Not too shabby.
Let's see what it would cost for me to build a system like that and throw on Linux instead:
Retail X2 3800+ CPU & ECS GeForce6100SM-M motherboard (onboard GF6100):
$90. 2 GB Kingston PC5300 DDR2 RAM (after $40 MIR):
$100.
Maxtor 160 GB Serial ATA/300 hard drive:
$40.
Geforce 7600 GT video card with 256 MB RAM:
$110.
Samsung 18X DVD-RW:
$30.
Apevia X-QPack-NW-AL MicroATX case with 420W power supply (after shipping & $10 MIR):
$86.
Total: $556 plus tax, $607 total after $50 MIRs.
I guess the extra $93 is the Microsoft tax. Of course the system I describe comes with twice as much RAM and good quality onboard graphics for those wanting Xinerama Beryl dual-monitor goodness, plus a slick little case, probably much smaller and handier than what you ended up with. Since I'm not a gamer I'd save a little money and stick with the onboard graphics or maybe add a Geforce 6100 for $40 instead if I wanted dual monitors.
I configured Thunderbird to retrieve email from Gmail POP server, work like a charm
You can download Yahoo email to a POP3 email client with some program like YPOPS. It's slow and a bit more of a hassle, though.
When Yahoo stopped offering free POP3 email I stopped using Yahoo as a regular email account that I regularly checked. Now my Yahoo address is what I use for e-commerce, etc., places where I need a working account and might want to check my order status occasionally, but I don't want to get weekly promotional spam from the merchants for the rest of my life.
I'd love to see Dell offering every customer an option to check a box when ordering a computer so that their new machine comes with the Windows version du jour but also includes a partition with the consumer's choice of one of a list of Linux distros. Stipulate that Dell will only offer direct support for the Windows OS without the customer paying for a Linux support contract. Offer Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse, Mandriva or Freespire on a 15 GB partition with a 1 GB swap partition and a 20 GB home partition, leaving plenty of room for Windows, even on a low end 80 GB system. For a premium people could choose a commercial Linux like Linspire, Xandros or Mandriva Discovery (RHEL and SUSE are too expensive). Dell could even charge a reasonable amount, say $10, to provide the basic dual boot option. I'm sure hundreds of thousands of folks would pay for a backup operating system that was touted as more secure and had a free office suite and 3D eye candy options. I'd recommend the option to friends and relatives.
People want the more options, not fewer. They want to be able to run all their old software, Photoshop, games, financial software, and have an OS that has an outside chance of supporting their cheapo Win-peripherals. But millions of folks have heard good things about Linux, as well.
With ntfs-3g and Windows equivalents Windows and Linux can write to each others partition, which would make things easier (and more dangerous). But operating system files could be hidden from users by default, just the way Windows and Ubuntu Edgy do now. What the heck, include free VMWARE or KVM so the customer can run her installed Linux from within Windows and vice versa. And provide a GUI program that will allow Windows users to reclaim their Linux partitions for Bill Gates if they decide they don't have the cobbles to boot open source. As Albert Schweitzer said, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Of course this scenario ignores the fact that Microsoft wouldn't put up with these shenanigans for a second. But that's why we should have strong anti-trust laws.
Linux on the desktop could be the real winner that walks away from this upset, if someone is smart enough to invest in making it really usable for the average person, but I'm not sure the community can pull it off.
I look forward to the day when part of a desktop distro's installation routine is to ask you if you'd like to install virtualizations of all the other operating systems already installed on your computer, including Windows. Then you would only need to click a button to run a Windows session within your swirling Beryl v.42 cube (there are plenty of neat videos of VMWARE XP run in a Beryl session on YouTube right now, it seems to work pretty well). Come to Linux for the eye candy, stay for the security and power, and if you get an itch to play games, hit that nauseating blue icon. I gather that 3D doesn't work within contemporary virtualizations, but I understand that a future generation of PCI-E will come with hardware virtualization support, just like Intel and AMD have added hardware virtualization support to their newer CPUs.
Open sores progress on virtualization has been as stunningly fast, as has its progress on many other fronts (look how far compositing windows managers have come over the last year). The first public release of Xen was in 2003. Since 2.6.20 the Linux kernel has included KVM, a loadable kernel module that boosts speed for machines with the proper CPUs. (I gather it can be compiled in to kernels as old as 2.6.15.) Other virtualization schemes like QEMU, kqemu and VirtualBox have been opening up their licenses and releasing GPL versions. Already virtualized operating systems can run at over 80% of the speed they run natively, and speed is increasing. And even right now it is not too difficult to setup up virtual Windows with KVM support.
