There's one catch, though: modern TVs lack an input filter that they're supposed to have by design which would normally reject non-TV frequencies,
If they are lacking the filter, then they were designed that way. Those devices are FCC approved and certificated, and if they were designed and tested for compliance with the filter but are being built without it, they are in violation of federal law (47CFR15) and can be confiscated and destroyed.
Designed and tested with the filter, shipped without it because they're expected to be connected to Cable, AFAIK. As for confiscation/destruction, I don't think that's realistic, regardless of whether that's what's "on paper".
In those cases filtering needs to be added back to the TV to isolate it from the Ham transmissions -- it's my understandnig that this filter can be provided by the TV manufacturer upon request.
Since it is not really part of the design, and the manual for the TV clearly states that this device must accept interference (as part of the Part 15 Class B conformance statement), probably not. I think you can find commercial filters to use in this case, but the TV owner is stuck paying for them. And good operating practice says that the ham is not going to touch the TV to try to fix it, otherwise he becomes liable for any perceived failures of that TV. "Hey, the day after you installed your filter to stop your interference, the TV stopped working altogether, and I'm suing you, you basterd."
And, sadly, most of the interference issues would not be solved by installing a filter on the antenna,
That wouldn't help at all because the issue is the TV being desensitized by a signal that is out-of-band for TV, but in-band for Ham radio. You cannot filter out the signal that you're trying to transmit, as that defeats the purpose.
since a lot of the interference issues comes from modern, cheap ass plastic housings on the low price consumer equipment. You can't stop an interfering signal that is leaking into the electronics through the side of the TV by installing a filter on the antenna lead. You need to install shielding on the TV itself.
Well, no, not in this case -- remember, we're talking about TVs receiving broadcast TV that are the problem -- the signal causing the TV a problem is coming from the TV antenna, and (generally) not from "leakage". You've got the right idea, though -- that the receiver needs to be isolated from the desensitizing signal. Some filtering between the TV antenna and the TV is all that's required to reduce the mount of the Ham transmission gets to the TV's receiver. The TV's receiver is in a separate RF enclosure, so the fact that the back of the TV is plastic isn't a problem and is thus (usually) a Red Herring here.
Basically that's where this is headed. "The more you tighten your grip, the more this is going to slip through your fingers." We're basically headed down the path of building our own weapons from scratch, just like what has happened in warzones elsewhere.
> That is a serious infringement of Liberty, IMHO.
Your liberty does not include the right to spray your rf all over my land.
Actually in most places, it does, at least for Ham Radio operators, CB, Family Radio systems, wireless intercoms,and Wifi. However as you mentioned, these liberties also come with the restriction that the transmission not interfere with other frequencies -- thus we can give you our RF, but you should never notice.
There's one catch, though: modern TVs lack an input filter that they're supposed to have by design which would normally reject non-TV frequencies, because they're suppposed to be tolerant of out-of-band signals. TV manufacturers got permission not to ship this filter, because most TVs are hooked up to Cable where it isn't needed. However in the cases where a neighbor of a Ham is receiving broadcast TV, the TV can be desensed due to the lack of the filter and the close proximity of the transmitting Ham station. In those cases filtering needs to be added back to the TV to isolate it from the Ham transmissions -- it's my understandnig that this filter can be provided by the TV manufacturer upon request.
I've visited the GBT while it was under construction at the NRAO; there's another interesting feature of the site due to the location being surrounded by mountains -- which is that thunder from lightning strikes take a long time to dissipate, because they reverberate between the mountains. It's reallly something to listen to -- the rumble after the initial thunderclap lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds.:-) Somehow it's like a symphony to the soul.
You're right. I should have mentioned apt/dpkg (Ubuntu) vs. yum/rpm (Fedora) and zypper/rpm (OpenSuSE) but the core RPM tool seems more robust when you need to trace down why an app isn't starting up (dependency problems) or determine whether files have been tampered with.
Well, sort of. Debian has a tool 'debsums' to check package checksums and thus installed package integrity. (You'll likely want to run 'debsums -s' to report only errors.) However this isn't installed by default, nor is it commonly discussed or advertised, whereas the equivalent for rpm, 'rpm -Va', typically is. So it's not that there isn't a tool to do the same job, it's just that it's not as well known. Likewise with dependencies; if one uses 'atptitude' you can get both forward and reverse dependency lists, and with 'deborphan' you can find orphaned packages that can be removed. [As you can probably tell, I'm more comfortable with these tools than with the RPM counterparts.]
Although leaving Ubuntu coincides with buying a faster machine, it seems zypper/rpm is much faster than apt/dpkg, which could take hours to install (NOT including initial downloading). zypper/rpm has various options for how updates are performed (one file at a time, in small batches or after fully downloaded) among other options.
I don't personally see major speed improvements in RPM (yum/rpm on Fedora) over DEB; and if install speed were important, Arch is clearly fastest from what I've seen.;-) If zypper/rpm on OpenSuSE is faster than DEB I wouldn't doubt it, but that wouldn't be a motivator (for me) to switch distros.
Thanks very much for at least sympathizing, you'd be surprised how many people don't!
:-( Yeah... it's a lot easier to "explain away" issues than actually try to help with them. From the point of view of the person "helping", it "solves" the problem. I see this kind of thinking a lot on LUG mailing lists -- it's frustrating.
I did ask for help getting things running in the #freebsd channel but once I admitted I had made the "mistake" of buying a Windows PC with UEFI the most helpful answer I got was to "buy another computer," but in...less polite terms.
Most hardware these says comes with UEFI (or soon will), but more to the point you cannot guarantee that you will be able to know whether the hardware comes with UEFI or not. And regardless, you own that hardware now, so telling you to buy new hardware isn't reasonable. I forget if FreeBSD requires a different solution than the Grub2 shim, but hopefully there's a solution for it soon too.
I personally wish that I hadn't learned about UEFI in this manner but I'm glad that I know better now at least -- but there are still plenty of us out there who would like to try other options!
