Much like how recording companies are making copy protected CDs, have a law requiring consumer CD recorders to encode SCMS copy restriction data, and also change a royalty on blank CD-Rs?:)
I've had a TiBook since July. It's never crashed. The only reboots have been due to system updates, and once or twice because its process table was full due to a wacky script I run at login to my terminal that doesn't properly cleanup at logout.
I've had an iBook since last May.. again, same story. I have three cousins with iBooks running OSX 10.2, I've seen one of them kernel panic and crash.. but probably because the guy had like 50k free on his HDD.
I also have a desktop G4 which I have kernel paniced about 4 times, but 3 times were because I was loading kernel modules with a force option, since they didn't want to load manually, and the other time was a flakey USB cable continually registering/unregistering devices.
MacOSX is nothing like MacOS 9 in terms of stability. I push my machines. Running OS9, there would be daily crashes a-plenty. I initially got into Linux because I wanted to setup a router box to save on redialling each time my mac crashed (local phone calls are 20c each in Australia).
"My name is Alex, and I'm a Solaris/BSD/Linux/Windows System Administrator"
Users care about a pretty boot manager. It makes them less fearful of the computer. It makes them want to use it. This makes it a good desktop OS.
Of course, I happily use LILO with just a one line text messsage.. but then I do know what I'm doing.
Remember the topic of this post is about making Debian a desktop OS. This means pretty stuff that makes the machine usable by joe user. We are not talking about Debian being a wonderful server platform in this topic (tho it is:)
It's not FUD.. I spent fricken 3 hours and about 40 reboots trying to work out why the background image wasn't coming up.. then I do some web searching about the history of the GRUB patch to do this and find out that it doesn't work because the guy who maintains Debian's GRUB packages has a conflict of interest with the GNU GRUB release with regards to importing downstream 3rd party patches.
Last time I looked at LILO, it couldn't do anything other than 320x200 images.. but I would be interested to see it to 640x480 (tho GRUB's ability to hide menu options until a password is entered is handy for a lab situation.. I'm going to have a "Boot from floppy" option, which with GRUB I can hide until a password is entered, but I have no problems with waving in the face of users and saying it's password protected)
And as am avaid fark reader, I am honoured to be an Asshat;)
Imagine this if you will.. several student labs, comprising about 80 machines running dualboot Debian/XP. Using Lilo to choose OS is bad. Students don't like a block 320x200 display. GRUB good! GRUB can support 640x480 backgrounds in vga16 mode.
But oh, not the Debian GRUB. The Debian GRUB package is maintained by the same guy who maintains the GNU GRUB distribution.. and he's not porting RedHat/Connectiva's patches to provide the 640x480 background and high res text into the current release, preferring to wait until GRUB 1.0 to include them.
GRUB is at version 0.91, and was first released in.. 1995.
Where you provide housing to someone, even gratis on-site housing, you as the employer become subject to tenant/landlord laws, which forbade stuff like this.
I use samba every day as an integral part of my work. Without it, I would have to be screwing around with Windows 2000 Server.. and I don't be wanting that.
"My name is Alex Dawson.. and I'm a Windows Computer Lab administrator"
As a fellow powerbook G4 user, I feel your pain at needing to use an Ethernet cable. Here you have a laptop which in my case, is worth about two months salary.. and if you want to connect it to a network you have two choices. Choice 1 is to use Airport.. which depending on which direction you're facaing and what elevation you're at, will drive you insane.. or Choice 2, to use an Ethernet cable. The downside of using an Ethernet cable, is that they're almost impossible to remove. Great planning Apple. I really think the Ethernet ports in these should have been mounted upside down.. would have made things so much easier.
And keep in mind that companies that by several 1.3 million computers are more than willing to shuck out a few more thousand on lawyers to ensure than that their service contract is honoured;)
You almost made the right decision. However, the powerbook you just bought has a Matshita CW-8121 CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, which is RPC-2 (ie, region locked), and after being on the market for almost 18 months, no RPC-1 (software region) flash is available for it:(
Though I'm not one to talk.. I have a Powerbook/800 with one of those drives in it too. I'm keeping my ibook with its RPC-1 drive for DVDs:)
My university pays the equiv of US$90/copy for WinXP Prof... and that's just the upgrade. The original install you have to buy OEM, which is about US$170 (this is in Australia)
So $45 would be great for a license to install it on a blank box.
Yes.. I must say, if I were a sysadmin for a university, I would rather support a few walkthrus on setting an admin password.. (Cntrl-alt-del, log out.. login as administrator, c-a-d again, change password) instead of supporting a bunch of students in an upgrade from NT/2k to XP... Oh, and I would have firewalled ports 80/139 inbound long long ago..
Uh yeah. Force students to install software on their privately owned computers which reports back on what programs and stuff they have installed on them.
Thankfully there's an organisation around to keep people with this frame of mind in check. It's called the ACLU.