I've read there are already some very nice administrative tools to set up Xen/KVM in the RHEL5 prerelease. Give it 2-3 Friedman Units and the whole process should be trivial.
I'm sure Microsoft will EULAgize every piece of software it has to make it illegal to run their stuff virtually, but in some countries that won't fly and in others folks will probably just ignore those stipulations, like they do with other onerous aspects of MS-imposed contracts of adhesion,
...per capita GDP of Cuba is second lowest in the Caribbean basin.
Actually, according to the CIA World Fact Book Cuba's GDP per capita is substantially higher than that of Honduras & Nicaragua, the two Caribbean basin countries I checked, particularly when considering per capita PPP, purchasing power parity, the actual buying power that folks have rather than their income expressed in nominal exchange rates. Oh, and read growth of GDP per capita in Cuba was a very robust 7.5% in 2006. This, despite the fact that they are embargoed by their nearest industrialized neighbor and natural trading partner, while the client states I mentioned are the recipients of U.S. "aid" and support.
Also, remember, many things in Cuba are FREE that most people in the rest of the Carribean basin can not begin to afford, such as high quality universal medical care and higher education. Nominal income per capita is a rather poor index of standard of living. For instance, the U.S. spends roughly twice the Cuban GDP per capita on health care alone but Cuba has roughly similar life expectancy and infant mortality rates, oh, and Cuba excels all other Latin American countries by these measurements. Likewise, in 1998 UNESCO tested students from all over Latin America and Cuba blew away all other countries, both in reading and math, so much so, that they thought there might be a problem with the testing and retested the Cubans (same result).
Also, unlike Cuba, the rest of the countries in the Carribean basin have a very unequal income distribution, so the ruling classes luxuriate in splendor while much of the actual population is destitute. But as long as the local bourgeoisie can afford to take frequent shopping flights to Miami the economies are "healthy" according to your criteria, I suppose.
Nope. Kerala has the second lowest per-capita GDP in India - the lowest being Bihar.
Dunno, I poked around a bit and my original statement seems pretty close to accurate. Look over this & this.
Interesting aside, while looking for stats on GDP I came across the concept of PPP, purchasing power parity, an attempt to equilibrate per capita income by taking in to account differences in the purchasing power of increments of geld in various countries. Since poorer countries tend to have lower prices, nominal per capita GNP overstates the differences in standards of living between developed countries and others. According to estimates of PPP GDP China actually has the second largest economy in the world, about 3/4th the size of the U.S. economy, and India's economy is the fourth largest in the world.
Kerala has been ruled on and off by the Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) since its inception as a state in 1956. Despite considerable resistance from the central government Kerala has passed land reform, abolished tenant farming, and pushed education and public health (there are 2,700 state run medical institutions in Kerala). This strong emphasis on social welfare has led Kerala to be ranked #1 in India on the Human Development Index. Some indices cut and pasted from the Wikipedia article on the Kerala Model:
1. Its adult literacy rate is 91% compared to India's 65 and the US's 96. Newspaper readership in among the world's highest.
2. Life expectancy at birth in Kerala is 73 years compare to 61 years in India and 76 years in the US. Female life expectancy in Kerala exceeds that of the male, just as it does in the developed world.
3. Kerala's birth rate is 14 per 1,000 females and falling fast. India's rate is 25 per 1,000 females and that of the U.S. is 16. Kerala's infant mortality rate is 10 per 1,000 births versus 70 for India and 7 for the US. In Kerala the birth rate is 40 per cent below that of the national average and almost 60 per cent below the rate for poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found that the birth rate had fallen to replacement level.
Because of terrible communist outrages like subsidized rice and public food distribution, protective laws for workers and pensions for agricultural laborers, capital has not exactly been streaming in to Kerala, unemployment is relatively high, and GDP is low (though apparently significantly higher than the Indian average). Hence, much of the economically active population has emigrated and remittances sent home contribute around 20% of state GDP. Nonetheless, my sources claim Kerala has the highest standard of living in India.
Try BlagLinux out of Brixton, England. It is a single CD Fedora based distro that seems only to issue a release every other cycle (FC3, FC5), plus it uses apt-get (as well as YUM). It is updated frequently (the FC3 version, for instance has Firefox 1.5.0.8 in its repositories). it is one of only a half dozen distros certified by the FSF as only having free software in the distribution image or package repositories, but still comes with support for mp3s out of the box, unlike Fedora. It has a friendly, helpful community. It has got to have one of the easiest installation routines ever. If you want it to take over your disk just boot the disc and type blagblagblag.