I read about it before running into install trouble because of it, but all that does is remove the surprise factor.;-)
Took me a bit to figure out that LMDE = Linux Mint Debian. During the "top 25 distribution" tryouts I had I tried it, and admittedly I like LMDE more than the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint. However as jimshatt pointed out, that will not solve the social problems that Debian has, because both Mint and Ubuntu want packages to go through Debian first... so as a package maintainer you end up being in exactly the same position as you were before.
Couldn't get it to boot...unfortunately I'm one of those charlatans that made the fatal mistake of buying a computer with UEFI and no way to turn secure boot off (HP p6-2142), I can't get it to boot anything other than Windows 7, Ubuntu or Fedora. And I was hoping to use FreeBSD...
:-( Secure boot is a nightmare. On top of some UEFI bioses not having the option to disable it, another option is required to enable "legacy boot" mode; where "legacy" in this case means "anything other than Windows 8". Some bioses allow disabling Secure Boot, yet still don't have a "legacy boot" option.:-/
What I'm really dissappointed by is that some manufacturers (Lenovo, for one) don't seem to include anything about UEFI bios settings in their documentation for laptops they sell. I recently had to do an install on a Lenovo P500, and on this box getting into the UEFI bios requires pressing a separate tiny button on the side of the laptop while the laptop is off. See the text on Page 20 and the diagram on Page 5 of the following document (which doesn't ship with the laptop):
Matthew Garrett has a signed "shim" for Grub which the other distributions which will let them boot even when the "secure boot" option is enabled; so OpenSuSE will have this solved soon. Hopefully Debian soon will as well.
After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional.
I started with Slackware, then switched to Debian in late 1999 and have been using it since. However I recently tried a bunch of distros, one of which was OpenSuSE (12.1) with KDE4 and I was surprised at how much I liked it. If I ever switch away from Debian, OpenSuSE would be one of my top choices. I also liked Arch (super-fast package installs, but there's no graphical installer) and Vector Linux (based on Slackware but with package management). I also liked Fedora 17, but for obvious reasons I don't currently consider it a condender.:-/
Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit.
Concerning RPM-based distros I'm assuming you're referring to the improvements via YUM rather than RPM internals. (Correct me if this isn't the case.) Debian has actually improved on some of the DEB packaging tools; it isn't obvious because the development of DEB tools starts from the source package side first. I mostly like the Debian packaging system -- it's still the best package management system that I know of -- except that it's a bit complicated to create source packages, especially if you want to use Git while doing so. If I were to complain about Debian and reasoning for leaving it, it would be more along the lines of social problems within the Debian community rather than technical issues.
Actually my favorite of Gerry Anderson's work was the TV series UFO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(TV_series) Space 1999 was good when I was a kid, but when I re-watched it as an adult I found it terrible -- the show needed better writing. [A few of the episodes are still good though.]
She uses 'I was like', 'they were like' an awful lot. That, to me, is not the sign of an intelligent person.
She speaks informally, but I don't think that denotes anything about her intelligence.
I've met her in person; she's previously spoken about Debian at NYLUG and spoke during DebConf10. During her speeches at DebConf10 she used a bunch of 'lolcats' pictures in the slides; it wasn't just to be cute, it was for effect and to hold everybody's attention, and it worked. I believe this is a matter of choosing her presentation and her words to fit her audience.
This is actually false. He wore quite a wide range of clothes, typically picked out by his wife. When she died, he didn't care as much and while he owned more clothes, he tended to wear pretty drab similar looking stuff. This myth was perpatrated by the movie The Fly, and I used to believe it until someone showed me some pictures of him in different clothing, including a hoodie.
Regardless that Einstein didn't do this, when I saw Jeff Goldboom's character do this in The Fly, I thought it was a good idea. (Imitating Chris Rock): "Yeah, that's right I said it! Right here on Slashdot I said that shit.";-)
As long as the clothes chosen beforehand look fine or fit the person's particular style, I don't see anything wrong with planning ahead concerning what you're going to wear for the rest of the week.
Mate, as far as Linux Mint 13 is concerned, ships with two versions of the menu. You have the regular Mate menu, but also have the option to have the good ol' Gnome 2 menu.
Because the MATE developers don't know what they're doing...
Attempting to maintain all of GNOME 2 by themselves has always been a stupid decision.
Unfortunately after having a look at it, I agree. That said, I consider Gnome 3 to be a usability disaster, so there are good reasons why people are trying to get back the functionality they had with Gnome 2. Cinnamon is 3D only and Mate works in 2D. My choice as a fallback is Xfce. [I primarily use KDE 4, with Nepomuk and Strigi (in "Desktop Search") turned completely off.]
A couple of notes concerning Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and KDE 4. Note that I'm writing this from a "Debian point of view" rather than it being Ubuntu-specific, simply because I don't run Ubuntu (for a bunch of reasons).
We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.
I've recently tried Mate and Cinnamon, and they have a common problem: they don't seem to respect the "Debian menu". i.e. there are normal menu items that don't show up and instead you get the menu that Mate or Cinnamon wants to show you. My experience (in testing Ubuntu-based distros in VMs) is that Mate works in 2D, but Cinnamon is 3D-only, so it sucks to run Cinnamon in a VM. Mate hasn't been accepted into Debian, so it's not even an option for me to run right now. There are DDs that don't want it to be included, partly because it (supposedly) depends on old Gnome 2 libs, and partly because they'd rather see more effort put into Gnome 3 (which I cannot stand using). Cinnamon isn't in Debian either, probably for similar reasons. I've looked at both the Mate and Cinnamon packages available in the upstream repositories and both seemed to need work and didn't appear to be stable yet, and installing them via the external repositories looked troublesome.
Xfce is great, and what I generally recommend today, especially on low-end systems. Users I've given it to seem to like it too. The only thing I don't like (which is not really a problem with Xfce itself) is that Debian has changed the default network manager used for the Xfce task from wicd to network-manager, but this is is fixable because the package is a Recommends rather than Depends, so this is a minor complaint. I think the reason for the default change is that network-manager is IPv6 enabled where wicd is not. I've had several problems with network-manager that I don't have with wicd though, which is why I stick with wicd.
