See this stress test that I did a few years ago. Load of 25 for hours without a hiccup. Well, yeah, the server slowed down, but it never hung, and as soon as the load went down to a normal level, everything was fine.
This article reeks of PR to me. Why did this small business go to the reporter in the first place? Why are the two biggest Linux consulting firms (RH & IBM) showed as being impotent? I'm not going to dispute the facts in the article, because I live a couple thousand miles north of the company, but the tone of the article makes it sound like it was written by a PR company and released to the press.
Since 4 out of the 5 comments on the Firefox extension are negative, including ones which state that they can't use it to reliably log into a site, I'd say to avoid it.
While no one knows Bill Gates' heart, we can say with certainty that his philanthropy follows the normal cycle of the abusive steel or railroad magnate who felt penitent for his life- and headlong pursuit of money once he had amassed more than he could dream of using, and used charity to assuage his guilt for past wrongdoings. Although the pool of people with this characteristic is, of course, too small to talk in a statistically valid way, there is even a name given to the "syndrome" by psychologists, though I forget what it is...
Since your Novell Linux Small Business Suite is priced at up to 100 users, it sounds like that matches the submitter's needs and "maximizes value." I think I need to puke after using that phrase...
quite possibly, but single sign-on is pretty well handled on the k12os list. Like the GP said, if your guys are all MCSEs, then you're likely to go with the AD solution, but otherwise, I doubt that reading the list and the howto are going to take any more time than reading the AD docs...
While I agree with you, the K12OS mailing list that I continually lurk on has quite a few inexperienced Linux fols, and the single sign-on issue has basically been solved by one of them. David Trask has put together a script which automates setting up smb-ldap for a PDC, and it's here: http://web.vcs.u52.k12.me.us/linux/smbldap/
As for a groupware solution, I currently use egroupware ( http://egroupware.org/ ), which is fairly mature, can authenticate to ldap, and can be used both over the web and thorugh Kontact as a client.
I'm not being picky. I'm debating that your original point, which was "we still don't have a decent control panel applet on any Linux distribution worth mentioning," is wrong. Your examples of what control panels we don't have have been shown to be in error, point by point. My fiancee lives without a shell and doesn't have a clue how to use one. One's installed, because it's a dependancy, but hey...
Now, I don't happen to like that most of the new applets in Ubuntu are friggin' slow, because they're mostly written in Python, but the progress on this front is amazing right now.
We'll obviously have to disagree on this one, because you have your mind set on this issue. That's OK, but don't get persnickity and call people picky if they want to correct you when you are factually wrong.
I've been working with Linux since RH5, I guess, so I've done my fair share of config'ing everything manually. From your UID, I'd guess that you have, too.
Like I said in my original post, with the discover/hotplug setup, your card will basically be config'd if it can be. Just like always, I guess, there may be corner cases where that's not true, but there are those cases on every system, aren't there? For nearly every card, though, if there is a module in the kernel, it'll be loaded.
I understand, though, that you have experience with this, and that, for some reason, it doesn't work for you. I've installed Ubuntu on both old and new hardware, laptops and desktops, and the only thing I've had to work manually on was a WXGA screen.
Most of your original points are, as I showed, without merit. You should accept that instead of backpedaling and redefining.
Since Kubuntu has already answered, and you say "better than Ubuntu..." I'll try to address these.
# Changing the screen resolution. * System > Preferences > Screen Resolution
# Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers. Since you are interested in nvidia, the package installation now "s/nv/nvidia/g"s for you. You still need to restart the X server, though.
* System > Preferences > Mouse If you have a tablet or something, the xorg.conf may have to be edited. I've never installed one, but all common types of pointing devices are included and automatically identified by X.org
* System > Preferences > Keyboard Choose your keyboard prefs, type of keyboard, alternate language groups, and group swithing keys. I haven't edited an xorg.conf file at all to use Thai and English on a keyboard I bought in Korea. The Ubuntu due next month also has a nice Language manager which will automatically install language packs and keyboard switchers even for difficult languages like Korean's Hangul/Hanja
# Setting up a sound card. Handled during the boot-up process. This has changed from when I started using Linux about eight years ago, but it isn't really a user configurable item anymore. Discover and Hotplug handle it. If your sound card is supported in a module, it'll be loaded. If it isn't, then you are pretty much just as screwed as you would've been all those years ago with an unsupported card.
