Debian Hurd is much easier to install than any version of windows. Try it yourself. First format your hard drive and install Hurd. Next format your hard drive again and install windows. I think you will find that you have a much easier time with Hurd. Sad isn't it.
I started this thread anonymously. There is nothing wrong with the OSS/FS movement except that jerks like you bash it for some unknown reason. I have used Debian Linux since 1993. At the time, MS Windows 3.0 was such a total piece of crap at multitasking that I had to use DesqView to run my BBS and still be able to use my PC for ME.
Needless to say when Linus dropped the bomb, I slurped up a 0.97 Debian system via ftp and started toying with it. Compared to MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, Debian Linux and XFree86 was such a stupendous improvement that any power user literally drooled over its potential...
C.A. 2002 now a new bunch of jerk-wads like yourself with more money than sense wants to support these criminals? Microsoft makes the U.S. Government ( the most notoriously corrupt government in the history of the world ) look like a bunch of wanna-bees. Don't get me wrong here, I like my corrupt government, but I don't want Microsoft to _become_ the government, which it is working very dilligently and insidiously to do.
Windows looks like a PIECE OF CRAP compared to Debian with Enlightenment 16, "Hand of God" theme, and Gnome with "Graphite" theme. The only time I ever boot to Windows is to play Serious Sam. So don't call me "kiddie" and go pay your tribute to Bill "Mammon" Gates, you foolish spendthrift and enemy of freedom. You are buying your way into slavery, fool.
I agree. Debian is not for the technologically challenged, unless you can get somebody to pre-install it for you. I have used it, well always I guess. Back in '93 when I started using Linux I think there was Debian, Slackware, and Yggdrasil. I picked Debian since I could get it by ftp and have used it ever since. It still stumps me occasionally but there is plenty of documentation and helpers out there. It is an excellent hobbyist system for sure.
Lindows is targeted at, well, I'm not exactly sure, but I read I think last week that Wally-Mart is selling cheap PC's with Lindows. Heck if you're gonna wipe the drive and install Debian or Mandrake anyways might as well save a few bucks.
No kidding? I'm going to Debconf! Cool. Maybe I can suck up some free Lindows cdroms and give them away at work. Mini-frisbees! Unfortunately cdroms make poor coffee coasters.
I think promoting Lindows at Debconf is somewhat more severe than "Preaching to the choir." People who run Debian (like me) don't need a simplified version of Linux. Shit I still use dselect.
They go and pick out some kids game at Wally-Mart and you bring it home and try and install it only to discover dum-de-dum-dum it won't work with your Windows XP because of some stupid sound card conflict or buggy memory driver. Yet they still sell this stuff.
I have a whole stack of games that don't work anymore with Windows. More and more I can play in Linux or Wine or FreeDOS, but these reverse engineering schemes are definately a good thing.
Just try and get Wing Commander Privateer to work on your new XP box. I bet the sound won't work.
Heh I experimented with this using "bc"
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1
A little algebraic maniputation and I put the phi equation into Newton's for for an iterative solution, and it converges.
Isn't "phi" one of those pseudoscience constants?
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1
Like I read Velikovsky some years back and he seemed to be claiming that it was some fundamental constant of his vibratory model of the universe and it predicted the respective orbits of the planets around the sun. I didn't know that
phi = sqrt( pi() * 1.2 )
That is a pretty interesting property, namely that:
Yeah, but a lot of my favorite (Windows) games have been abandoned and don't work on faster computers or have some other problem. A case in point is Privateer2, just try playing it on a 450MHz machine and you will find it is impossibly fast. Barring some hack like "MoSlo" or such it is effectively dead as a Windows game. However, if I could get the damn thing to run in Linux it might be sluggish enough to be playable.
There are a lot of really cool old games out there that we love to play but they just aren't supported anymore. The only real hope is either a complete rewrite for Linux / X11 or else run it using Wine or DosEmu. Since Wine abstracts your sound hardware, it appears to be an old Soundblaster which works with most anything.
I hope Microsoft never gets ahold of one of those quantum computers... once Windows X$ is installed they will be slower than a Commodore 64, and thats before you get to run your application software. I think they should re-write Windows XP entirely in hand optimized assembler. They have who knows how many billion dollars, I want to see some friggin real performance.