KDE 4 is good, but only if you turn off Nepomuk and Strigi file indexing, otherwise it runs terribly. [I'm primarily a KDE 4 user and love it otherwise.] These settings are in K->Settings->System Settings within Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Destkop Search. It isn't easy to figure out what you'll be giving up by turning these features off, but thankfully someone has come up with a web page and document that explains these features. https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ One additional interesting thing to note about KDE 4 is that it can do compositing (or not, your choice, easily switchable via Alt+Shift+F12) without using compiz -- instead it's built-in. KDE 4 also has several rendering engines for both raster and OpenGL, so it works on both 2D-only and 3D enabled systems.
As for Unity -- no. 3D only so it sucks to run in a VM, and it interferes too much with how I work. Also I'm told that Unity is an add-on to compiz, and that systems that run for days get slower over time and eventually compiz crashes requiring a restart of X.
I'll mention this because it's what I'm doing and I haven't seen anyone else suggest it yet.
What I personally do for remote help is to use SSH with X forwarding directly, without using anything like VNC. I always set up SSH servers on non-default ports and also install fail2ban "just in case" a remote attacker actually finds the SSH servers and tries to brute-force them -- of which no attempt has ever been made so far. [And I can say that because I also set up 'logcheck', tweak logcheck to filter out noise so that it only reports actual issues, and then I actually read the resulting emails it sends.] In addition I also set up a "pre-shared" ssh key with no password and copy the key to the remote router so that the password to log into the router is not passed over the 'net, and also disable root logins. (Okay -- call me paranoid.:-P)
And although I know I could do the same thing to log into the user's box through the router via pre-shared keys and ssh-agent forwarding: http://unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html instead I don't actually bother to do so, and just use a normal ssh password login to the user's box.
Login steps to get to user's box:
- log in via SSH to the remote router, with X fowarding
ssh -l (normal_user_username) -X -p (port) (remote_router) # ex: ssh -l mooha -X -p 1022 router.mydomain.com
- log in via SSH (as a normal user) to the user's box, with X forwarding
- su to root on user's box
- su to that user
- tell the user to quit the program they're having a problem with
- run the specific program they're having a problem with myself and have a look
Upsides:
- secure
- gives user some privacy (can't see their screen)
- never "take over" the user's mouse Downsides:
- can't see the user's screen
- need to know the actual program name to run, rather than using the menus in the window manager
- difficult to have a look at "non-application" programs such as desktop widgets (which is usually not a problem)
Have you upgraded to 4.8 or 4.9, which I heard is a lot better? Or do they still have similar problems w/ Nepomuk and Strigi?
I'm running KDE 4.8.4, which is what is in Debian Unstable. Before a presentation I did on KDE4 for my local lug I tried Strigi/Nepomuk features again in KDE4.8 and performance was again terrible -- many hours of 100% CPU time during the indexing process. [IIRC on the same P4 system this process took somewhere between 14 to 18 hours to index a home directory with 30 GB of stuff in it, and I think the resulting Virtuoso database was about 1 GB.] The reason is that Nepomuk/Strigi uses several "ontologies" run as separate background processes to do the indexing -- one "ontology" for each type of indexing being done -- file names, pictures, audio files, etc -- so you'd think this would be a single background process searching the disk, but no it's like 5 or 6. And the thing is, I have no reason to use either of these services. To even find out what these services can do isn't easy, because the documentation for them in the KDE manual is terrible. However if you search around the 'net you'll eventually find this:
As you read the above document here's some details to keep in mind: I use Krusader as my chosen file manager, not Dolphin. I don't use DigiKam or Gwenview (I use Geeqie as my chosen picture viewer). I never use the Alt-F2 Krunner menu, and I never give files tags or comments to them. Therefore Nepomuk as it stands today is totally doesn't serve a purpose for me.
But above all else, I don't want KDE4 choosing on its own when to run a super I/O intensive indexing process just to create a *cache* of things it finds and hold all of that in a huge database. To me that harks back to the 'mlocate' package -- if you've ever been working on a server that suddenly ran like shit and you found an 'updatedb' process running when you viewed the output of 'top', that's the package that did that. But unlike the mlocate package that called the updatedb process via cron, there's no way to tell KDE4 when to allow it to do the indexing or to limit CPU or I/O -- the only thing you can limit is how much RAM is used, which doesn't address this problem. The indexing starts by default, immediately after your very first login, causing the computer to run like utter shit, and your only choice to stop it is to immediately go to System Settings -> Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Desktop Search and turn these features off . And that's only if you know where to go and what to do. This is why many users that try KDE4 for the first time say "I can't use this, it makes my computer run like shit." And unfortunately, by the default settings KDE4 gives you, they're right.
There are many other levels of FAIL here, too -- the listing of Control Center modules in the KDE Help are not even in alphabetical order, so even if you somehow know that settings for Nepomuk are in the "Desktop Search" section, it's still an effort to find in the list. Then once you look through the help for the Desktop Search, the documentation that is there is simplistic and doesn't even tell you how you can use it, and doesn't give you any warning whatsoever of the performance impact these services have. [I discussed the lack of performance warning with the KDE4 developers at the time, and they were again unsympathetic. After about a week of arguing and "talk to the hand", they told me to create a KDE account and to propose wording myself, which they'd then review and consider. The problem with this suggestion is that they had already made it quite clear that they were not going to take it seriously.] And the way you get into trying to fix the performance disaster is finding several 'nepomuk' processes, so you try to fi
This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."
This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.
As much as I love KDE4 of today, I agre with you concerning how they treated the transition period during the time of KDE4.2. Nepomuk was my biggest problem at the time -- after I gave it time to index files, trying to selecting 100 files in Krusader would make a P4 machine unusuable for 30 seconds -- and that's just for the select operation. [And I really mean 30 actual seconds.] By the time 30 seconds had gone by I had clicked somewhere else thinking I had done something wrong, whereby that click was remembered and all of the files were de-selected, then I'd have to go through that whole 30-second wait for the select process again. The Virtuoso index database that Strigi/Nepomuk had created was > 2GB, which in itself was rediculous and was why the select operation was taking so long. I had not changed any Nepomuk settings BTW -- they were the default.