# Configuring a network. * System > Admin > Networking Configure unconfigured devices, whatever... Additionally, for the first time ever, I was able to set up all my firewall rules without a single command on the line;)
* Applications > System Tools > Firestarter You can set up your nat, dhcp server, and open or close ports here. Allow or disallow traffic based on interface or host. Set your default policy from here, as well. I'm not sure how well it shapes traffic, but I don't have need for that.
# Installing a printer. * System > Admin > Printing Like sound cards, you can set up anything that has a Cups driver or is on the network. SMB, CUPS, LPD, and JetDirect printers are supported.
I appreciate your anger at adding a program under Ubuntu, only to have it not appear on the menu. I think that this is a Gnome issue more than Ubuntu, but that doesn't change your position.
Ubuntu is set up with a limited number of apps in the main repositiory, which you can add through a special "Add Applications" manager (an alternate to Synaptic). If it's listed in there, your menu item shouldn't be a problem. If it's from one of the unsupported reposotories, then that's why the package doesn't show up. It's not well maintained.
I have had some problems with Ubuntu, so I'm not defending them 100%. I do feel that the criticisms you've chosen to level aren't justified, though.
My major problem with the "new" direction of the Linux desktop is that everything is self-configuring. I end up having the same problems that I used to have on Windows 95 or 98. (More recently, too, when I tried to set up a HP5L printer on XP for my brother-in-law). Things start or stop working for no apparent reason. If hotplug burps, your USB device won't be identified or will hang the machine.
First of all, the best exploits are ones that no one else knows about yet. You should know that. If a white hat finds it, he will disclose it or report it to MS. If he doesn't disclose, then it won't show up on any vulnerability lists. That doesn't mean that another, darker-hatted fellow didn't also find the vuln, develop an exploit, and is using it in secret without all the fanfare of a script kiddie.
Then again, it could just be the black hat who found it in the first place and didn't tell anyone, but that wouldn't be different between IIS and Apache. I'm not claiming one or the other is safer, just that this whole "IIS is more secure because there are only 2 exploits" nonsense is just that.
You just can't count security advisories when the method of reporting them is not consistent across different products. It's like doing an experiment where you don't calibrate your instruments before different measurements on different days. The results say nothing.
MS is strongly in the camp where vulnerabilities are not reported publicly until a patch (or at least an exploit) is already available, while Apache publicizes vuln's without either, hoping that the community will pony up with a patch.
How in the world could you ever compare either of these products with numbers that come from such widly different sources? It's like saying that I run faster than you when I measure my speed in km/h and you use miles...
Agreed. I was sriously disappointed when I moved to S.K. from Thailand. I haven't yet seen an Linux computer in the country, despite regularly visiting places like tech malls.
The company that makes Hangeul Office (which appears to have better market share than MS Office here) produce a version of linux in order to offer their office suite on it, but I have never heard of anyone using it except myself.
Compare this to my time in Thailand when the hypermarket down the street would sell computers with Linux on them and the newsstand had small books on it, and I feel that Linux has made no inroads into S.K. at all.
That said, Thailand appears to have ditched Linux, as well. My visit their in June showed that I couldn't find a single book published in the last year about it. I guess that the governments turnaround on its Linux policy and subsequent multi-year (no cost) agreement with MS really took its toll.
Slashdot Mirror
You are one of the most gifted humourists that I've seen on this site. I love you!
And I loved your joke the first time that I read it, too, but I wrote about it seriously a couple of weeks ago. I want one on my web server!
"so it could have been a linux flaw...
buy you're right, on most pc's the weakest link is the user..."
Try as I might, I have no idea what this means. Could you repost in a standard form of English, please, so I can follow the discussion?
It's not OSX that holds all the cards on that, you know. KDE has had it for as long as I can remember. Probably seven years?
Don't worry about why... NineNine rarely follows reason.
I mentioned AjaxOffice (ajaxoffice.sourceforge.net) in my recent entry about this.