How come a 486 with Windows95 feels faster than a Pentium III with Windows 2000? It sure as shit doesn't do anything different now than it did then. They must have re-written the whole OS as a VBA module for Excel or something to make it such a pig.
Maybe the Crusoe can code morph Visual Basic code and run it natively? Perhaps the fabled hardware Java processor of yore? Whatever it does Linus works there so it must be pretty damn cool.
It can't be cheap to go toe-to-toe with Intel and AMD, not to mention all the other "embedded" cpu guys. Hope they can hang in there long enough to grab up some real market share. From what I have read about the Crusoes (disregarding FUD) anybody who has one seem to think its great.
Ok, what if the "code morph layer" were somehow modified instead to execute a more efficient type of code? I took some comp eng classes back in college, so I know that there is a myriad of ways that one can encode a machine language instruction. For instance, a Crusoe could probably be made to run trinary code or something equally weird. I find it tough to believe that X86 instructions are the best there is... like what about emulating PA-RISC or Itanium or Sparc or Mips, or who knows what?
I hope Linus is going to drop some bomb with 256bit Midori Linux or something wild that is going to do to the CPU world what 3Dfx did to the video card world! Go Linus! Go Transmeta! Yaay!
Heh I have a couple old SA110 Netwinders and I just wish they were the new Crusoe models. They are damn fast for the little toy servers that they are but a 600MHz Crusoe with FPU built in would totally blow them away.
The low power deal is very important to me. For instance I run the `Winder server headless 24/7 as my firewall/router/webserver and it doesn't cost jack shit. Try that with a dual cpu pentium-iii and see how fast your electric bill shoots up! A server is pretty worthless if you can't afford to run the thing all the time.
I have been fooling aroung with it for a couple years now. I have my little 1Gb Hurd partition which I occasionally boot up and experiment with. I must say that I have learned a lot by trying to compile programs under Hurd, and I actually succeded in patching Pth (Gnu Portable Threads) to get it to compile. It provides a rudimentary pthread compatibility lib while the main pthreads are still in development for inclusion into the c-library.
Even more fun is rolling your own OSKit-Mach microkernel and then running it on a serial debugger. It is fascinating to be able to single step through a running kernel, set breakpoints, view the source as it executes, look at the CPU registers, etc. I wholeheartedly recommend it to all the compsci students and future kernel hackers out there.
Nope. X11 works with my Nvidia GeForce2MX, but OpenGL is still software Mesa only as there is no DRI support for GnuMach and no third party Xservers AFAIK.
But X does work, so it isn't just text. It has X11R6 v 4.2 I believe.
Hehe ever try to use "real UNIX" after you are accustomed to GNU/Linux? You'll find that most of the useful switches to the commands are either absent or do something else. It's like going from a luxury car to a junkyard truck. I would much rather have "Linux-like" commands than "UNIX-like" commands.
I have _two_ of these Netwinder DM machines. One acts as my router/firewall/webserver for my home LAN, the other is for playing with. I have replaced the original Netwinder RedHat Linux with Debian 3.0 for Arm and it works extremely well.
Wonder if I could add a RiscOS partition and run it on one of these? They have 275MHz StrongARM cpu's. Nah, probably not. The bootloader is made for linux, now that I think about it. Unless RiscOS has a bootable kernel I doubt it would work. It might run on a Zaurus/iPaq/Jornada though...
You can get these things on Ebay fairly inexpensively. If you get a C180 or better it should have the 64-bit PA-8200 processor. The Linux port is progressing nicely. I'd stay away from the 32 bit machines as they are a bit on the sluggish side. I just recently picked up a C200 for about $200 and it makes a nifty toy to play with.
Sorry dude. I didn't mean to come across so heavy like that. RedHat (and all other) linux distros are all very worthy of praise and respect. Its a team effort and RedHat has given back a lot more than most others.
If you'd looked at the package listing you would have seen a whole bunch of 2.4 kernels all ready for you to install. Most of us compile our own kernels from source anyways to optimize it for our own particular hardware sets.