I finally figured that out that Strigi/Nepomuk was the problem and wrote the KDE4 developers to describe the issue, and none seemed sympathetic. Either they argued that a P4 machine was too old to matter, didn't believe my report, or made unhelpful statements such as "Nepomuk is not going away". Basically the answers I got amounted to "talk to the hand." [And by the way that same P4 machine runs just fine with KDE4 today as long as Strigi and Nepomuk are fully turned off.]
Nepomuk today remains my biggest complaint with KDE4, and so I always advice turning both it and Strigi indexing fully off. Once that's done KDE4 is very enjoyable to use, so it's still my daily default.
I don't use Gnome3 -- I tried it for a few minutes and found it frustrating. Same goes for Unity. MATE and Cinnamon both seem fine, and I like Xfce. GNOME has long had issues with listening to user desires, so I'm really not surprised about this issue.
Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
It's worked so far, the perceived elitism seems to be all it's got going for it!
:-P
In talking to opinionated Gentoo advocates sometimes it can seem like that. I assume that they mean well. Personally, I greatly prefer at least an attempt at an objective point of view, where one explains both the benefits and the drawbacks. For instance the first LUG I started with a lot of people would say "Debian is great", but couldn't say why, even when I directly asked, and also were unable to tell me any of the drawbacks of switching to it. Being that I was coming from Slackware there were some, because I had to switch from a BSD-type startup where each startup level had a single script, to a SystemV-type startup where each runlevel had a directory with softlinks to individual startup scripts in/etc/init.d/. This doesn't sound like such a big deal, but it was, because on Slackware one modifies these startup scripts regularly, whereas on most other systems you may not need to (or if you do, it's not very often).
So this is a hint to all free software advocates: "keep it real". State both the benefits and the drawbacks that you know of for what you're advocating. Doing so greatly aids credibility, and gives the receiver of the information a more informed point of view.
the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer
Arch is supposed to be like slackware (vanilla packages, KISS principle) but with rolling updates. The installation just isn't that big of a deal, because the target user already has a plan and knows how to get there. A graphical installer would be a solution looking for a problem. Like slackware and gentoo, arch is intended for people who prefer to be "on their own".
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to complete a fancy, inspiring, totally graphical installation only to be dumped at the command prompt on your first boot. D'oh!
Generally the distributions with graphical installers also set up X and your choice of desktop environment, and this was what I had in mind when I made the comment. [Gentoo is a notable exception here: the Gentoo LiveCD has a graphical installer, which after using leaves you with a text-console-only installation.:-P] In terms of Slackware, today I'd likely choose Vector Linux (which is based on Slackware) rather than Slackware, for the graphical installer and more importantly due to the package manager that includes an online repository, which Slackware lacks by default. It was Slackware's lack of abillity to keep the distribution up-to-date via package managment that forced me to give it up sometime between 1999 and 2000, whereby I went to Debian. [And other than Debian's internal politics, I've been happy since.;-)]
A graphical installer (and setting up Xorg and a desktop envioronment) makes a distribution more accessible -- it greatly reduces the time it takes to get a distribution up and running. It seems Arch had some kind of automated installer at one time, but that seems to have been abandoned since. I don't think a lack of a graphical installer is as much of a design choice rather than something avoided due to the situations the graphical installer might not be able to handle at first.
As for gentoo, of course it has "insane long compiles" -- that is the main design feature. It is supposed to be a meta-distribution where you essentially create your own custom distro yourself. This is a totally different paradigm from any other distro.
I agree.
In conclusion, arch, slack, and gentoo are not typical consumer-oriented distros. Sure you can turn any one of them into a slick desktop, but they make no assumption about that. They just give you the tools, and you build the house yourself. If you like the idea of a clean, simple distro without the "bullshit", I would suggest debian.
Heh. Yes, although you're preeching to the choir -- I've been running Debian for both desktop and servers for 13 years.;-) This is one one of the reasons I did the "free software survey", because it's been too long since I've run anything but Debian.
I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
Hmm okay thanks for letting me know what your experience with Mint was. I've only deployed Mint Debian to one user so far -- it was a laptop with only 256MB of RAM and a low-end videocard, so I deployed it with Xfce. The only issue the user complained about was a sticking Enter key on the keyboard. The user remained happy with that until she upgraded to a different laptop, which came with Windows 7. [And naturally the new laptop didn't come with OS reinstallation disks.]
The icon on the K menu in KDE is relatively easy to change; right-click, go to Application Launcher Menu Settings, choose Options, click on the Icon to choose a different icon. I occasionally try a different KDE icon, but like you I generally like the default.
I know what you mean about these annoyances, though -- Debian generally keeps the default appearances "barebones" so there's generally not a lot of branding past the Splash screens for Grub2 and the desktop manager, and I likewise like that -- so I know where you're coming from.
I believe that the one that is based on Debian is aimed more @ servers, than @ desktops. Instead of deriving their server version from Ubuntu, Mint went straight w/ Debian
Actually no, both versions of Mint are specifically focused on desktop use. The idea behind Mint Debian is that you can use the actual Debian Testing repositories so that all of that software is then avialable to Mint. [They also state that the Debian-based edition is faster and more responsive than the Ubuntu-based edition.]
I'm sort of tied to Debian Sid/Unstable right now because that's the target for new source package uploads, and I'm getting into Debian development. Also most Debian-based distributions (including Ubuntu) would rather have packages go through Debian first, so if that was my target then I'd still need Debian Sid.;-)
Are you being humours with the "con" (ironical?;-)) or can't you spell canonical?
:-P Apparently it's that I can't spell Canonical.
Do you know what the word means? If not, it's particularly ironic given the content of your post.
"Canonical is the adjective for canon, literally a 'rule', and has come to mean also 'standard', 'typical', or 'unique distinguished exemplar'." - Wikipedia
Haha! Nice -- thanks for pointing out that irony. Sort of fitting.:-P
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There's one catch, though: modern TVs lack an input filter that they're supposed to have by design which would normally reject non-TV frequencies,
If they are lacking the filter, then they were designed that way. Those devices are FCC approved and certificated, and if they were designed and tested for compliance with the filter but are being built without it, they are in violation of federal law (47CFR15) and can be confiscated and destroyed.
Designed and tested with the filter, shipped without it because they're expected to be connected to Cable, AFAIK. As for confiscation/destruction, I don't think that's realistic, regardless of whether that's what's "on paper".