Earthstink/Mindleak has had cheesy support & email for years. I've provided technical assistance to several lefty friends who were migrated to them after IGC went out of the progressive ISP business. Those folks are still paying $22 monthly for crummy dialup, even when I've told them that there are dozens of better dialup providers that charge less than half of that, in some cases as little as $4 a month. You can even get broadband in my region ~$15 a month.
The experience that ticked me off the most occurred a few years ago when I helped a friend set up his office computer to download his email so he could he could respond to correspondence at work as well as at home. I set up his POP email clients so they didn't remove his email from the server for a month so he'd have a full copy of all his emails at both locations. I got a call a couple of weeks later complaining that he wasn't receiving any email at all. It took me about 45 minutes of playing with voice mail and underpaid support staff to get a hold of someone who could tell me what was happening. Apparently Earthlink only let you store 10 MB of email on their servers before they cut you off. They didn't even send him a courtesy notice telling him what was happening, unlike my FREE email provider Netzero not too long before that. Even back then, 10 MB was about a tenth of a penny's worth of hard drive space. Personally, I blame Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord for this stinginess.
I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade my OCE 3.0 install to OCE 4.0. Apt-get seems to work well enough on OCE 3.0 and Debian is pretty good at upgrading distros. OCE 3.0 is pretty old (Woody based, I believe) and there don't seem to be any updates recently.
For a system that is supposed to work friendly with a Windows environment OCE 3.0 has some serious limitations. As a normal user I can't write to a Samba share every other Linux distro I've used has no trouble with. I have to change files on the server as root or use FISH/SSH. Pretty annoying.
I rather like the Explorer-like Xandros File Manager but I still tend to use Konqueror since XFM doesn't support tabs and had limited Kioslave functionality. Also, K3B isn't in the Xandros OCE repository and CD burning is limited to 4X (oh well, I'm not in a hurry).
I could just blow Xandros away and install a modern distro, but it still works fine for web surfing and listening to MP3s and I don't see the point in burning a few hours with a new install and all the attendent fiddling just to overcome a few minor annoyances.
Similarly, the Eagles aren't going to risk one feather to help one side or the other in some ring war (and trying to get past the flying Nazgul to drop the Hobbits off would have been quite risky). Gandalf has a personal friendship with Gwaihir and so can ask for personal favors, such as his own rescue from Orthanc, and rescuing the Hobbits after the danger has passed, the war is over, and the Eagles don't have to choose a side.
The eagles did't have a relationship with Gandalf when they first rescued him, Bilbo and about a dozen dwarves from being roasted when they had been treed by goblins and wargs in the Hobbit, as I recall. They seemed to do it just to spite the goblins. The Eagles also intervened not once but twice in full scale battles between composite armies of men, elves & dwarves on one side and goblins/orcs on the other, the Battle of Five Armies and during the dust up between the Captains of the West & the hosts of Sauron at the Black Gates of Morannon. In all three cases the Eagles acted at their considerable peril for no direct benefit to themselves. The internal logic of Middle Earth suggests that Gandalf could have persuaded a single Eagle to dare a solo mission to save all of creation from falling under the Shadow of the East.
No, the Eagles are Tolkien's favorite deus ex machina, one he relied on far to often to write himself out of twists in the plot to which there was no obvious solution. But the point of dei ex machinis is to untangle a problematic story line, not to end the story itself prematurely.
W2K will run acceptably on Socket V hardware as long as it isn't running antivirus software and a software firewall. Once you add those background processes, it slows to a crawl. Linux, on the other paw, doesn't need to run those extra services. Plus, you can chose a lightweight window manager like XFCE or Fluxbox, which isn't an option with Windows. Slackware or a Slack-based XFCE distro like Vectorlinux, Zenwalk, Wolvix, etc. is what I install on hardware of that era.
Actually, the U.S. had a widely reported "tilt" towards Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq War. It true that except a few helicopters, not much big ticket Iraqi military hardware was sent directly by the U.S., perhaps.6 of 1% of conventional arms imports during the war. However the government allowed third parties (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt) to transfer plenty of American weapons, including helicopters, bombs & howitzers.
Reagan even directly asked the Italian Prime Minister Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.
The U.S. also guaranteed $5 billion dollars of loans to Iraq for exports through an Italian bank that was effectively a CIA front. That helped Saddam divert other monies to arms acquisition. Iraq defaulted leaving American taxpayers to shell out $2 billion to cover that transaction.
The American government shared intelligence & satellite reconnaissance photography with the Iraqi government, which enabled Saddam to use his chemical weapons much more effectively.