I was running XFree 4.0 on Potato with a 2.4 kernel a long time ago. Just compile the stuff and stick it in/usr/local. You don't have to use just Debian packages. Its compiler setup is great and it is trivial to compile most tarballs.
Right now, the non-x86 developers are furiously trying to compile/patch a few pesky yet important packages on whatever platform they work with. I have been using 3.0 "testing" for over six months, and have Linux and Hurd working on X86, and Linux on a HP 9000 715/80 PA-RISC box, and a StrongARM SA110 Netwinder machine. In each case it works great! "Unstable" is a misnomer in that the OS itself is not unstable (doesn't crash), what is unstable is that the packages are constantly being updated so an apt-get upgrade might list 1000 new updated packages every week! With something like 9500 packages in Woody there is a lot going on all the time.
Debian is very "UNIX'y" in that IMHO it more resembles real System-V in it's look and feel, boot behavior, and compiler functionality. I really like it myself. I have messed with RedHat a bit and really don't care for it at all compared to Debian. I think Mandrake is more Debian-Like, and may be superior in its ease-of-setup for a total newbie, but once you start running on weird non x86 platforms Debian really shines because for all intents and purposes it appears to be and acts just like the x86 versions.
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Debian Hurd is much easier to install than any version of windows. Try it yourself. First format your hard drive and install Hurd. Next format your hard drive again and install windows. I think you will find that you have a much easier time with Hurd. Sad isn't it.
MS can pay me *one hell of a lot of money*
Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
Arrgh... where's the Tequila!
Needless to say when Linus dropped the bomb, I slurped up a 0.97 Debian system via ftp and started toying with it. Compared to MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, Debian Linux and XFree86 was such a stupendous improvement that any power user literally drooled over its potential...
C.A. 2002 now a new bunch of jerk-wads like yourself with more money than sense wants to support these criminals? Microsoft makes the U.S. Government ( the most notoriously corrupt government in the history of the world ) look like a bunch of wanna-bees. Don't get me wrong here, I like my corrupt government, but I don't want Microsoft to _become_ the government, which it is working very dilligently and insidiously to do.
Windows looks like a PIECE OF CRAP compared to Debian with Enlightenment 16, "Hand of God" theme, and Gnome with "Graphite" theme. The only time I ever boot to Windows is to play Serious Sam . So don't call me "kiddie" and go pay your tribute to Bill "Mammon" Gates, you foolish spendthrift and enemy of freedom. You are buying your way into slavery, fool.
Wheres the friggin' Tequila... arghhh!
I agree. Debian is not for the technologically challenged, unless you can get somebody to pre-install it for you. I have used it, well always I guess. Back in '93 when I started using Linux I think there was Debian, Slackware, and Yggdrasil. I picked Debian since I could get it by ftp and have used it ever since. It still stumps me occasionally but there is plenty of documentation and helpers out there. It is an excellent hobbyist system for sure.
Lindows is targeted at, well, I'm not exactly sure, but I read I think last week that Wally-Mart is selling cheap PC's with Lindows. Heck if you're gonna wipe the drive and install Debian or Mandrake anyways might as well save a few bucks.
No kidding? I'm going to Debconf! Cool. Maybe I can suck up some free Lindows cdroms and give them away at work. Mini-frisbees! Unfortunately cdroms make poor coffee coasters.
I think promoting Lindows at Debconf is somewhat more severe than "Preaching to the choir." People who run Debian (like me) don't need a simplified version of Linux. Shit I still use dselect.
They go and pick out some kids game at Wally-Mart and you bring it home and try and install it only to discover dum-de-dum-dum it won't work with your Windows XP because of some stupid sound card conflict or buggy memory driver. Yet they still sell this stuff.
I have a whole stack of games that don't work anymore with Windows. More and more I can play in Linux or Wine or FreeDOS, but these reverse engineering schemes are definately a good thing.
Just try and get Wing Commander Privateer to work on your new XP box. I bet the sound won't work.
