It would have been nice if they tried Xubuntu too. Ubuntu based,
XFCE as a light, yet feature rich (to some extent) desktop. Clean, good looking, very responsive. Some screenies here.
Me too. You make a good point. Besides, the people behind the project should seriously consider sell these babies at a premium to people in developed markets. Many people will buy one as a way to partially subsidize the production. Plus you get a pretty useful gadget.
Hell, I live in an expensive area of the US. I spend over a 100 bucks anytime I go to the supermarket and pick up a few things for next week for me and my family.
Allright, I am running it (from the development branch, Cooker, when they froze all checkins).
If you are planning to run it, you may consider a quick look at:
The Mandriva 2006 Twiki Page. It has links to the Errata Page, Release Notes and the Distro Changelog
My first impressions:
Very Fast. Boots fast (see the link above). It runs very fast, I guess because of the use of gcc4. Very, very responsive.
Sexy. Fonts look great, KDE 3.4.2 looks fantastic. It also is very useable, again, mainly because of KDE in my setup. The Mandrake tools are, as always, greatly appreciated, including urpmi. Haven't tried using s.m.a.r.t. yet.
No Kat, No ACPI. YMMV, but Kat brings my desktop down ot its knees. It takes way too much CPU usage. I uninstalled it. And there is a know bug (follow the links above) in X org that they will try to fix soon, but the quick workaround is to disable ACPI. Please don't bitch, if you can't live without it (like if you have a laptop), just wait a couple weeks for the fix and then you install
OOO 2.0. I am running the Open Office 2.0 from the contributed packages, it runs great, I am really loving it. Point your software manager to the Contrib medium and install (or join the Club and everything will be even easier). There is a nice ooo-kde package to integrate (not perfect yet) with KDE. Sweet.
Yes, you are right. It is news. I apologize for the tone of my original post. I got upset because I thought I was intentionally misleading, but re reading both the article and my post I really think that I was off the mark.
Way to be sensasionalist. In the middle of a PR fight to see whether IE or Firefox are more secure, and spectacular announcements of security breaches here and there, we get this post, talking about a new security breach in FireFox... marketing website. Nothing much to see here.
Where do these people think up these imaginary problems? "Lack of conceptual integrity"? "Lack of innovation"?
The open source community has been a source of quality software and helpful guidance for as long as I've used it (YMMV of course).
Exactly. And let's cite a few examples:
Apache.
OpenOffice.
Linux Kernel, BSD Kernel.
KDE, GNOME.
Samba
Mozilla suite, Firefox
And I am leaving a lot of large scale, succesfull, profesional grade, conceptually integral and in many cases innovative Open Sourve / Free software. Many of them more industry specific, like JBoss.
And for God's sake, not every fscking project needs to be innovative, all right ?
The answer for me is easy: kontact. I use all the components, including KMail. It syncs the Calendar, TODO list, etc., perfectly with my PDA (a Sony Clie).
After years of exclusive use of Linux (and in the recent years very user friendly Mandrake), I have been forced in the last few months to use WinXP (at work). It's not as bad as Win9*, it definitely improved in stability, but that's about it. Not as user friendly as Mandrake, and boy does it suck in terms of efficiency.
My home pc, a modest whitebox AMD Linux machine with 256 MB of cheap ram kicks ass as compared to my dual processor 2.8 GHz Intel WinXP machine with 1 Gb of Ram. One main process runs fine, but multitasking is dead slow. Just pathetic, you mostly need to halt all other work while compiling software with MS Visual Studio (or while running a heavy number crunching sheet in excel).
The only edge for Windows is its huge user base. You know that you can buy any gadget and it'll come with a Win driver. It might suck but there it is. This is a convenience, let's face it, and that's the ONLY reason why windows still makes some sense as an option IMHO. The evil empire might be falling sooner than expected.:-)
No, the third world needs a source of clean drinking water, democratic governments instead of tinpot dictators and warlords, education on how to grow crops instead of remaining nomadic herders, better housing, and public schools to name a few things. Computers don't even rate on any list of things the third world needs.
How condescendent an illiterate of you. Thank you, we do have democracies in most of our countries. We know how to grow crops. However, we have little help from the illuminated first world.
Do you know how many of the dictatorships in the third world are orchestrated in the first world ? Do you know how many times the first world, and notably the US has supported these dictatorships.