While university residences are just that, there are various landlord/tenant laws which apply, as well as restrictions on what public institutions can force students to do. Something about not living in a police state?:)
I'm a university department network admin. For the record, we do this too. It's reasonably simple:)
*pets the Ciscos* *niiiiice cisco*
Also, using some of Cisco's really nifty features like Cisco-Discovery-Protocol (CDP) and ability to query with SNMP, it's quite easy to actually physically locate what switchport a machine is plugged into:)
Yes, you do need 384MB of RAM. Yes, it's a lot of RAM. But it runs really nicely with that much RAM. RAM isn't that expensive. Apps and OS don't need to run all in 32MB of RAM anymore. More than that is available.
I have three OSX machines. 1 x G4 Desktop (Gigabit Ethernet) with 1024MB of RAM, 1 x G4 Powerbook (800mhz) with 1024MB of RAM and 1 x iBook with 384MB of RAM. And one linux box with 192MB of RAM.
The linux box really liked the memory leak in kppp which made it eat up 380MB of RAM. Was swapping a little..
Yeah, 802.11b doesn't work within a sheilded metal box? who knew;)
I have a titanium powerbook.. it has two little windows with plastic covers on for the 802.11b stuff.. I did some testing with some high power antennas.. with one of the windows facing it, I got "full" coverage from 250ft.. with the powerbook facing them from 20ft, I got no signal. I also work in a building which is pretty much a faraday cage.. forget mobile phones in there.
We just replaced out Apple Laserwriter 16/600's at work this year.. after each of them had done close to 700k pages:) Poor printers. We replaced them with HP4100tns.. they've already done an average of 70k pages:)
Poor baby can't sell his shareware anymore. Boo hoo.
It's a text editor dude, not a fricken app development studio. Like he said in the interview, in the future it may only be possible to sell big application suites, and not ream people out for a text editor. I can't say I see this as a big loss.
That's what peeves me about MacOS vX and Windows.. everyone wants to make money with their programs. And Linux? People distribute good programs out of the kindness of their heart.
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Much like how recording companies are making copy protected CDs, have a law requiring consumer CD recorders to encode SCMS copy restriction data, and also change a royalty on blank CD-Rs? :)
I've had a TiBook since July. It's never crashed. The only reboots have been due to system updates, and once or twice because its process table was full due to a wacky script I run at login to my terminal that doesn't properly cleanup at logout.
I've had an iBook since last May.. again, same story. I have three cousins with iBooks running OSX 10.2, I've seen one of them kernel panic and crash.. but probably because the guy had like 50k free on his HDD.
I also have a desktop G4 which I have kernel paniced about 4 times, but 3 times were because I was loading kernel modules with a force option, since they didn't want to load manually, and the other time was a flakey USB cable continually registering/unregistering devices.
MacOSX is nothing like MacOS 9 in terms of stability. I push my machines. Running OS9, there would be daily crashes a-plenty. I initially got into Linux because I wanted to setup a router box to save on redialling each time my mac crashed (local phone calls are 20c each in Australia).
"My name is Alex, and I'm a Solaris/BSD/Linux/Windows System Administrator"
Users care about a pretty boot manager. It makes them less fearful of the computer. It makes them want to use it. This makes it a good desktop OS.
:)
Of course, I happily use LILO with just a one line text messsage.. but then I do know what I'm doing.
Remember the topic of this post is about making Debian a desktop OS. This means pretty stuff that makes the machine usable by joe user. We are not talking about Debian being a wonderful server platform in this topic (tho it is
I'm running 3.0r0 stable.. what are you running?
It's not FUD.. I spent fricken 3 hours and about 40 reboots trying to work out why the background image wasn't coming up.. then I do some web searching about the history of the GRUB patch to do this and find out that it doesn't work because the guy who maintains Debian's GRUB packages has a conflict of interest with the GNU GRUB release with regards to importing downstream 3rd party patches.
;)
Last time I looked at LILO, it couldn't do anything other than 320x200 images.. but I would be interested to see it to 640x480 (tho GRUB's ability to hide menu options until a password is entered is handy for a lab situation.. I'm going to have a "Boot from floppy" option, which with GRUB I can hide until a password is entered, but I have no problems with waving in the face of users and saying it's password protected)
And as am avaid fark reader, I am honoured to be an Asshat
Imagine this if you will.. several student labs, comprising about 80 machines running dualboot Debian/XP. Using Lilo to choose OS is bad. Students don't like a block 320x200 display. GRUB good! GRUB can support 640x480 backgrounds in vga16 mode.
But oh, not the Debian GRUB. The Debian GRUB package is maintained by the same guy who maintains the GNU GRUB distribution.. and he's not porting RedHat/Connectiva's patches to provide the 640x480 background and high res text into the current release, preferring to wait until GRUB 1.0 to include them.
GRUB is at version 0.91, and was first released in.. 1995.
