Wow, look at his comparison charts in the package management section and you will find that a huge majority of systems are using rpm. A couple of deb, and a couple of tar.gz systems and all of the rest are rpm based. So why is that the (arguably) worst package management system ever is so predominately used? SuSE is the only company I have seen that can make it work well. Having said that, SuSE would be my main distro if they would switch to the deb format. As it is now, I will take Debian or Slack over any of the others simply for their non-use of rpms. Who knows, maybe I have spent too much time in dependancy hell.
Low power is great, there is a definite need for using less power and producing less heat in some systems. As for MHZ increases, I truly wonder what is driving the need for speed anymore other than media types and gamers. Where are the next generation apps that will utilize this kind of firepower? Media producers, avid gamers, engineers, and server roles excluded, who else needs or even wants this kind of power? What will you do with it, besides *everything* you do today "faster"?
I have to wonder if that is what they are realling interested in doing? It is damn hard to make money with Linux services and support. Most of the people who are capable of using Linux in a production arena do not need or require support contracts and consulting services. Until there exists an enterprise level killer app for Linux the only people who are going to be interested in running linux are geeks anyway. Think of an exchange killer for the enterprise, that is when the conservative management types will become interested in Linux. That is also when companies will be able to survive offering up expertise and service contracts. Till then, good luck hitching your wagon to the Linux money train because it just does not exist. Quite possible it never will either.
do not add up and betray his total lack of experience administering a windows network.
Consider this quote:
In operation, a Windows-based client-server system of this complexity will be staffed at a user:support ratio of about 30:1, and so needs about 165 full-time support people plus a base Information Systems (IS) staff of about 35 for single shift operation.
The Unix setting, in contrast, needs two groups of 20 people in the data centers and a staff of perhaps five. This totals 45 IS staffers for 24 x 7 operation.
Seems to me that he is relying on actually beating feet to the desktop when a user has a problem instead of using the (considerable) remote management tools that are available in Windows. It still does not offer the manageability of 'nix systems, but there are tools and methods available that make supporting the systems bearable.
As far as training new users on Linux, only give them what they need and no more! Everything the typical user needs to do should be accomplished by clicking on a pretty icon, period. Do not assume that Linux in a corporate (or academic) environment is going to look anything like your Linux box.
Why not take the things that BeOS did well and port them to a platform that has a chance of surviving? BeOS was beautiful to look at, the interface made sense, and the response to user input was blazing. All things that make for a nice desktop / multimedia OS, and all things that Linux could benefit from if it wants to compete on the desktop. Other aspects of BeOS such as networking, security, and hardware support were not so highly evolved and probably never would have been. Note that these are areas where Linux is somewhat evolved. I for one would love to see a marriage of the two.
How many of you know exactly where to look for caffiene, t-shirts, and mp3 devices? My point is everyone who reads/. has been exposed to the thinkgeek banners hundreds if not thousands of times. The ads actually work too, though I am far more likely to type in the url for thinkgeek than I am too click on a banner. There is such a thing as overexposure. I think we need more variety in ads, not bigger ads for the same damn things we have seen countless times. Hey Taco, why not post the stats for the percentage of people who have turned off the OSDN nav bar?
From the article: Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won't be free.
Way to ensure that Oracle stays around for ever Larry! Not a bad bit of insurance for Sun either as they are likely to be the platform of choice.
I have to wonder if any OS that is primarily used as a server needs something like Gnome. The experience I have had with Solaris has been fine and I have never found myself looking for more eye candy. Maybe it would be nice for those who are using Solaris as a workstation though. So what do the Solaris users out there think? Is this something that anyone is actually going to miss? Or is this more of a situation where Sun would like to have a slick interface too?
Progeny strengths are Debians strengths, namely the ease of upgrading and installing new software and a very cleanly laid out system. The other huge benefit of using Progeny was the fact that it had the Debian heritage behind it all the way, which is what convinced me to try it in the first place. The installer was (is) nice also, maybe the best I have seen. For what it is worth, Progeny is my favorite distro, but I am going out and *buying* the latest from SuSE today. Everyone out there who loves their favorite distro and wants to see them around for a while should do the same.