A little algebraic maniputation and I put
3 09179805 762862135448622705\9 113748475408807538689 175212663386222353\0 865959395829056383226 613199282902678806\1 043216269548626296313 614438149758701220\6 486444924104432077134 494704956584678850\5 884607499887124007652 170575179788341662\7 621771117778053153171 410117046665991466\
p i = 4 * a(1)9 7169399375 105820974944592307\1 706798214808651328230 664709384460955058\1 027019385211055596446 229489549303819644\3 786783165271201909145 648566923460348610\7 372458700660631558817 488152092096282925\5 305488204665213841469 519415116094330572\2 611793105118548074462 379962749567351885\
a lpha = pi / ( phi^2)6 926562499505529 057521467556375365\9 198186568648125360010 705945389334340348\7 606295498586362400290 970525243087795168\9 677253907789930645432 415922185240842172\0 971071808916879413135 748981466258466101\0 859726696097114760127 693023059888230457\5 977539807233206560329 157466678939790854\
the phi equation into Newton's for for an
iterative solution, and it converges.
Try this:
scale=500
define p(x) { return 1 + 1/x; }
phi = 2
while ( phi != p(phi) ) { phi = p(phi); }
phi
1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720
2604628189024497072072041893
6931793180060766726354433389
7520876689250171169620703222
3408058879544547492461856953
9874339442212544877066478091
5624940758906970400028121042
97987317613560067087480710
pi
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841
8164062862089986280348253421
2231725359408128481117450284
2881097566593344612847564823
4543266482133936072602491412
4091715364367892590360011330
7036575959195309218611738193
75272489122793818301194912
alpha
1.19998161486432666111577775331680
6536691197193953899810303302
8805912815421826166704685114
4578373489622855204137590571
5378938824383523670155495662
7508290914857218481375692930
8792080349171710232554795004
34041365040685351056856224
Neato!
Like I read Velikovsky some years back and he seemed to be claiming that it was some fundamental constant of his vibratory model of the universe and it predicted the respective orbits of the planets around the sun. I didn't know that
phi = sqrt( pi() * 1.2 )
That is a pretty interesting property, namely
that:
( n / phi ) + ( n / (phi^2) ) = n
Weird...
Yeah, but a lot of my favorite (Windows) games have been abandoned and don't work on faster computers or have some other problem. A case in point is Privateer2, just try playing it on a 450MHz machine and you will find it is impossibly fast. Barring some hack like "MoSlo" or such it is effectively dead as a Windows game. However, if I could get the damn thing to run in Linux it might be sluggish enough to be playable.
There are a lot of really cool old games out there that we love to play but they just aren't supported anymore. The only real hope is either a complete rewrite for Linux / X11 or else run it using Wine or DosEmu. Since Wine abstracts your sound hardware, it appears to be an old Soundblaster which works with most anything.
I hope Microsoft never gets ahold of one of those quantum computers... once Windows X$ is installed they will be slower than a Commodore 64, and thats before you get to run your application software. I think they should re-write Windows XP entirely in hand optimized assembler. They have who knows how many billion dollars, I want to see some friggin real performance.
How come a 486 with Windows95 feels faster than a Pentium III with Windows 2000? It sure as shit doesn't do anything different now than it did then. They must have re-written the whole OS as a VBA module for Excel or something to make it such a pig.
Maybe the Crusoe can code morph Visual Basic code and run it natively? Perhaps the fabled hardware Java processor of yore? Whatever it does Linus works there so it must be pretty damn cool.
It can't be cheap to go toe-to-toe with Intel and AMD, not to mention all the other "embedded" cpu guys. Hope they can hang in there long enough to grab up some real market share. From what I have read about the Crusoes (disregarding FUD) anybody who has one seem to think its great.
Ok, what if the "code morph layer" were somehow modified instead to execute a more efficient type of code? I took some comp eng classes back in college, so I know that there is a myriad of ways that one can encode a machine language instruction. For instance, a Crusoe could probably be made to run trinary code or something equally weird. I find it tough to believe that X86 instructions are the best there is... like what about emulating PA-RISC or Itanium or Sparc or Mips, or who knows what?
I hope Linus is going to drop some bomb with 256bit Midori Linux or something wild that is going to do to the CPU world what 3Dfx did to the video card world! Go Linus! Go Transmeta! Yaay!