There is a timeline and additional documents here. The U.S. also sent 17 shipments of 80 batches of toxic biomaterials including anthrax and botulism.
The U.S. even quietly opposed condemning Iraq's use of WMDs in the U.N.:
Iran had submitted a draft resolution asking the U.N. to condemn Iraq's chemical weapons use.
The U.S. delegate to the U.N. was instructed to lobby friendly delegations in order to obtain a general motion of "no decision" on the resolution. If this was not achievable, the U.S. delegate was to abstain on the issue. Iraq's ambassador met with the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, and asked for "restraint" in responding to the issue - as did the representatives of both France and Britain.
To facilitate military aid the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of terrorist nations despite the fact that Saddam was harboring Abu Nidal & his minions.
Also, Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll from long before he took power and was even involved in a CIA plot to kill a previous president of Iraq. After Saddam took power the CIA helped him kill off his political opposition.
But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.
Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.
Like Noriega, Al Qaida, the Taliban and many others before him, Saddam's real crime wasn't that he a tyrant, a butcher or a dictator, but that he fed at the CIA trough and then later didn't obey orders. That is the one crime that always prompts U.S. military intervention and "liberation."
Unfortunately, Xubuntu Eft seems to have a bug upgrading from Dapper, at least with the with the update-manager. I'm not sure if using the aptitude/apt-get method works any better. I believe you can burn the image to a CD and insert it and Xubuntu will ask you if you want to upgrade. Or you can probably mount the iso and add it to your repository to upgrade, as per an earlier post in this discussion.
Luckily Automatix seems to be ready for Eft, even if EasyUbuntu's site is down at the moment.
"Older machine" covers a lot of ground. ME-stake could have come on anything from about a 266 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM to a 800 MHz or so with 256 MB. I'd have very different recommendations depending upon which end of the spectrum the machine fell. First of all, I'd suggest upgrading the memory to at least 128 MB to run a modern full-sized distro.
For a really lower end box I'd suggest a Slackware-based distribution with XFCE like Vectorlinux or Zenwalk. Slackware itself is remarkable fast on older hardware. I have a 400 MHz/128 MB machine on the back porch running KDE on 10.2 with no problem, and while it isn't exactly zippy, it works fine (and I won't lose any sleep if the neighborhood kids decide they need the machine more than I do). But Slack requires quite a bit of time and some experience with Linux to set up (when will the mouse wheel work out of the box without editing xorg.conf?) Though I haven't used it much, PC-BSD also seemed adequate running KDE on an older box (128 MB), as well, and isn't as fiddly as Slack.
For a machine with a little more pop I think Freespire would be fine. Xandros free addition is a little dated (2004), but would also work well for someone with Windows experience. It's version of KDE is ancient and doesn't have tabs, but I think it would be more intuitive for first time Linux users. PCLinuxOS is easy to set up and comes with MPlayer configured to play Windows formats without the need for win32-codecs.
A lot of the pain of setting up a desktop Linux box is to set it up to deal with proprietary formats that you are likely to encounter on the net, things like Flash, Realplayer, various codecs, Java, DVDs, etc. Many distros have been actually removing proprietary stuff from their default installs (for instance, libdvdcss is no longer part of PCLinuxOS). So any distro that has tools available to easily add that stuff might make your life easier. EasyUbuntu and Automatix automate all that stuff for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and Mepis (Automatix), so that makes those distros very appealing. There is something similar available for Debian Etch and I suspect other projects like them are in the works for other major distros. (Anyone know?)
Bearing this in mind, I might suggest Xubuntu, the XFCE version of Ubuntu. It will run on 128 MB machines and the proprietary multimedia stuff is easy to add with those scripts. Plus, it has a very clean, simply interface that a new user would be less likely to find confusing. You can install from the liveCD "Desktop" edition if you have 192 MB of RAM or more or use the "Alternate CD" installation disc with 128 MB. I haven't tried it on a slow machine, but it is very snappy on my lappy.
Arklinux automatically sets up a user called arklinux who has no password and essentially root privileges. You'd think that might be worthy of a comment. The system automatically boots to this arklinux user. I thought I was using Windows. You can give arklinux a password so no one uses the account and set up a new regular account with a password, but that wouldn't necessarily occur to a newbie.
There does not appear to be a GUI tool to configure file sharing. Even Konqueror won't do it. If you right click on a folder and try to create a share and it stalls out after excreting a dialogue box. I think even KateOS is more polished (I've never actually used KateOS, but it is from Poland, hence the reference).