In those cases filtering needs to be added back to the TV to isolate it from the Ham transmissions -- it's my understandnig that this filter can be provided by the TV manufacturer upon request.
Since it is not really part of the design, and the manual for the TV clearly states that this device must accept interference (as part of the Part 15 Class B conformance statement), probably not. I think you can find commercial filters to use in this case, but the TV owner is stuck paying for them. And good operating practice says that the ham is not going to touch the TV to try to fix it, otherwise he becomes liable for any perceived failures of that TV. "Hey, the day after you installed your filter to stop your interference, the TV stopped working altogether, and I'm suing you, you basterd."
And, sadly, most of the interference issues would not be solved by installing a filter on the antenna,
That wouldn't help at all because the issue is the TV being desensitized by a signal that is out-of-band for TV, but in-band for Ham radio. You cannot filter out the signal that you're trying to transmit, as that defeats the purpose.
since a lot of the interference issues comes from modern, cheap ass plastic housings on the low price consumer equipment. You can't stop an interfering signal that is leaking into the electronics through the side of the TV by installing a filter on the antenna lead. You need to install shielding on the TV itself.
Well, no, not in this case -- remember, we're talking about TVs receiving broadcast TV that are the problem -- the signal causing the TV a problem is coming from the TV antenna, and (generally) not from "leakage". You've got the right idea, though -- that the receiver needs to be isolated from the desensitizing signal. Some filtering between the TV antenna and the TV is all that's required to reduce the mount of the Ham transmission gets to the TV's receiver. The TV's receiver is in a separate RF enclosure, so the fact that the back of the TV is plastic isn't a problem and is thus (usually) a Red Herring here.
Streisand effect for the win.
Basically that's where this is headed. "The more you tighten your grip, the more this is going to slip through your fingers." We're basically headed down the path of building our own weapons from scratch, just like what has happened in warzones elsewhere.
> That is a serious infringement of Liberty, IMHO.
Your liberty does not include the right to spray your rf all over my land.
Actually in most places, it does, at least for Ham Radio operators, CB, Family Radio systems, wireless intercoms,and Wifi. However as you mentioned, these liberties also come with the restriction that the transmission not interfere with other frequencies -- thus we can give you our RF, but you should never notice.
There's one catch, though: modern TVs lack an input filter that they're supposed to have by design which would normally reject non-TV frequencies, because they're suppposed to be tolerant of out-of-band signals. TV manufacturers got permission not to ship this filter, because most TVs are hooked up to Cable where it isn't needed. However in the cases where a neighbor of a Ham is receiving broadcast TV, the TV can be desensed due to the lack of the filter and the close proximity of the transmitting Ham station. In those cases filtering needs to be added back to the TV to isolate it from the Ham transmissions -- it's my understandnig that this filter can be provided by the TV manufacturer upon request.
I've visited the GBT while it was under construction at the NRAO; there's another interesting feature of the site due to the location being surrounded by mountains -- which is that thunder from lightning strikes take a long time to dissipate, because they reverberate between the mountains. It's reallly something to listen to -- the rumble after the initial thunderclap lasts for about 20 to 30 seconds. :-) Somehow it's like a symphony to the soul.
I started with Slackware as well
Cool.
You're right. I should have mentioned apt/dpkg (Ubuntu) vs. yum/rpm (Fedora) and zypper/rpm (OpenSuSE) but the core RPM tool seems more robust when you need to trace down why an app isn't starting up (dependency problems) or determine whether files have been tampered with.
Well, sort of. Debian has a tool 'debsums' to check package checksums and thus installed package integrity. (You'll likely want to run 'debsums -s' to report only errors.) However this isn't installed by default, nor is it commonly discussed or advertised, whereas the equivalent for rpm, 'rpm -Va', typically is. So it's not that there isn't a tool to do the same job, it's just that it's not as well known. Likewise with dependencies; if one uses 'atptitude' you can get both forward and reverse dependency lists, and with 'deborphan' you can find orphaned packages that can be removed. [As you can probably tell, I'm more comfortable with these tools than with the RPM counterparts.]
Although leaving Ubuntu coincides with buying a faster machine, it seems zypper/rpm is much faster than apt/dpkg, which could take hours to install (NOT including initial downloading). zypper/rpm has various options for how updates are performed (one file at a time, in small batches or after fully downloaded) among other options.
I don't personally see major speed improvements in RPM (yum/rpm on Fedora) over DEB; and if install speed were important, Arch is clearly fastest from what I've seen. ;-) If zypper/rpm on OpenSuSE is faster than DEB I wouldn't doubt it, but that wouldn't be a motivator (for me) to switch distros.
Thanks very much for at least sympathizing, you'd be surprised how many people don't!
:-( Yeah... it's a lot easier to "explain away" issues than actually try to help with them. From the point of view of the person "helping", it "solves" the problem. I see this kind of thinking a lot on LUG mailing lists -- it's frustrating.
I did ask for help getting things running in the #freebsd channel but once I admitted I had made the "mistake" of buying a Windows PC with UEFI the most helpful answer I got was to "buy another computer," but in...less polite terms.
Most hardware these says comes with UEFI (or soon will), but more to the point you cannot guarantee that you will be able to know whether the hardware comes with UEFI or not. And regardless, you own that hardware now, so telling you to buy new hardware isn't reasonable. I forget if FreeBSD requires a different solution than the Grub2 shim, but hopefully there's a solution for it soon too.
I personally wish that I hadn't learned about UEFI in this manner but I'm glad that I know better now at least -- but there are still plenty of us out there who would like to try other options!
I read about it before running into install trouble because of it, but all that does is remove the surprise factor. ;-)
Took me a bit to figure out that LMDE = Linux Mint Debian.
During the "top 25 distribution" tryouts I had I tried it, and admittedly I like LMDE more than the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint. However as jimshatt pointed out, that will not solve the social problems that Debian has, because both Mint and Ubuntu want packages to go through Debian first... so as a package maintainer you end up being in exactly the same position as you were before.
