to compete. The fight is not over... and I'm confident Linux will be one of the last ones standing at the end of the battle.
:)
:)
Concluding that the Linux desktop is a failure simply because a company that writes a silly Linux/Unix file manager for it fails is really, really stupid! Eazel's business plan was flawed beyond believe! They counted on revenues from "services". However, the services they provided were already commodity items (supposed proper package management, free internet disk space).
And then there's this quote:
Such is the way of all movements: either the professionals take over and the movement evolves, or the movement recedes.
No shit! So the Linux desktop attracts some cheap money, but when that money fails, so does the Linux desktop? Give me a f*cking break
The only thing that's dead or dying are companies with flawed business plans. And for the record, I don't hope the author of this articles tries to make a living by writing, he'll starve
-adnans
turning away from the likes of SGI and Microsoft
I think SGI is one of the reasons why Linux is becoming populair in the High end graphics market. Isn't Alias|Wavefront owned wholy by SGI?
-adnans
Did you clock this operation? I read somewhere that compiling GNOME current takes a full day on a beefy box (800MHZ+).
-adnans
Looking at your towering spelling intellect, not to mention your COWardness, I'm not too worried :-)
-adnans
I did however like the gadgets, but taking a look at the last week, with all the Linux related companies going to the dogs, and 4 distributions going "kaput" within less than 6 months time, I would be looking at other alternatives to Linux, especially if my business were going to depend on them.
What do failing distributions and/or companies have to do with the viability of Linux as an embedded OS?
-adnans
Here's something new: "The world doesn't revolve around you!"
Just because YOU don't have a need for games on Linux it doesn't mean no one else has either. I personally love having Q3, Myth2, Shogo and UT for my Linux box, as a means of entertainment. Eagerly awaiting my Tribes2/SMAC bundle from Tuxgames.
If you don't have a need for Linux games, don't buy them, simple no?
-adnans
I think it sends a special kind of signal hidden in the overscan area which then activates a special Macrovision chip in your VCR. These chips are a requirement so every VCR has one. There are electronic workarounds (example) however. Of course you can do like me and get a cheap DXR3 / H+ decoder card and installed the hacked Linux drivers which have Macrovision disabled (*).
-adnans
(*) Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement for DVD piracy. I use the DXR3/ H+ without Macrovision for archival purposes only.... >:-)
- Linux boot / root floppy images (via ftpmail/uucp)
- SLS 1.0 (kernel 0.99.x days)
- Yggdrassil (first usable distro IMHO)
- Slackware 3.0 (ELF!!)
- Slackware 3.1
- Redhat 4.2
- Redhat 5.1
- Redhat 6.0 (They finally convinced me to look for something better)
- Debian 2.2
- Debian Unstable...The Holy Grail
-adnans