Oh, and the reviewer is lucky he used the System Install rather than going down the Expert path. The version of qtparted they used seems to be broken. See the Arklinux forum.
Trying to start Celestia and Stellarium (and Dog only knows what else) causes X to buckle.
Another problem with smaller distros is that there isn't much of a community to help you if you are having problems. For instance there are fewer than 200 posts on the Arklinux forum spread over two languages. On the other paw, if I'm having problems with Yetis I can go over to the Bigfootforums where there are roughly 230,000 posters who can help me out. The Ark developers respond on the forums when they can, but really, they need to spend their time being developers. One of the things I look for in a distro is a well-developed, friendly community, not so big that you get lost in the shuffle (e.g. Ubuntu) but large enough so there will be someone who can help you. Maybe Mepis or Slackware sized groups, perhaps 25-75 posts per day.
On the plus side, Arklinux does have a very snappy and responsive "feel" to it, and I rather liked some of the customizations the developers chose. Maybe part of that is due to its cutting edge nature, particularly GCC 4.1, KDE 3.54 & X.Org 7.1 (which also accounts for some of the instability and video card problems).
It seems like if you put all the developers together from some of the smaller but very promising distros, say, Frugalware, Arklinux, Ultima, and Vectorlinux Soho, for Slackware-derived up-to-date KDE-centric Linices, you could come up with a really kickass operating system. But I am not sure developer time is necessarily additive, absent a pay-check because of issues of geographic proximity and human egos.
I'm glad Ark is the only distro that standardizes on apt-get with rpm
Why are you glad about that if you like RPM based distros with apt-get? Anyway, there are other such beasts in the wild. BLAG comes to mind. Doesn't PCLINUXOS use apt-get? I'm sure there are others.
Also, I believe the live CD doesn't come with an installer, unlike most of its ilk.
Now try that with Mozilla or Seamonkey. Whoops, not in the repositories, and they won't install with the standard Mozy tar.gz installer unless you first install the "deprecated" gtk1 package with apt-get because kynaptics is broken and they are probably going to move to Adept, except it is even more broken at the moment. Not something a Newbie will figure out, I'm afraid.
About, but not the only. I have a free punkass.com POP3 email account, but there are several other providers that still provide free POP3 & Web Based email,as well. Plus you can always use some program like yahoopops, fetchyahoo or yahoo2mbox to download most any web based email to a POP3 email client.
I gave a link for a $500 HP Wintel laptop, then I stumbled across one for $400 this week at BestBuy, not MIR. 512 MB of PC4200, 1.46 GHz Celeron M with 1 MB of L2 cache, 1280x768, 6-in-1 digital media reader (I gather Mac lappies don't routinely have those), firewire, USB 2.0, wireless and wired LAN, 5.2 lbs., 60 GB SATA drive. Supposedly Vista-ready and it comes with a remote and ear buds, so hopefully people will think you have an iPod in the cyber-cafe. You could almost buy 3 of these for the price of the cheapest new Apple notebook.
Beat Windows XP Home in to a corner with QTPARTED, then blow on Mepis or Ubuntu or whatever your favorite distro is & you've got a great, secure little dual-booting box. Linux for surfing and coding, Windows for gaming and using proprietary hardware.
I know lots of folks have had issues with a lot of Wintel hardware failing, but that issue is hardly unique. Mac hardware fails, too, and lots of cheap Wintel hardware lasts for years without any issues. I built an AT box with the cheapest stuff I could find 10 years ago (well, I splurged on a $107 FIC PA-2007 motherboard). Though I upgraded a few things (32 MB EDO to 128 MB of SDRAM, Pentium I 120 MHz CPU to a K-6 300, 1.7 GB HD to a 5 GB WD HD), nothing EVER failed. It went from Windows 95A to being a Debian Sarge server in a room where I didn't have to listen to the fans. It arrived in La Paz, Bolivia about a week ago, where hopefully the Ministry of Health will continue to use it for years.
Also, I'm not saying that ALL Apple hardware is overpriced and over-hyped. I'm actually very attracted to the MacMini because it is so quiet & energy-efficient, and not too expensive, though I could build a much more powerful Wintel SFF box for a lot less and it would be a lot easier to service (fix, upgrade).
No, an $1100 eMac & a $300 Airport Extreme, plus some software she didn't need. She could have bought a $250 Linspire box or I would have built her an even nicer system for $350. I've seen these cheap GQ Linspire boxes on sale for as little as $100 since then. And since the Airport Extreme isn't quite extreme enough to go up a couple of floors so her husband can use it & she plugs in directly to her DSL modem, she wouldn't have needed to spend $20 after mail in rebate on some perfectly functional commodity wireless router. (We were looking for wireless NICs for her husband's machine so I priced the routers at that time.)