See this stress test that I did a few years ago. Load of 25 for hours without a hiccup. Well, yeah, the server slowed down, but it never hung, and as soon as the load went down to a normal level, everything was fine.
This article reeks of PR to me. Why did this small business go to the reporter in the first place? Why are the two biggest Linux consulting firms (RH & IBM) showed as being impotent? I'm not going to dispute the facts in the article, because I live a couple thousand miles north of the company, but the tone of the article makes it sound like it was written by a PR company and released to the press.
Since 4 out of the 5 comments on the Firefox extension are negative, including ones which state that they can't use it to reliably log into a site, I'd say to avoid it.
And the crickets chirp, the tumbleweeds roll by...
While no one knows Bill Gates' heart, we can say with certainty that his philanthropy follows the normal cycle of the abusive steel or railroad magnate who felt penitent for his life- and headlong pursuit of money once he had amassed more than he could dream of using, and used charity to assuage his guilt for past wrongdoings. Although the pool of people with this characteristic is, of course, too small to talk in a statistically valid way, there is even a name given to the "syndrome" by psychologists, though I forget what it is...
Well, then, we should get moving on AjaxOffice, shouldn't we?
Since your Novell Linux Small Business Suite is priced at up to 100 users, it sounds like that matches the submitter's needs and "maximizes value." I think I need to puke after using that phrase...
quite possibly, but single sign-on is pretty well handled on the k12os list. Like the GP said, if your guys are all MCSEs, then you're likely to go with the AD solution, but otherwise, I doubt that reading the list and the howto are going to take any more time than reading the AD docs...
While I agree with you, the K12OS mailing list that I continually lurk on has quite a few inexperienced Linux fols, and the single sign-on issue has basically been solved by one of them. David Trask has put together a script which automates setting up smb-ldap for a PDC, and it's here: http://web.vcs.u52.k12.me.us/linux/smbldap/
As for a groupware solution, I currently use egroupware ( http://egroupware.org/ ), which is fairly mature, can authenticate to ldap, and can be used both over the web and thorugh Kontact as a client.
I'm not being picky. I'm debating that your original point, which was "we still don't have a decent control panel applet on any Linux distribution worth mentioning," is wrong. Your examples of what control panels we don't have have been shown to be in error, point by point. My fiancee lives without a shell and doesn't have a clue how to use one. One's installed, because it's a dependancy, but hey...
Now, I don't happen to like that most of the new applets in Ubuntu are friggin' slow, because they're mostly written in Python, but the progress on this front is amazing right now.
We'll obviously have to disagree on this one, because you have your mind set on this issue. That's OK, but don't get persnickity and call people picky if they want to correct you when you are factually wrong.
I've been working with Linux since RH5, I guess, so I've done my fair share of config'ing everything manually. From your UID, I'd guess that you have, too. Like I said in my original post, with the discover/hotplug setup, your card will basically be config'd if it can be. Just like always, I guess, there may be corner cases where that's not true, but there are those cases on every system, aren't there? For nearly every card, though, if there is a module in the kernel, it'll be loaded. I understand, though, that you have experience with this, and that, for some reason, it doesn't work for you. I've installed Ubuntu on both old and new hardware, laptops and desktops, and the only thing I've had to work manually on was a WXGA screen. Most of your original points are, as I showed, without merit. You should accept that instead of backpedaling and redefining.
Since Kubuntu has already answered, and you say "better than Ubuntu..." I'll try to address these.
;)
# Changing the screen resolution.
* System > Preferences > Screen Resolution
# Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.
Since you are interested in nvidia, the package installation now "s/nv/nvidia/g"s for you. You still need to restart the X server, though.
* System > Preferences > Mouse
If you have a tablet or something, the xorg.conf may have to be edited. I've never installed one, but all common types of pointing devices are included and automatically identified by X.org
* System > Preferences > Keyboard
Choose your keyboard prefs, type of keyboard, alternate language groups, and group swithing keys. I haven't edited an xorg.conf file at all to use Thai and English on a keyboard I bought in Korea.