Why not go all out and just make a KDE Linux distro for everyone out there who wants consistency across the board? I am not much of a KDE user but I do think that this would be the best possible setup for casual users, those new to Linux, and even corporate users. It would also be the end of having multiple apps to do the same thing as KDE seems intent on providing at least a graphical front end to the most commonly used utilities. Seems like a good way to provide a decent system for the less technically inclined out there.
Re:OT: Which distro has a good installer?
on
Kernel 2.4.11 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
It is nice that you are still working on getting Linux set up! You might want to give progeny a go, it is based on debian but the install is much easier to get through. SuSE is not a bad bet, they have some realy nice tools for X configuration. As for mixing and matching distros, I would recommend that you stick with one setup. Some of the differences between distros have to do with the type of package management they use, whether they use custom kernels, the type of init scripts, how the packages were compiled, even the file system.That is probably not something that you want to mess with. Then again, maybe it is and you are just that brave...have fun.Take it for what it is worth, many people here will have valid arguements against any recommendation that someone else is willing to make.
The NIH has a ton of Macs also. One funny (or sad) note on linux though: I know one doctor who works in the NCI (Nat. Cancer Institute) who installed a Red Hat box and promptly got the thing rooted! Someone from their IS department tracked his rogue box down and asked why he was scanning all of the other systems! Oh well, they did help him recover and he is still into learning linux, but his first effort did not make a very good impression to say the least. I would like to know how he got owned though, probably from another box already on their network would be my guess...
Wow, links is much better, thanks for the tip. I am using it to this reply. So far, so good. Seems to have nice table support and clicking on links works as well. Reading the man page for "screen" which sounds promising too. Thanks again. Goodbye lynx hello links!
Out of pure curiosity, I would like to how many people actually stick with one WM? Right now I am using BlackBox, earlier today it was all WindowMaker and later tonight it could be IceWM or Gnome with Sawfish. Usually it is Blackbox or WindowMaker with several virtual desktops and a lot of wterms open all over the place. Most of my application use still consists of console tools running in a wterm or eterm, the few graphical apps that I use with regularity tend to be web tools like browsers or messenger clients. My file manager is usually a Bash prompt, I am looking for a better lynx than lynx and if I find it Mozilla will see a lot less screentime than it does now. Sometimes the only reason I startx is because I like a lot of terminals open at once. So how do you use your window manager of choice? I am almost willing to bet that the average usage of a window manager is not what the developers expected at all in a lot of cases. Then again I could be very wrong and there may be people who really do want a graphical tool replacement for every text based tool out there. Graphical clients for Ping and Telnet come to mind...
Thanks for logging in to reply! As for your offer to move, I think I will stay right here thankyou very much.This is America you know, I have that right. As for my personal thoughts, I promise to try and be a better American like you in the future. Should I start with irrational hatred or good old fashioned war mongering first? By the way, I do have faith in the American people, always have. I do not have blind faith in our elected officials, never will. I just really hate to see solutions like this. I also have a lot of friends in the military that I worry about. Would I like to see those responsible for this die like the animals they are? You bet! Is it going to be that clean and efficient? No way, a lot of innocent people are going to die. Ask yourself what they are going to die for why don't you? Thanks again for the reply!
Best wishes for the people who are about to die on the ground for no reason and the millions of refugees to follow this attack. I wish that I had some semblance of faith in the US's ability to do this right, but I do not have that kind of faith anymore in anything this country does. At least they are dropping food and supplies in concert with the bombs, it is a humanitarian gesture at least. Talk about good cop bad cop! Any way I look at it, this is not going to help me feel more secure or supply some notion of revenge or justice for me. I do not think this will help anything, but I do think it has the potential to make hatred for the US that much worse. Either way, we all lose.