Actually, she told me she spent $1800 at the Apple store, which is altogether believable since some eMacs did indeed cost $1500. I was just being ultra-conservative because she might have had to purchase a monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc. if she'd bought the GQ machine, plus SDRAM RAM to upgrade the GQ box was more expensive in those days. Her old monitor was a kind of crummy 14" model and her previous computer was AT, and I'm not sure if those cheapo GQ boxes come with any peripherals. Anyway, I sold her a $3 USB scroll mouse and it made quite a difference to her computing experience.
Right, and you can buy a perfectly serviceable Windows laptop with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM for $500 new if you keep your eyes open. OK, it will only have 256 MB of RAM, but for $30 you can kick that up to 512 MB, which is plenty for any operating system but Vista (or maybe Linux with xgl/compriz). My friend shopped around a bit and bought a new Toshiba for $400. Shopping around doesn't really help you with Apple, plus you get to pay $100 premium if you want a different color, I understand.
But I guess I cheap PC lappie won't be as "cool" as an Apple. Seems like the majority of the folks I see at the local cyber-cafe have Macs, though they are a small fraction of the market. I guess that's what you want when you want to be seen.
Frankly, though I have a couple of techie friends who swear by Macs, most of the folks I've seen using them bought them because they were told they were "more advanced" and they would have been better served buying a cheap clone and pocketing the cash.
Case and point, I know a 75 year old folksinger who thought she needed a Mac to make music (this despite the fact that she couldn't figure out how to play the directory of MP3s that I put on her Desktop). She paid as much for her bleeding wireless router as an entire faster PC would have cost her (and her husband still can't connect to her $300 Airport Extreme upstairs). And despite this eMac having a reasonably fast CPU and enough RAM (256) I couldn't stand using this Apple POS because it was so pokey. The Apple default is to turn on every stupid piece of eye candy like transparency and animated oscillating taskbars. And they tuck the preferences away so that a fairly computer savvy person couldn't easily turn that crap off without Googling around. The lack of a second mouse button with a context menu or a scroll wheel didn't help figuring things out. But it looked "cool." It seems like Mac is a cult of form-over-function. All the connectors were tucked away away on the side of this all-in-wonder POS. 10 out of 10 for aesthetics, minus several dozen for convenience.
All she does is a little light web surfing and email. I could have bought her the $150 Fry's "GQ" special with Linspire pre-installed, kicked up the RAM to 640 MB for $40, and it would have been more responsive and done everything she needed, and she could be getting interest on the $1200 she would have saved.
Sure, the GQ would be made with low quality commodity parts. But Apples are now mostly commodity components these days and those eMacs had plenty of hardware problems, particular RasterShift and failing capacitors. At least if the GQ's motherboard or power supply failed they would be cheap and easy to replace. I don't think the eMacs were designed to be consumer serviceable, any more than the MacMini or the iPod. Take 'em in to the Apple store when the battery fails, or better yet, buy a new one. Feh.
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Not too shabby.
Let's see what it would cost for me to build a system like that and throw on Linux instead:
Retail X2 3800+ CPU & ECS GeForce6100SM-M motherboard (onboard GF6100): $90.
2 GB Kingston PC5300 DDR2 RAM (after $40 MIR): $100.
Maxtor 160 GB Serial ATA/300 hard drive: $40.
Geforce 7600 GT video card with 256 MB RAM: $110.
Samsung 18X DVD-RW: $30.
Apevia X-QPack-NW-AL MicroATX case with 420W power supply (after shipping & $10 MIR): $86.
Total: $556 plus tax, $607 total after $50 MIRs.
I guess the extra $93 is the Microsoft tax. Of course the system I describe comes with twice as much RAM and good quality onboard graphics for those wanting Xinerama Beryl dual-monitor goodness, plus a slick little case, probably much smaller and handier than what you ended up with. Since I'm not a gamer I'd save a little money and stick with the onboard graphics or maybe add a Geforce 6100 for $40 instead if I wanted dual monitors.
You can download Yahoo email to a POP3 email client with some program like YPOPS. It's slow and a bit more of a hassle, though.
When Yahoo stopped offering free POP3 email I stopped using Yahoo as a regular email account that I regularly checked. Now my Yahoo address is what I use for e-commerce, etc., places where I need a working account and might want to check my order status occasionally, but I don't want to get weekly promotional spam from the merchants for the rest of my life.