The Ubuntu due next month also has a nice Language manager which will automatically install language packs and keyboard switchers even for difficult languages like Korean's Hangul/Hanja
# Setting up a sound card.
Handled during the boot-up process. This has changed from when I started using Linux about eight years ago, but it isn't really a user configurable item anymore. Discover and Hotplug handle it. If your sound card is supported in a module, it'll be loaded. If it isn't, then you are pretty much just as screwed as you would've been all those years ago with an unsupported card.
# Configuring a network.
* System > Admin > Networking
Configure unconfigured devices, whatever...
Additionally, for the first time ever, I was able to set up all my firewall rules without a single command on the line
* Applications > System Tools > Firestarter
You can set up your nat, dhcp server, and open or close ports here. Allow or disallow traffic based on interface or host. Set your default policy from here, as well. I'm not sure how well it shapes traffic, but I don't have need for that.
# Installing a printer.
* System > Admin > Printing
Like sound cards, you can set up anything that has a Cups driver or is on the network. SMB, CUPS, LPD, and JetDirect printers are supported.
I appreciate your anger at adding a program under Ubuntu, only to have it not appear on the menu. I think that this is a Gnome issue more than Ubuntu, but that doesn't change your position.
Ubuntu is set up with a limited number of apps in the main repositiory, which you can add through a special "Add Applications" manager (an alternate to Synaptic). If it's listed in there, your menu item shouldn't be a problem. If it's from one of the unsupported reposotories, then that's why the package doesn't show up. It's not well maintained.
I have had some problems with Ubuntu, so I'm not defending them 100%. I do feel that the criticisms you've chosen to level aren't justified, though.
My major problem with the "new" direction of the Linux desktop is that everything is self-configuring. I end up having the same problems that I used to have on Windows 95 or 98. (More recently, too, when I tried to set up a HP5L printer on XP for my brother-in-law). Things start or stop working for no apparent reason. If hotplug burps, your USB device won't be identified or will hang the machine.
First of all, the best exploits are ones that no one else knows about yet. You should know that. If a white hat finds it, he will disclose it or report it to MS. If he doesn't disclose, then it won't show up on any vulnerability lists. That doesn't mean that another, darker-hatted fellow didn't also find the vuln, develop an exploit, and is using it in secret without all the fanfare of a script kiddie.
Then again, it could just be the black hat who found it in the first place and didn't tell anyone, but that wouldn't be different between IIS and Apache. I'm not claiming one or the other is safer, just that this whole "IIS is more secure because there are only 2 exploits" nonsense is just that.
Ummm... I hate to break it to you, but Java Desktop has nothing to do with Java, except the name and a common company.
You just can't count security advisories when the method of reporting them is not consistent across different products. It's like doing an experiment where you don't calibrate your instruments before different measurements on different days. The results say nothing.
MS is strongly in the camp where vulnerabilities are not reported publicly until a patch (or at least an exploit) is already available, while Apache publicizes vuln's without either, hoping that the community will pony up with a patch.
How in the world could you ever compare either of these products with numbers that come from such widly different sources? It's like saying that I run faster than you when I measure my speed in km/h and you use miles...
Awww... Where did he run off to? I miss him...
I must've had a brain fart, because daum owns Lycos ... not even in the same league. Oh well, morning postings!
Quite odd, considering that Yahoo! is owned by Daum.net, the Korean internet giant, don't you think?
Agreed. I was sriously disappointed when I moved to S.K. from Thailand. I haven't yet seen an Linux computer in the country, despite regularly visiting places like tech malls.
The company that makes Hangeul Office (which appears to have better market share than MS Office here) produce a version of linux in order to offer their office suite on it, but I have never heard of anyone using it except myself.
Compare this to my time in Thailand when the hypermarket down the street would sell computers with Linux on them and the newsstand had small books on it, and I feel that Linux has made no inroads into S.K. at all.
That said, Thailand appears to have ditched Linux, as well. My visit their in June showed that I couldn't find a single book published in the last year about it. I guess that the governments turnaround on its Linux policy and subsequent multi-year (no cost) agreement with MS really took its toll.
I lived in Thailand during that period, and I'm wondering if you have a source for your assertion. I'd love to keep it handy for later, if you do...