FBSD is not going to die, not with the amount of love and sweat that the users and developers put into it. I primarily use GNU/Linux, bouncing between Progeny and SuSE, but I like having a FBSD box around as well. I am amazed at the war of words brewing between the respective "Communities" found herein though! Most Linux users I know (and I encourage them whenever and wherever possible) are happy to try FBSD, OpenBSD, even QNX. They may not stay with it, but at least they can learn to appreciate the differences along with the many similarities. The funny thing is, you can put all of these systems on a network together and they interoperate just fine. Too bad the same cannot be said for some of the representative factions below. Why does it seem that the assholes are so much louder than the more open minded users? Oh yeah, MS users count too! Some things are better utilized with something like Win2K, media applications spring to mind for myself. Though I am really hoping that this http://www.demudi.org/ can help resolve that defeciency.
All of the staff (around 120 people)are on Win2K and it suits them quite well. We run Win2K on our database and mail servers (for now...) and use linux for network monitoring and security functions with the occasional freebsd box here and there. Most of the IT staff also have a linux or freebsd box for daily use.As a positive note, the next six servers that we are purchasing will run linux. There is also some discussion of ditching a couple of the Win2K servers in favor of linux. We have recieved a couple of requests for linux on the desktop from the more technically inclined staff of late, but that is not just not possible at this time due to one legacy app they must use. So inroads are being made, slowly but surely linux is getting there and becoming an actual alternative for casual users.
I fail to see why we have movie reviews by anyone on slashdot. Why would anyone care if Jon (or anyone else for that matter) goes to the movies and feels the need to "share" afterward. If we must have movie reviews, at least make them interesting movies. This has to be the most hyped piece of crap of the year, anyone who is interested will go and suffer through it without having to be told about it on slashdot.Please stop the movie reviews, or at least make them interesting.
Well, you do have a valid point. It would have been great to refuse the search, but I was not the only one involved. Honestly, when this happened I was too floored by what I was seeing to think straight. When it was over I was very angry at what had taken place, much more so than I expected to be. I do agree with you though, had I been the only one who needed to go NIH that day and had been thinking a little more clearly I would have refused the search. Have a great day.
Today I went to the National Institite of Health in Bethesda Maryland for a checkup. At the shared entrance to NIH and the Metro station, I was stopped by an officer who asked where I was going, gave me a sticker to wear, and told me to pull in behind a line of about 10 cars.Interesting I thought, I wonder what is going on? Well, it did not take long to see that the line of cars I was now in was being combed over by a group of armed officers. When my turn came I was told to shut off the engine, pop the hood, and open the trunk. The officers searched my car in the areas mentioned and had my produce a drivers license (which was copied to a sheet of paper by hand) and then I was allowed to procede.When I reached the parking garage, the same thing happened again except this time they made me get out and open the hood and they searced under the car. One officer told me "just relax, everything is going to be ok" before he started his search. When I was asked how I was doing by another officer, I replied that I must have woken up in another country today because this is not America anymore. You could tell they did not want to be doing this. I cannot begin to describe how stunned I was to have this happen. If this is how we have to live in America now, I do not think that I want to be here anymore. And yes, I do know why they did it, I do understand the current need for such precautions, but this is not an acceptable way to live for me.
Anyone know of a site listing the various linux distro's default settings from a typical install? You know the install I mean, the one performed by newbies that lets inetd fire off multiple servers for no good reason. It should be an interesting comparison, maybe even worthwhile if it is up to date and accurate. I think that would actually be a decision point for newbies who look before they leap, they certainly do not need to run a ton of servers that they do not understand.