Couldn't get it to boot...unfortunately I'm one of those charlatans that made the fatal mistake of buying a computer with UEFI and no way to turn secure boot off (HP p6-2142), I can't get it to boot anything other than Windows 7, Ubuntu or Fedora. And I was hoping to use FreeBSD...
:-( Secure boot is a nightmare. On top of some UEFI bioses not having the option to disable it, another option is required to enable "legacy boot" mode; where "legacy" in this case means "anything other than Windows 8". Some bioses allow disabling Secure Boot, yet still don't have a "legacy boot" option. :-/
What I'm really dissappointed by is that some manufacturers (Lenovo, for one) don't seem to include anything about UEFI bios settings in their documentation for laptops they sell. I recently had to do an install on a Lenovo P500, and on this box getting into the UEFI bios requires pressing a separate tiny button on the side of the laptop while the laptop is off. See the text on Page 20 and the diagram on Page 5 of the following document (which doesn't ship with the laptop):
http://download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles_pub/ideapad_z500p500_ug_v1.0_july_2012_english.pdf
Matthew Garrett has a signed "shim" for Grub which the other distributions which will let them boot even when the "secure boot" option is enabled; so OpenSuSE will have this solved soon. Hopefully Debian soon will as well.
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20522.html
After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional.
I started with Slackware, then switched to Debian in late 1999 and have been using it since. However I recently tried a bunch of distros, one of which was OpenSuSE (12.1) with KDE4 and I was surprised at how much I liked it. If I ever switch away from Debian, OpenSuSE would be one of my top choices. I also liked Arch (super-fast package installs, but there's no graphical installer) and Vector Linux (based on Slackware but with package management). I also liked Fedora 17, but for obvious reasons I don't currently consider it a condender. :-/
Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit.
Concerning RPM-based distros I'm assuming you're referring to the improvements via YUM rather than RPM internals. (Correct me if this isn't the case.) Debian has actually improved on some of the DEB packaging tools; it isn't obvious because the development of DEB tools starts from the source package side first. I mostly like the Debian packaging system -- it's still the best package management system that I know of -- except that it's a bit complicated to create source packages, especially if you want to use Git while doing so. If I were to complain about Debian and reasoning for leaving it, it would be more along the lines of social problems within the Debian community rather than technical issues.
Actually my favorite of Gerry Anderson's work was the TV series UFO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(TV_series)
Space 1999 was good when I was a kid, but when I re-watched it as an adult I found it terrible -- the show needed better writing. [A few of the episodes are still good though.]
She uses 'I was like', 'they were like' an awful lot. That, to me, is not the sign of an intelligent person.
She speaks informally, but I don't think that denotes anything about her intelligence.
I've met her in person; she's previously spoken about Debian at NYLUG and spoke during DebConf10. During her speeches at DebConf10 she used a bunch of 'lolcats' pictures in the slides; it wasn't just to be cute, it was for effect and to hold everybody's attention, and it worked. I believe this is a matter of choosing her presentation and her words to fit her audience.
This is actually false. He wore quite a wide range of clothes, typically picked out by his wife. When she died, he didn't care as much and while he owned more clothes, he tended to wear pretty drab similar looking stuff. This myth was perpatrated by the movie The Fly, and I used to believe it until someone showed me some pictures of him in different clothing, including a hoodie.
Regardless that Einstein didn't do this, when I saw Jeff Goldboom's character do this in The Fly, I thought it was a good idea. (Imitating Chris Rock): "Yeah, that's right I said it! Right here on Slashdot I said that shit." ;-)
As long as the clothes chosen beforehand look fine or fit the person's particular style, I don't see anything wrong with planning ahead concerning what you're going to wear for the rest of the week.
Mate, as far as Linux Mint 13 is concerned, ships with two versions of the menu. You have the regular Mate menu, but also have the option to have the good ol' Gnome 2 menu.
I'll have to look for that; thanks.
Because the MATE developers don't know what they're doing...
Attempting to maintain all of GNOME 2 by themselves has always been a stupid decision.
Unfortunately after having a look at it, I agree. That said, I consider Gnome 3 to be a usability disaster, so there are good reasons why people are trying to get back the functionality they had with Gnome 2. Cinnamon is 3D only and Mate works in 2D. My choice as a fallback is Xfce. [I primarily use KDE 4, with Nepomuk and Strigi (in "Desktop Search") turned completely off.]
A couple of notes concerning Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and KDE 4. Note that I'm writing this from a "Debian point of view" rather than it being Ubuntu-specific, simply because I don't run Ubuntu (for a bunch of reasons).
We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.
I've recently tried Mate and Cinnamon, and they have a common problem: they don't seem to respect the "Debian menu". i.e. there are normal menu items that don't show up and instead you get the menu that Mate or Cinnamon wants to show you. My experience (in testing Ubuntu-based distros in VMs) is that Mate works in 2D, but Cinnamon is 3D-only, so it sucks to run Cinnamon in a VM. Mate hasn't been accepted into Debian, so it's not even an option for me to run right now. There are DDs that don't want it to be included, partly because it (supposedly) depends on old Gnome 2 libs, and partly because they'd rather see more effort put into Gnome 3 (which I cannot stand using). Cinnamon isn't in Debian either, probably for similar reasons. I've looked at both the Mate and Cinnamon packages available in the upstream repositories and both seemed to need work and didn't appear to be stable yet, and installing them via the external repositories looked troublesome.
Xfce is great, and what I generally recommend today, especially on low-end systems. Users I've given it to seem to like it too. The only thing I don't like (which is not really a problem with Xfce itself) is that Debian has changed the default network manager used for the Xfce task from wicd to network-manager, but this is is fixable because the package is a Recommends rather than Depends, so this is a minor complaint. I think the reason for the default change is that network-manager is IPv6 enabled where wicd is not. I've had several problems with network-manager that I don't have with wicd though, which is why I stick with wicd.
KDE 4 is good, but only if you turn off Nepomuk and Strigi file indexing, otherwise it runs terribly. [I'm primarily a KDE 4 user and love it otherwise.] These settings are in K->Settings->System Settings within Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Destkop Search. It isn't easy to figure out what you'll be giving up by turning these features off, but thankfully someone has come up with a web page and document that explains these features. https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ One additional interesting thing to note about KDE 4 is that it can do compositing (or not, your choice, easily switchable via Alt+Shift+F12) without using compiz -- instead it's built-in. KDE 4 also has several rendering engines for both raster and OpenGL, so it works on both 2D-only and 3D enabled systems.