Heh I have a couple old SA110 Netwinders and I just wish they were the new Crusoe models. They are damn fast for the little toy servers that they are but a 600MHz Crusoe with FPU built in would totally blow them away.
The low power deal is very important to me. For instance I run the `Winder server headless 24/7 as my firewall/router/webserver and it doesn't cost jack shit. Try that with a dual cpu pentium-iii and see how fast your electric bill shoots up! A server is pretty worthless if you can't afford to run the thing all the time.
I have been fooling aroung with it for a couple years now. I have my little 1Gb Hurd partition which I occasionally boot up and experiment with. I must say that I have learned a lot by trying to compile programs under Hurd, and I actually succeded in patching Pth (Gnu Portable Threads) to get it to compile. It provides a rudimentary pthread compatibility lib while the main pthreads are still in development for inclusion into the c-library.
Even more fun is rolling your own OSKit-Mach microkernel and then running it on a serial debugger. It is fascinating to be able to single step through a running kernel, set breakpoints, view the source as it executes, look at the CPU registers, etc. I wholeheartedly recommend it to all the compsci students and future kernel hackers out there.
Nope. X11 works with my Nvidia GeForce2MX, but OpenGL is still software Mesa only as there is no DRI support for GnuMach and no third party Xservers AFAIK.
But X does work, so it isn't just text. It has X11R6 v 4.2 I believe.
Hehe ever try to use "real UNIX" after you are accustomed to GNU/Linux? You'll find that most of the useful switches to the commands are either absent or do something else. It's like going from a luxury car to a junkyard truck. I would much rather have "Linux-like" commands than "UNIX-like" commands.
Wonder if I could add a RiscOS partition and run it on one of these? They have 275MHz StrongARM cpu's. Nah, probably not. The bootloader is made for linux, now that I think about it. Unless RiscOS has a bootable kernel I doubt it would work. It might run on a Zaurus/iPaq/Jornada though...
You can get these things on Ebay fairly inexpensively. If you get a C180 or better it should have the 64-bit PA-8200 processor. The Linux port is progressing nicely. I'd stay away from the 32 bit machines as they are a bit on the sluggish side. I just recently picked up a C200 for about $200 and it makes a nifty toy to play with.
Sorry dude. I didn't mean to come across so heavy like that. RedHat (and all other) linux distros are all very worthy of praise and respect. Its a team effort and RedHat has given back a lot more than most others.
(Attempts to remove foot from mouth)
Er... dang it this here Wheatonix can't run CADAM compiled for AIX. Heck with it. It sucks.
Was that "Woody" is such a major improvement over "Potato" that they felt it was justifiable to go to the next major version number; i.e. 3.0.
There are also options for ReiserFS and XFS but I haven't toyes with those. Ext3 is easy and probably safer.
If you can't recompile a kernel maybe you better stick to RedHat.
If you'd looked at the package listing you would have seen a whole bunch of 2.4 kernels all ready for you to install. Most of us compile our own kernels from source anyways to optimize it for our own particular hardware sets.
I was running XFree 4.0 on Potato with a 2.4 kernel a long time ago. Just compile the stuff and stick it in /usr/local. You don't have to use just Debian packages. Its compiler setup is great and it is trivial to compile most tarballs.
Right now, the non-x86 developers are furiously trying to compile/patch a few pesky yet important packages on whatever platform they work with. I have been using 3.0 "testing" for over six months, and have Linux and Hurd working on X86, and Linux on a HP 9000 715/80 PA-RISC box, and a StrongARM SA110 Netwinder machine. In each case it works great! "Unstable" is a misnomer in that the OS itself is not unstable (doesn't crash), what is unstable is that the packages are constantly being updated so an apt-get upgrade might list 1000 new updated packages every week! With something like 9500 packages in Woody there is a lot going on all the time.
Debian is very "UNIX'y" in that IMHO it more resembles real System-V in it's look and feel, boot behavior, and compiler functionality. I really like it myself. I have messed with RedHat a bit and really don't care for it at all compared to Debian. I think Mandrake is more Debian-Like, and may be superior in its ease-of-setup for a total newbie, but once you start running on weird non x86 platforms Debian really shines because for all intents and purposes it appears to be and acts just like the x86 versions.