What defines a Desktop
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KDE 2.2.1 Up
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· Score: 1
So how does one define a desktop PC anymore? My linux box does not look like your linux box does not look or feel like my co-workers linux box. The core may be the same, or damn close to it, but the part you interact with can be so many things these days that it makes my head spin.So, how do *you* introduce someone to "linux"? CLI, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, Windowmaker or what? You almost know that when corporations start to adopt linux on the desktop that they are going to go with KDE for the most part, though Ximian Gnome may have a fighting chance in some arenas. But what about you, the non-corporate linux user? Where do you want to see the desktop go and why?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, look at his comparison charts in the package management section and you will find that a huge majority of systems are using rpm. A couple of deb, and a couple of tar.gz systems and all of the rest are rpm based. So why is that the (arguably) worst package management system ever is so predominately used? SuSE is the only company I have seen that can make it work well. Having said that, SuSE would be my main distro if they would switch to the deb format. As it is now, I will take Debian or Slack over any of the others simply for their non-use of rpms. Who knows, maybe I have spent too much time in dependancy hell.
Low power is great, there is a definite need for using less power and producing less heat in some systems. As for MHZ increases, I truly wonder what is driving the need for speed anymore other than media types and gamers. Where are the next generation apps that will utilize this kind of firepower? Media producers, avid gamers, engineers, and server roles excluded, who else needs or even wants this kind of power? What will you do with it, besides *everything* you do today "faster"?
I have to wonder if that is what they are realling interested in doing? It is damn hard to make money with Linux services and support. Most of the people who are capable of using Linux in a production arena do not need or require support contracts and consulting services. Until there exists an enterprise level killer app for Linux the only people who are going to be interested in running linux are geeks anyway. Think of an exchange killer for the enterprise, that is when the conservative management types will become interested in Linux. That is also when companies will be able to survive offering up expertise and service contracts. Till then, good luck hitching your wagon to the Linux money train because it just does not exist. Quite possible it never will either.
Consider this quote:
Seems to me that he is relying on actually beating feet to the desktop when a user has a problem instead of using the (considerable) remote management tools that are available in Windows. It still does not offer the manageability of 'nix systems, but there are tools and methods available that make supporting the systems bearable.
As far as training new users on Linux, only give them what they need and no more! Everything the typical user needs to do should be accomplished by clicking on a pretty icon, period. Do not assume that Linux in a corporate (or academic) environment is going to look anything like your Linux box.
Why not take the things that BeOS did well and port them to a platform that has a chance of surviving? BeOS was beautiful to look at, the interface made sense, and the response to user input was blazing. All things that make for a nice desktop / multimedia OS, and all things that Linux could benefit from if it wants to compete on the desktop. Other aspects of BeOS such as networking, security, and hardware support were not so highly evolved and probably never would have been. Note that these are areas where Linux is somewhat evolved. I for one would love to see a marriage of the two.
How many of you know exactly where to look for caffiene, t-shirts, and mp3 devices? My point is everyone who reads /. has been exposed to the thinkgeek banners hundreds if not thousands of times. The ads actually work too, though I am far more likely to type in the url for thinkgeek than I am too click on a banner. There is such a thing as overexposure. I think we need more variety in ads, not bigger ads for the same damn things we have seen countless times. Hey Taco, why not post the stats for the percentage of people who have turned off the OSDN nav bar?
bash# ngrep -i bomb >>terrorist_bastards.txt
From the article:
Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won't be free.
Way to ensure that Oracle stays around for ever Larry! Not a bad bit of insurance for Sun either as they are likely to be the platform of choice.
Is that all it takes to have chicks gather around? To hell with Blackbox, I am switching to KDE poste haste!
I have to wonder if any OS that is primarily used as a server needs something like Gnome. The experience I have had with Solaris has been fine and I have never found myself looking for more eye candy. Maybe it would be nice for those who are using Solaris as a workstation though. So what do the Solaris users out there think? Is this something that anyone is actually going to miss? Or is this more of a situation where Sun would like to have a slick interface too?
Progeny strengths are Debians strengths, namely the ease of upgrading and installing new software and a very cleanly laid out system. The other huge benefit of using Progeny was the fact that it had the Debian heritage behind it all the way, which is what convinced me to try it in the first place. The installer was (is) nice also, maybe the best I have seen. For what it is worth, Progeny is my favorite distro, but I am going out and *buying* the latest from SuSE today. Everyone out there who loves their favorite distro and wants to see them around for a while should do the same.