Forgive me for not holding my breath.
Where you provide housing to someone, even gratis on-site housing, you as the employer become subject to tenant/landlord laws, which forbade stuff like this.
I use samba every day as an integral part of my work. Without it, I would have to be screwing around with Windows 2000 Server.. and I don't be wanting that.
;)
"My name is Alex Dawson.. and I'm a Windows Computer Lab administrator"
[tm & (r) Apple Computer]
As a fellow powerbook G4 user, I feel your pain at needing to use an Ethernet cable. Here you have a laptop which in my case, is worth about two months salary.. and if you want to connect it to a network you have two choices. Choice 1 is to use Airport.. which depending on which direction you're facaing and what elevation you're at, will drive you insane.. or Choice 2, to use an Ethernet cable. The downside of using an Ethernet cable, is that they're almost impossible to remove. Great planning Apple. I really think the Ethernet ports in these should have been mounted upside down.. would have made things so much easier.
That's impressive you found that :)
Well done.
And keep in mind that companies that by several 1.3 million computers are more than willing to shuck out a few more thousand on lawyers to ensure than that their service contract is honoured ;)
You almost made the right decision. However, the powerbook you just bought has a Matshita CW-8121 CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, which is RPC-2 (ie, region locked), and after being on the market for almost 18 months, no RPC-1 (software region) flash is available for it :(
:)
Though I'm not one to talk.. I have a Powerbook/800 with one of those drives in it too. I'm keeping my ibook with its RPC-1 drive for DVDs
Oh yes, if the machine in question is owned by the company you work as an admin for, the users must obey your fiat of supported OS'es :)
My university pays the equiv of US$90/copy for WinXP Prof... and that's just the upgrade. The original install you have to buy OEM, which is about US$170 (this is in Australia)
So $45 would be great for a license to install it on a blank box.
Yes.. I must say, if I were a sysadmin for a university, I would rather support a few walkthrus on setting an admin password.. (Cntrl-alt-del, log out.. login as administrator, c-a-d again, change password) instead of supporting a bunch of students in an upgrade from NT/2k to XP... Oh, and I would have firewalled ports 80/139 inbound long long ago..
Oh wait, I _am_ a sysadmin for a university..
Uh yeah. Force students to install software on their privately owned computers which reports back on what programs and stuff they have installed on them.
:)
Thankfully there's an organisation around to keep people with this frame of mind in check. It's called the ACLU.
While university residences are just that, there are various landlord/tenant laws which apply, as well as restrictions on what public institutions can force students to do. Something about not living in a police state?
I'm a university department network admin. For the record, we do this too. It's reasonably simple :)
:)
*pets the Ciscos*
*niiiiice cisco*
Also, using some of Cisco's really nifty features like Cisco-Discovery-Protocol (CDP) and ability to query with SNMP, it's quite easy to actually physically locate what switchport a machine is plugged into
Yes, you do need 384MB of RAM. Yes, it's a lot of RAM. But it runs really nicely with that much RAM. RAM isn't that expensive. Apps and OS don't need to run all in 32MB of RAM anymore. More than that is available.
I have three OSX machines. 1 x G4 Desktop (Gigabit Ethernet) with 1024MB of RAM, 1 x G4 Powerbook (800mhz) with 1024MB of RAM and 1 x iBook with 384MB of RAM. And one linux box with 192MB of RAM.
The linux box really liked the memory leak in kppp which made it eat up 380MB of RAM. Was swapping a little..
I'm a simpsons geek. Original simpsons quote
:(
Mmm with a Tivo with this much HDD, I could record every episode... if I didn't live in Australia
Yeah, 802.11b doesn't work within a sheilded metal box? who knew ;)
.. with the powerbook facing them from 20ft, I got no signal. I also work in a building which is pretty much a faraday cage.. forget mobile phones in there.
I have a titanium powerbook.. it has two little windows with plastic covers on for the 802.11b stuff.. I did some testing with some high power antennas.. with one of the windows facing it, I got "full" coverage from 250ft
ob-simpsons-reference: "You're recording NFL with implied oral consent, not express written consent??"
You need to keep a specific box running until 2008? I hope you have plenty of spare of everything :)
We just replaced out Apple Laserwriter 16/600's at work this year.. after each of them had done close to 700k pages :) Poor printers. We replaced them with HP4100tns .. they've already done an average of 70k pages :)
The story about it about to become law was posted several weeks ago. Therefore, a followup story is a slashback, not a new one as you posted.
Poor baby can't sell his shareware anymore. Boo hoo.
It's a text editor dude, not a fricken app development studio. Like he said in the interview, in the future it may only be possible to sell big application suites, and not ream people out for a text editor. I can't say I see this as a big loss.
That's what peeves me about MacOS vX and Windows.. everyone wants to make money with their programs. And Linux? People distribute good programs out of the kindness of their heart.