As for Unity -- no. 3D only so it sucks to run in a VM, and it interferes too much with how I work. Also I'm told that Unity is an add-on to compiz, and that systems that run for days get slower over time and eventually compiz crashes requiring a restart of X.
I'll mention this because it's what I'm doing and I haven't seen anyone else suggest it yet.
What I personally do for remote help is to use SSH with X forwarding directly, without using anything like VNC. I always set up SSH servers on non-default ports and also install fail2ban "just in case" a remote attacker actually finds the SSH servers and tries to brute-force them -- of which no attempt has ever been made so far. [And I can say that because I also set up 'logcheck', tweak logcheck to filter out noise so that it only reports actual issues, and then I actually read the resulting emails it sends.] In addition I also set up a "pre-shared" ssh key with no password and copy the key to the remote router so that the password to log into the router is not passed over the 'net, and also disable root logins. (Okay -- call me paranoid. :-P)
One place I've found with simple instructions for setting up pre-shared ssh keys:
http://rcsg-gsir.imsb-dsgi.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/documents/internet/node31.html
And although I know I could do the same thing to log into the user's box through the router via pre-shared keys and ssh-agent forwarding:
http://unixwiz.net/techtips/ssh-agent-forwarding.html
instead I don't actually bother to do so, and just use a normal ssh password login to the user's box.
Login steps to get to user's box:
- log in via SSH to the remote router, with X fowarding
ssh -l (normal_user_username) -X -p (port) (remote_router) # ex: ssh -l mooha -X -p 1022 router.mydomain.com
- log in via SSH (as a normal user) to the user's box, with X forwarding
- su to root on user's box
- su to that user
- tell the user to quit the program they're having a problem with
- run the specific program they're having a problem with myself and have a look
Upsides:
- secure
- gives user some privacy (can't see their screen)
- never "take over" the user's mouse
Downsides:
- can't see the user's screen
- need to know the actual program name to run, rather than using the menus in the window manager
- difficult to have a look at "non-application" programs such as desktop widgets (which is usually not a problem)
Have you upgraded to 4.8 or 4.9, which I heard is a lot better? Or do they still have similar problems w/ Nepomuk and Strigi?
I'm running KDE 4.8.4, which is what is in Debian Unstable. Before a presentation I did on KDE4 for my local lug I tried Strigi/Nepomuk features again in KDE4.8 and performance was again terrible -- many hours of 100% CPU time during the indexing process. [IIRC on the same P4 system this process took somewhere between 14 to 18 hours to index a home directory with 30 GB of stuff in it, and I think the resulting Virtuoso database was about 1 GB.] The reason is that Nepomuk/Strigi uses several "ontologies" run as separate background processes to do the indexing -- one "ontology" for each type of indexing being done -- file names, pictures, audio files, etc -- so you'd think this would be a single background process searching the disk, but no it's like 5 or 6. And the thing is, I have no reason to use either of these services. To even find out what these services can do isn't easy, because the documentation for them in the KDE manual is terrible. However if you search around the 'net you'll eventually find this:
https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/
As you read the above document here's some details to keep in mind: I use Krusader as my chosen file manager, not Dolphin. I don't use DigiKam or Gwenview (I use Geeqie as my chosen picture viewer). I never use the Alt-F2 Krunner menu, and I never give files tags or comments to them. Therefore Nepomuk as it stands today is totally doesn't serve a purpose for me.
But above all else, I don't want KDE4 choosing on its own when to run a super I/O intensive indexing process just to create a *cache* of things it finds and hold all of that in a huge database. To me that harks back to the 'mlocate' package -- if you've ever been working on a server that suddenly ran like shit and you found an 'updatedb' process running when you viewed the output of 'top', that's the package that did that. But unlike the mlocate package that called the updatedb process via cron, there's no way to tell KDE4 when to allow it to do the indexing or to limit CPU or I/O -- the only thing you can limit is how much RAM is used, which doesn't address this problem. The indexing starts by default, immediately after your very first login, causing the computer to run like utter shit, and your only choice to stop it is to immediately go to System Settings -> Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Desktop Search and turn these features off . And that's only if you know where to go and what to do. This is why many users that try KDE4 for the first time say "I can't use this, it makes my computer run like shit." And unfortunately, by the default settings KDE4 gives you, they're right.
There are many other levels of FAIL here, too -- the listing of Control Center modules in the KDE Help are not even in alphabetical order, so even if you somehow know that settings for Nepomuk are in the "Desktop Search" section, it's still an effort to find in the list. Then once you look through the help for the Desktop Search, the documentation that is there is simplistic and doesn't even tell you how you can use it, and doesn't give you any warning whatsoever of the performance impact these services have. [I discussed the lack of performance warning with the KDE4 developers at the time, and they were again unsympathetic. After about a week of arguing and "talk to the hand", they told me to create a KDE account and to propose wording myself, which they'd then review and consider. The problem with this suggestion is that they had already made it quite clear that they were not going to take it seriously.] And the way you get into trying to fix the performance disaster is finding several 'nepomuk' processes, so you try to fi
> Almost all software has that problem.
This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."
This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.
As much as I love KDE4 of today, I agre with you concerning how they treated the transition period during the time of KDE4.2. Nepomuk was my biggest problem at the time -- after I gave it time to index files, trying to selecting 100 files in Krusader would make a P4 machine unusuable for 30 seconds -- and that's just for the select operation. [And I really mean 30 actual seconds.] By the time 30 seconds had gone by I had clicked somewhere else thinking I had done something wrong, whereby that click was remembered and all of the files were de-selected, then I'd have to go through that whole 30-second wait for the select process again. The Virtuoso index database that Strigi/Nepomuk had created was > 2GB, which in itself was rediculous and was why the select operation was taking so long. I had not changed any Nepomuk settings BTW -- they were the default.