Why not go all out and just make a KDE Linux distro for everyone out there who wants consistency across the board? I am not much of a KDE user but I do think that this would be the best possible setup for casual users, those new to Linux, and even corporate users. It would also be the end of having multiple apps to do the same thing as KDE seems intent on providing at least a graphical front end to the most commonly used utilities. Seems like a good way to provide a decent system for the less technically inclined out there.
It is nice that you are still working on getting Linux set up! You might want to give progeny a go, it is based on debian but the install is much easier to get through. SuSE is not a bad bet, they have some realy nice tools for X configuration. As for mixing and matching distros, I would recommend that you stick with one setup. Some of the differences between distros have to do with the type of package management they use, whether they use custom kernels, the type of init scripts, how the packages were compiled, even the file system.That is probably not something that you want to mess with. Then again, maybe it is and you are just that brave...have fun.Take it for what it is worth, many people here will have valid arguements against any recommendation that someone else is willing to make.
The NIH has a ton of Macs also. One funny (or sad) note on linux though: I know one doctor who works in the NCI (Nat. Cancer Institute) who installed a Red Hat box and promptly got the thing rooted! Someone from their IS department tracked his rogue box down and asked why he was scanning all of the other systems! Oh well, they did help him recover and he is still into learning linux, but his first effort did not make a very good impression to say the least. I would like to know how he got owned though, probably from another box already on their network would be my guess...
Wow, links is much better, thanks for the tip. I am using it to this reply. So far, so good. Seems to have nice table support and clicking on links works as well. Reading the man page for "screen" which sounds promising too. Thanks again. Goodbye lynx hello links!
Out of pure curiosity, I would like to how many people actually stick with one WM? Right now I am using BlackBox, earlier today it was all WindowMaker and later tonight it could be IceWM or Gnome with Sawfish. Usually it is Blackbox or WindowMaker with several virtual desktops and a lot of wterms open all over the place. Most of my application use still consists of console tools running in a wterm or eterm, the few graphical apps that I use with regularity tend to be web tools like browsers or messenger clients. My file manager is usually a Bash prompt, I am looking for a better lynx than lynx and if I find it Mozilla will see a lot less screentime than it does now. Sometimes the only reason I startx is because I like a lot of terminals open at once. So how do you use your window manager of choice? I am almost willing to bet that the average usage of a window manager is not what the developers expected at all in a lot of cases. Then again I could be very wrong and there may be people who really do want a graphical tool replacement for every text based tool out there. Graphical clients for Ping and Telnet come to mind...
Thanks for logging in to reply! As for your offer to move, I think I will stay right here thankyou very much.This is America you know, I have that right. As for my personal thoughts, I promise to try and be a better American like you in the future. Should I start with irrational hatred or good old fashioned war mongering first? By the way, I do have faith in the American people, always have. I do not have blind faith in our elected officials, never will. I just really hate to see solutions like this. I also have a lot of friends in the military that I worry about. Would I like to see those responsible for this die like the animals they are? You bet! Is it going to be that clean and efficient? No way, a lot of innocent people are going to die. Ask yourself what they are going to die for why don't you? Thanks again for the reply!
Best wishes for the people who are about to die on the ground for no reason and the millions of refugees to follow this attack. I wish that I had some semblance of faith in the US's ability to do this right, but I do not have that kind of faith anymore in anything this country does. At least they are dropping food and supplies in concert with the bombs, it is a humanitarian gesture at least. Talk about good cop bad cop! Any way I look at it, this is not going to help me feel more secure or supply some notion of revenge or justice for me. I do not think this will help anything, but I do think it has the potential to make hatred for the US that much worse. Either way, we all lose.