For example in the 70's in South america, and most of the last century in Central America. Did you notice that Irak has recently been invaded
by an oil hungry nation, and tens of thousands
of innocents iraquies died ? Is that the help we are gonna get ?
We do need computers. Actually we have computers. But we do need to get to a point where there is no digital divide. We have to avoid intellectual and productive dependency. For everyone's sake. Because after all there is one planet, one human kind, and we should all help each other to live in peace and harmony. Oh, yeah, that's what Free Software is all about.
Funny thing is, you get modded as insightfull, and I'll get modded down to hell. Anyone has a suggestion for a better Tech forum than Slashdot ?
If you have an older version installed, you can upgrade using urpmi. First add 10.2 sources from the control center. Then, you can upgrade everything from the software installer in the control center (select to see packages by upgrade availability). Or easier, as root from a console,
urpmi --auto-select --auto --no-verify-rpm
I used --no-verify-rpm because I selected PLF sources for 10.2 and the contrib packages, and some of them have wrong (or no) signatures.
Warning: there is an official/10.2/ branch in the ftp mirrors, do not use it. It is broken, and it broke my Mandrake 10.1. You have to use the "devel" branch from the ftp mirrors, as explained in Mandriva's announcement.
After fixing manually the mess I got from the "official" upgrade, I pointed urpmi to the "devel" branch and everything went 100% smooth. Mandriva 10.2 looks very solid, no huge changes from 10.1 but nice and 95% polished (there is a rough edge here or there, nothing serious).
One more thing, after upgrading, you can add the latest kernel from the software installer.
Anway, i found interesting that Pat mentions XFCE as a "fixed an polished" desktop. It's great, and while i'd hate to see GNOME loose popularity, at this time XFCE 4.2 is a better GNOME than GNOME itself.
I second this. XFCE is as fast as GNOME used to be, its interface is as simple as GNOME is today, and in general it feels more cleanly designed, and it doesn't seem less powerfull. If you like GNOME and you still haven't done so, give XFCE a try. You may find it pretty useful.
but QT designer does not actually support python natively does it?
Well, if you install pyqt, you will be using pyuic, which converts the designer output into python code. From the pyqt page:
PyQt includes pyuic which takes the same designs that uic converts to C++, but converts them to the equivalent Python code. This makes PyQt particularly useful as a rapid prototyping environment for applications that will eventually be implemented in C++.
First of all, my warmest regards to the gamba team. And I wish them all the success.
But I thought I should point out that there is a beautifull platfrom for cross-platftorm RAD. This is
PyQt, used in conjunction with Qt Designer. It combines the power of Qt as a GUI dev platform, with the power, extendability and simplicity of Python. I think that gambas aims at a simpler approach though, so I am not saying that it is useless. What I am saying is, if you need a very powerfull yet simple RAD with graphical capabilities, maybe you would like to consider QtDesinger + PyQt. It also has the advantage that is a really mature platform.
What really bothers me with Walmart Computer products is that they never, ever post full specs. So you either guess, or find out somewhere else. So, what's the weight of this beast ? This is kind of important for a notebook. Is there an internal modem ? Ethernet port ? (most mobos if not all come with ethernet on board these days). Is there a free slot to add at least 128 of RAM ?
How come it only has a 1.5 hour of battery life ?
Of course, it doesn't seem to have a PCMCIA slot, this is inconvenient for a notebook. But, if it is light, it has an ethernet port and you can easily add 128 Mb (which is really inexpensive these days), you can have a fully functional notebook for about US$ 550. Not bad at all ! But they NEED to give you the info ! I hope they'll stock them in the stores, I'd love to see it and maybe get one.
Re:You wouldn't compile from scratch.
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. The idea would be that someone does the job for you. Someone will use the power and flexibility of Gentoo for customizing a Linux distro appropriate for your little Gadget. And this someone is the vendor of your little gadget. Heck, you may not be given the choice to compile anything in most appliances.
Re:Smart move of Skype?
on
Skype + Kazaa = ?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to agree here. The reason for them to do this seems to be their hunger for new users.
My feeling is that their business plan was:
Release a great product: IM and VoIP in a cute small package that just works eveywhere (Windows, Macs, Linux). PC to PC calls are free, PC to Phone calls is their revenue (they charge for them)
Make the product massively popular
Get a steady revenue from a small percentage of the huge user base, making PC to Phone calls
Problem is, step 2 didn't go very well. They have a nice user base, but it seems not to be large enough for their needs.