I finally figured that out that Strigi/Nepomuk was the problem and wrote the KDE4 developers to describe the issue, and none seemed sympathetic. Either they argued that a P4 machine was too old to matter, didn't believe my report, or made unhelpful statements such as "Nepomuk is not going away". Basically the answers I got amounted to "talk to the hand." [And by the way that same P4 machine runs just fine with KDE4 today as long as Strigi and Nepomuk are fully turned off.]
Nepomuk today remains my biggest complaint with KDE4, and so I always advice turning both it and Strigi indexing fully off. Once that's done KDE4 is very enjoyable to use, so it's still my daily default.
I don't use Gnome3 -- I tried it for a few minutes and found it frustrating. Same goes for Unity. MATE and Cinnamon both seem fine, and I like Xfce. GNOME has long had issues with listening to user desires, so I'm really not surprised about this issue.
...
The aftermath, of course, is that all telephone companies are now Bell, and service, which costs $20 / month, is now mandatory.
Heh.. I loved the movie Demolition Man.
Surely using elitism isn't going to help the Gentoo project.
It's worked so far, the perceived elitism seems to be all it's got going for it!
:-P
In talking to opinionated Gentoo advocates sometimes it can seem like that. I assume that they mean well. Personally, I greatly prefer at least an attempt at an objective point of view, where one explains both the benefits and the drawbacks. For instance the first LUG I started with a lot of people would say "Debian is great", but couldn't say why, even when I directly asked, and also were unable to tell me any of the drawbacks of switching to it. Being that I was coming from Slackware there were some, because I had to switch from a BSD-type startup where each startup level had a single script, to a SystemV-type startup where each runlevel had a directory with softlinks to individual startup scripts in /etc/init.d/. This doesn't sound like such a big deal, but it was, because on Slackware one modifies these startup scripts regularly, whereas on most other systems you may not need to (or if you do, it's not very often).
So this is a hint to all free software advocates: "keep it real". State both the benefits and the drawbacks that you know of for what you're advocating. Doing so greatly aids credibility, and gives the receiver of the information a more informed point of view.
the only thing I think is missing is a simple graphical installer
Arch is supposed to be like slackware (vanilla packages, KISS principle) but with rolling updates. The installation just isn't that big of a deal, because the target user already has a plan and knows how to get there. A graphical installer would be a solution looking for a problem. Like slackware and gentoo, arch is intended for people who prefer to be "on their own".
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to complete a fancy, inspiring, totally graphical installation only to be dumped at the command prompt on your first boot. D'oh!
Generally the distributions with graphical installers also set up X and your choice of desktop environment, and this was what I had in mind when I made the comment. [Gentoo is a notable exception here: the Gentoo LiveCD has a graphical installer, which after using leaves you with a text-console-only installation. :-P] In terms of Slackware, today I'd likely choose Vector Linux (which is based on Slackware) rather than Slackware, for the graphical installer and more importantly due to the package manager that includes an online repository, which Slackware lacks by default. It was Slackware's lack of abillity to keep the distribution up-to-date via package managment that forced me to give it up sometime between 1999 and 2000, whereby I went to Debian. [And other than Debian's internal politics, I've been happy since. ;-)]
A graphical installer (and setting up Xorg and a desktop envioronment) makes a distribution more accessible -- it greatly reduces the time it takes to get a distribution up and running. It seems Arch had some kind of automated installer at one time, but that seems to have been abandoned since. I don't think a lack of a graphical installer is as much of a design choice rather than something avoided due to the situations the graphical installer might not be able to handle at first.
As for gentoo, of course it has "insane long compiles" -- that is the main design feature. It is supposed to be a meta-distribution where you essentially create your own custom distro yourself. This is a totally different paradigm from any other distro.
I agree.
In conclusion, arch, slack, and gentoo are not typical consumer-oriented distros. Sure you can turn any one of them into a slick desktop, but they make no assumption about that. They just give you the tools, and you build the house yourself. If you like the idea of a clean, simple distro without the "bullshit", I would suggest debian.
Heh. Yes, although you're preeching to the choir -- I've been running Debian for both desktop and servers for 13 years. ;-) This is one one of the reasons I did the "free software survey", because it's been too long since I've run anything but Debian.
I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
Hmm okay thanks for letting me know what your experience with Mint was. I've only deployed Mint Debian to one user so far -- it was a laptop with only 256MB of RAM and a low-end videocard, so I deployed it with Xfce. The only issue the user complained about was a sticking Enter key on the keyboard. The user remained happy with that until she upgraded to a different laptop, which came with Windows 7. [And naturally the new laptop didn't come with OS reinstallation disks.]
The icon on the K menu in KDE is relatively easy to change; right-click, go to Application Launcher Menu Settings, choose Options, click on the Icon to choose a different icon. I occasionally try a different KDE icon, but like you I generally like the default.
I know what you mean about these annoyances, though -- Debian generally keeps the default appearances "barebones" so there's generally not a lot of branding past the Splash screens for Grub2 and the desktop manager, and I likewise like that -- so I know where you're coming from.
Mark is basically MIA from Debian, personally I'm surprised they haven't chucked him out of the project yet.
My understanding is that they don't really do that, unless the developer makes an announcement that they're leaving the project.
I believe that the one that is based on Debian is aimed more @ servers, than @ desktops. Instead of deriving their server version from Ubuntu, Mint went straight w/ Debian
Actually no, both versions of Mint are specifically focused on desktop use. The idea behind Mint Debian is that you can use the actual Debian Testing repositories so that all of that software is then avialable to Mint. [They also state that the Debian-based edition is faster and more responsive than the Ubuntu-based edition.]
I'm sort of tied to Debian Sid/Unstable right now because that's the target for new source package uploads, and I'm getting into Debian development. Also most Debian-based distributions (including Ubuntu) would rather have packages go through Debian first, so if that was my target then I'd still need Debian Sid. ;-)
Are you being humours with the "con" (ironical? ;-)) or can't you spell canonical?
:-P Apparently it's that I can't spell Canonical.
Do you know what the word means? If not, it's particularly ironic given the content of your post.
"Canonical is the adjective for canon, literally a 'rule', and has come to mean also 'standard', 'typical', or 'unique distinguished exemplar'." - Wikipedia
Haha! Nice -- thanks for pointing out that irony. Sort of fitting. :-P