FBSD is not going to die, not with the amount of love and sweat that the users and developers put into it. I primarily use GNU/Linux, bouncing between Progeny and SuSE, but I like having a FBSD box around as well. I am amazed at the war of words brewing between the respective "Communities" found herein though! Most Linux users I know (and I encourage them whenever and wherever possible) are happy to try FBSD, OpenBSD, even QNX. They may not stay with it, but at least they can learn to appreciate the differences along with the many similarities. The funny thing is, you can put all of these systems on a network together and they interoperate just fine. Too bad the same cannot be said for some of the representative factions below. Why does it seem that the assholes are so much louder than the more open minded users? Oh yeah, MS users count too! Some things are better utilized with something like Win2K, media applications spring to mind for myself. Though I am really hoping that this http://www.demudi.org/ can help resolve that defeciency.
All of the staff (around 120 people)are on Win2K and it suits them quite well. We run Win2K on our database and mail servers (for now...) and use linux for network monitoring and security functions with the occasional freebsd box here and there. Most of the IT staff also have a linux or freebsd box for daily use.As a positive note, the next six servers that we are purchasing will run linux. There is also some discussion of ditching a couple of the Win2K servers in favor of linux. We have recieved a couple of requests for linux on the desktop from the more technically inclined staff of late, but that is not just not possible at this time due to one legacy app they must use. So inroads are being made, slowly but surely linux is getting there and becoming an actual alternative for casual users.
I fail to see why we have movie reviews by anyone on slashdot. Why would anyone care if Jon (or anyone else for that matter) goes to the movies and feels the need to "share" afterward. If we must have movie reviews, at least make them interesting movies. This has to be the most hyped piece of crap of the year, anyone who is interested will go and suffer through it without having to be told about it on slashdot.Please stop the movie reviews, or at least make them interesting.
Well, you do have a valid point. It would have been great to refuse the search, but I was not the only one involved. Honestly, when this happened I was too floored by what I was seeing to think straight. When it was over I was very angry at what had taken place, much more so than I expected to be. I do agree with you though, had I been the only one who needed to go NIH that day and had been thinking a little more clearly I would have refused the search. Have a great day.
Today I went to the National Institite of Health in Bethesda Maryland for a checkup. At the shared entrance to NIH and the Metro station, I was stopped by an officer who asked where I was going, gave me a sticker to wear, and told me to pull in behind a line of about 10 cars.Interesting I thought, I wonder what is going on? Well, it did not take long to see that the line of cars I was now in was being combed over by a group of armed officers. When my turn came I was told to shut off the engine, pop the hood, and open the trunk. The officers searched my car in the areas mentioned and had my produce a drivers license (which was copied to a sheet of paper by hand) and then I was allowed to procede.When I reached the parking garage, the same thing happened again except this time they made me get out and open the hood and they searced under the car. One officer told me "just relax, everything is going to be ok" before he started his search. When I was asked how I was doing by another officer, I replied that I must have woken up in another country today because this is not America anymore. You could tell they did not want to be doing this. I cannot begin to describe how stunned I was to have this happen. If this is how we have to live in America now, I do not think that I want to be here anymore. And yes, I do know why they did it, I do understand the current need for such precautions, but this is not an acceptable way to live for me.
Anyone know of a site listing the various linux distro's default settings from a typical install? You know the install I mean, the one performed by newbies that lets inetd fire off multiple servers for no good reason. It should be an interesting comparison, maybe even worthwhile if it is up to date and accurate. I think that would actually be a decision point for newbies who look before they leap, they certainly do not need to run a ton of servers that they do not understand.
So how does one define a desktop PC anymore? My linux box does not look like your linux box does not look or feel like my co-workers linux box. The core may be the same, or damn close to it, but the part you interact with can be so many things these days that it makes my head spin.So, how do *you* introduce someone to "linux"? CLI, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, Windowmaker or what? You almost know that when corporations start to adopt linux on the desktop that they are going to go with KDE for the most part, though Ximian Gnome may have a fighting chance in some arenas. But what about you, the non-corporate linux user? Where do you want to see the desktop go and why?