I'd love to see Dell offering every customer an option to check a box when ordering a computer so that their new machine comes with the Windows version du jour but also includes a partition with the consumer's choice of one of a list of Linux distros. Stipulate that Dell will only offer direct support for the Windows OS without the customer paying for a Linux support contract. Offer Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse, Mandriva or Freespire on a 15 GB partition with a 1 GB swap partition and a 20 GB home partition, leaving plenty of room for Windows, even on a low end 80 GB system. For a premium people could choose a commercial Linux like Linspire, Xandros or Mandriva Discovery (RHEL and SUSE are too expensive). Dell could even charge a reasonable amount, say $10, to provide the basic dual boot option. I'm sure hundreds of thousands of folks would pay for a backup operating system that was touted as more secure and had a free office suite and 3D eye candy options. I'd recommend the option to friends and relatives.
People want the more options, not fewer. They want to be able to run all their old software, Photoshop, games, financial software, and have an OS that has an outside chance of supporting their cheapo Win-peripherals. But millions of folks have heard good things about Linux, as well. With ntfs-3g and Windows equivalents Windows and Linux can write to each others partition, which would make things easier (and more dangerous). But operating system files could be hidden from users by default, just the way Windows and Ubuntu Edgy do now. What the heck, include free VMWARE or KVM so the customer can run her installed Linux from within Windows and vice versa. And provide a GUI program that will allow Windows users to reclaim their Linux partitions for Bill Gates if they decide they don't have the cobbles to boot open source. As Albert Schweitzer said, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Of course this scenario ignores the fact that Microsoft wouldn't put up with these shenanigans for a second. But that's why we should have strong anti-trust laws.
Open sores progress on virtualization has been as stunningly fast, as has its progress on many other fronts (look how far compositing windows managers have come over the last year). The first public release of Xen was in 2003. Since 2.6.20 the Linux kernel has included KVM, a loadable kernel module that boosts speed for machines with the proper CPUs. (I gather it can be compiled in to kernels as old as 2.6.15.) Other virtualization schemes like QEMU, kqemu and VirtualBox have been opening up their licenses and releasing GPL versions. Already virtualized operating systems can run at over 80% of the speed they run natively, and speed is increasing. And even right now it is not too difficult to setup up virtual Windows with KVM support.I've read there are already some very nice administrative tools to set up Xen/KVM in the RHEL5 prerelease. Give it 2-3 Friedman Units and the whole process should be trivial.
I'm sure Microsoft will EULAgize every piece of software it has to make it illegal to run their stuff virtually, but in some countries that won't fly and in others folks will probably just ignore those stipulations, like they do with other onerous aspects of MS-imposed contracts of adhesion,
Its been tried, tovarich, Red Flag Linux. But if you do package your own distro, I can suggest a great default wallpaper: Linux: Because Micro$oft is for Capitalists Running DOS. Or maybe one of these.
For those of you who would rather be hatin' on my man RMS, here is a nice MS-approved wanted poster.
Also, remember, many things in Cuba are FREE that most people in the rest of the Carribean basin can not begin to afford, such as high quality universal medical care and higher education. Nominal income per capita is a rather poor index of standard of living. For instance, the U.S. spends roughly twice the Cuban GDP per capita on health care alone but Cuba has roughly similar life expectancy and infant mortality rates, oh, and Cuba excels all other Latin American countries by these measurements. Likewise, in 1998 UNESCO tested students from all over Latin America and Cuba blew away all other countries, both in reading and math, so much so, that they thought there might be a problem with the testing and retested the Cubans (same result).
Also, unlike Cuba, the rest of the countries in the Carribean basin have a very unequal income distribution, so the ruling classes luxuriate in splendor while much of the actual population is destitute. But as long as the local bourgeoisie can afford to take frequent shopping flights to Miami the economies are "healthy" according to your criteria, I suppose.
Interesting aside, while looking for stats on GDP I came across the concept of PPP, purchasing power parity, an attempt to equilibrate per capita income by taking in to account differences in the purchasing power of increments of geld in various countries. Since poorer countries tend to have lower prices, nominal per capita GNP overstates the differences in standards of living between developed countries and others. According to estimates of PPP GDP China actually has the second largest economy in the world, about 3/4th the size of the U.S. economy, and India's economy is the fourth largest in the world.
Kerala has been ruled on and off by the Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) since its inception as a state in 1956. Despite considerable resistance from the central government Kerala has passed land reform, abolished tenant farming, and pushed education and public health (there are 2,700 state run medical institutions in Kerala). This strong emphasis on social welfare has led Kerala to be ranked #1 in India on the Human Development Index. Some indices cut and pasted from the Wikipedia article on the Kerala Model:
1. Its adult literacy rate is 91% compared to India's 65 and the US's 96. Newspaper readership in among the world's highest.