I am a happy Linux Skype user myself, and I buy skypeout PC-Phone talk time regularly. My feeling from the tone of the skype employees posts in the forums is that they need to increase their user base, and they need it soon. Good luck to them. I would prefer an OS product, but skype installed in a snap and it just works, at least for me.
They don't need cross-platform toolkits. They hire cross-platform programmers, who are experienced in coding in native apis like Xlib and Windows API.
But Dante, this is exactly the point. Your development cost this way is roughly propotional to N when you develop for N platforms. If you use a cross platform toolkit, somebody did the effort of abstracting/mapping the native APIs on a common API for you. You develop once, desploy everywhere. Your cost is N times lower, in this case 3 times lower.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to begin Windows development on something like Qt, that can then be recompiled for Mac, Linux, BSD, etc ? Qt's abstraction for the filesystem would probably have been enough for them, and the GUI capabilities are way more than they need. Not to mention i18n and so forth.
Or, if Qt is an issue, why not Java ?
And we are talking Google, the Champions of the internet, and a serious competitor for MS on some areas... cross platform should be the way to go for them !
I would bet that with the gaining momentum of Linux as a corporate/govenrment desktop environment, teaming up with SuSE could be a good idea for Dell. Not that RedHat is horrible unusable or anything, but SuSE is more polished and integrated for the end user, and they are in a position of offering top of the line KDE, GNOME or a combination of both.
How about we stop posting stories of Companies and other entities considering a switch to Linux or Mac or whatever ? How about we only post actual switching stories ? They exist and thy are out there. We all know that many companies and Governments are using (especially) Linux as a negotiating argument to get a better deal from Microsoft. Let the involved parts alone. If the company is really serious and they implement it, let's see how and what they did.
the relative difference between the 90nm processors (defined as the difference divided by the average) in power consumptions is huge, and pretty consistent: 30% at idle, and then 43%, 45% and 44% for the other tests. These are huge numbers !
This is a recurrent but valid question. From
the preview:
The OQO comes with XP Home, but on account of the companies large interest in marketing towards mobile professionals, XP Professional will most likely be an option as well. OQO CEO Jory Bell confirms that the x86 architecture is capable of being used with any x86 based OS, such as Linux.
Further talks have revealed that some OQO employees have already tested out Linux on the device with success.
It's all good. So, can I buy it with no OS,
with the cost of windows XP deducted from the total price ? Or do I have to pay the MS tax, even if I don't plan on using Win XP on it?
Slashdot Mirror
It would have been nice if they tried Xubuntu too. Ubuntu based, XFCE as a light, yet feature rich (to some extent) desktop. Clean, good looking, very responsive. Some screenies here.
Hell, I live in an expensive area of the US. I spend over a 100 bucks anytime I go to the supermarket and pick up a few things for next week for me and my family.
If you are planning to run it, you may consider a quick look at: The Mandriva 2006 Twiki Page. It has links to the Errata Page, Release Notes and the Distro Changelog
My first impressions:
Cheers,
Don Inodoro
Cheers
Way to be sensasionalist. In the middle of a PR fight to see whether IE or Firefox are more secure, and spectacular announcements of security breaches here and there, we get this post, talking about a new security breach in FireFox ... marketing website. Nothing much to see here.
-
Apache.
-
OpenOffice.
-
Linux Kernel, BSD Kernel.
-
KDE, GNOME.
-
Samba
- Mozilla suite, Firefox
And I am leaving a lot of large scale, succesfull, profesional grade, conceptually integral and in many cases innovative Open Sourve / Free software. Many of them more industry specific, like JBoss.And for God's sake, not every fscking project needs to be innovative, all right ?
The answer for me is easy: kontact. I use all the components, including KMail. It syncs the Calendar, TODO list, etc., perfectly with my PDA (a Sony Clie).
My home pc, a modest whitebox AMD Linux machine with 256 MB of cheap ram kicks ass as compared to my dual processor 2.8 GHz Intel WinXP machine with 1 Gb of Ram. One main process runs fine, but multitasking is dead slow. Just pathetic, you mostly need to halt all other work while compiling software with MS Visual Studio (or while running a heavy number crunching sheet in excel).
The only edge for Windows is its huge user base. You know that you can buy any gadget and it'll come with a Win driver. It might suck but there it is. This is a convenience, let's face it, and that's the ONLY reason why windows still makes some sense as an option IMHO. The evil empire might be falling sooner than expected. :-)
How condescendent an illiterate of you. Thank you, we do have democracies in most of our countries. We know how to grow crops. However, we have little help from the illuminated first world.
Do you know how many of the dictatorships in the third world are orchestrated in the first world ? Do you know how many times the first world, and notably the US has supported these dictatorships. For example in the 70's in South america, and most of the last century in Central America. Did you notice that Irak has recently been invaded by an oil hungry nation, and tens of thousands of innocents iraquies died ? Is that the help we are gonna get ?
We do need computers. Actually we have computers. But we do need to get to a point where there is no digital divide. We have to avoid intellectual and productive dependency. For everyone's sake. Because after all there is one planet, one human kind, and we should all help each other to live in peace and harmony. Oh, yeah, that's what Free Software is all about.
Funny thing is, you get modded as insightfull, and I'll get modded down to hell. Anyone has a suggestion for a better Tech forum than Slashdot ?
Warning: there is an official/10.2/ branch in the ftp mirrors, do not use it. It is broken, and it broke my Mandrake 10.1. You have to use the "devel" branch from the ftp mirrors, as explained in Mandriva's announcement.
After fixing manually the mess I got from the "official" upgrade, I pointed urpmi to the "devel" branch and everything went 100% smooth. Mandriva 10.2 looks very solid, no huge changes from 10.1 but nice and 95% polished (there is a rough edge here or there, nothing serious).
One more thing, after upgrading, you can add the latest kernel from the software installer.
Now, you really have to be an ass if you try to fsck with the hand that's feeding you. And we are talking about people making tons of money anyways !
But I thought I should point out that there is a beautifull platfrom for cross-platftorm RAD. This is PyQt, used in conjunction with Qt Designer. It combines the power of Qt as a GUI dev platform, with the power, extendability and simplicity of Python. I think that gambas aims at a simpler approach though, so I am not saying that it is useless. What I am saying is, if you need a very powerfull yet simple RAD with graphical capabilities, maybe you would like to consider QtDesinger + PyQt. It also has the advantage that is a really mature platform.
Cheers !
Of course, it doesn't seem to have a PCMCIA slot, this is inconvenient for a notebook. But, if it is light, it has an ethernet port and you can easily add 128 Mb (which is really inexpensive these days), you can have a fully functional notebook for about US$ 550. Not bad at all ! But they NEED to give you the info ! I hope they'll stock them in the stores, I'd love to see it and maybe get one.
Exactly. The idea would be that someone does the job for you. Someone will use the power and flexibility of Gentoo for customizing a Linux distro appropriate for your little Gadget. And this someone is the vendor of your little gadget. Heck, you may not be given the choice to compile anything in most appliances.
My feeling is that their business plan was:
- Release a great product: IM and VoIP in a cute small package that just works eveywhere (Windows, Macs, Linux). PC to PC calls are free, PC to Phone calls is their revenue (they charge for them)
- Make the product massively popular
- Get a steady revenue from a small percentage of the huge user base, making PC to Phone calls
Problem is, step 2 didn't go very well. They have a nice user base, but it seems not to be large enough for their needs.I am a happy Linux Skype user myself, and I buy skypeout PC-Phone talk time regularly. My feeling from the tone of the skype employees posts in the forums is that they need to increase their user base, and they need it soon. Good luck to them. I would prefer an OS product, but skype installed in a snap and it just works, at least for me.
Or, if Qt is an issue, why not Java ?
And we are talking Google, the Champions of the internet, and a serious competitor for MS on some areas ... cross platform should be the way to go for them !
I would bet that with the gaining momentum of Linux as a corporate/govenrment desktop environment, teaming up with SuSE could be a good idea for Dell. Not that RedHat is horrible unusable or anything, but SuSE is more polished and integrated for the end user, and they are in a position of offering top of the line KDE, GNOME or a combination of both.
How about we stop posting stories of Companies and other entities considering a switch to Linux or Mac or whatever ? How about we only post actual switching stories ? They exist and thy are out there. We all know that many companies and Governments are using (especially) Linux as a negotiating argument to get a better deal from Microsoft. Let the involved parts alone. If the company is really serious and they implement it, let's see how and what they did.
the relative difference between the 90nm processors (defined as the difference divided by the average) in power consumptions is huge, and pretty consistent: 30% at idle, and then 43%, 45% and 44% for the other tests. These are huge numbers !