2. Life expectancy at birth in Kerala is 73 years compare to 61 years in India and 76 years in the US. Female life expectancy in Kerala exceeds that of the male, just as it does in the developed world.
3. Kerala's birth rate is 14 per 1,000 females and falling fast. India's rate is 25 per 1,000 females and that of the U.S. is 16. Kerala's infant mortality rate is 10 per 1,000 births versus 70 for India and 7 for the US. In Kerala the birth rate is 40 per cent below that of the national average and almost 60 per cent below the rate for poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found that the birth rate had fallen to replacement level.
Because of terrible communist outrages like subsidized rice and public food distribution, protective laws for workers and pensions for agricultural laborers, capital has not exactly been streaming in to Kerala, unemployment is relatively high, and GDP is low (though apparently significantly higher than the Indian average). Hence, much of the economically active population has emigrated and remittances sent home contribute around 20% of state GDP. Nonetheless, my sources claim Kerala has the highest standard of living in India.
Try Blag Linux out of Brixton, England. It is a single CD Fedora based distro that seems only to issue a release every other cycle (FC3, FC5), plus it uses apt-get (as well as YUM). It is updated frequently (the FC3 version, for instance has Firefox 1.5.0.8 in its repositories). it is one of only a half dozen distros certified by the FSF as only having free software in the distribution image or package repositories, but still comes with support for mp3s out of the box, unlike Fedora. It has a friendly, helpful community. It has got to have one of the easiest installation routines ever. If you want it to take over your disk just boot the disc and type blagblagblag.
Earthstink/Mindleak has had cheesy support & email for years. I've provided technical assistance to several lefty friends who were migrated to them after IGC went out of the progressive ISP business. Those folks are still paying $22 monthly for crummy dialup, even when I've told them that there are dozens of better dialup providers that charge less than half of that, in some cases as little as $4 a month. You can even get broadband in my region ~$15 a month.
The experience that ticked me off the most occurred a few years ago when I helped a friend set up his office computer to download his email so he could he could respond to correspondence at work as well as at home. I set up his POP email clients so they didn't remove his email from the server for a month so he'd have a full copy of all his emails at both locations. I got a call a couple of weeks later complaining that he wasn't receiving any email at all. It took me about 45 minutes of playing with voice mail and underpaid support staff to get a hold of someone who could tell me what was happening. Apparently Earthlink only let you store 10 MB of email on their servers before they cut you off. They didn't even send him a courtesy notice telling him what was happening, unlike my FREE email provider Netzero not too long before that. Even back then, 10 MB was about a tenth of a penny's worth of hard drive space. Personally, I blame Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord for this stinginess.
I wonder if I'll be able to upgrade my OCE 3.0 install to OCE 4.0. Apt-get seems to work well enough on OCE 3.0 and Debian is pretty good at upgrading distros. OCE 3.0 is pretty old (Woody based, I believe) and there don't seem to be any updates recently.
For a system that is supposed to work friendly with a Windows environment OCE 3.0 has some serious limitations. As a normal user I can't write to a Samba share every other Linux distro I've used has no trouble with. I have to change files on the server as root or use FISH/SSH. Pretty annoying.
I rather like the Explorer-like Xandros File Manager but I still tend to use Konqueror since XFM doesn't support tabs and had limited Kioslave functionality. Also, K3B isn't in the Xandros OCE repository and CD burning is limited to 4X (oh well, I'm not in a hurry).
I could just blow Xandros away and install a modern distro, but it still works fine for web surfing and listening to MP3s and I don't see the point in burning a few hours with a new install and all the attendent fiddling just to overcome a few minor annoyances.
The two party system, it is not just a good idea, it's Duverger's Law. Two puppets should be enough for any country.
The eagles did't have a relationship with Gandalf when they first rescued him, Bilbo and about a dozen dwarves from being roasted when they had been treed by goblins and wargs in the Hobbit, as I recall. They seemed to do it just to spite the goblins. The Eagles also intervened not once but twice in full scale battles between composite armies of men, elves & dwarves on one side and goblins/orcs on the other, the Battle of Five Armies and during the dust up between the Captains of the West & the hosts of Sauron at the Black Gates of Morannon. In all three cases the Eagles acted at their considerable peril for no direct benefit to themselves. The internal logic of Middle Earth suggests that Gandalf could have persuaded a single Eagle to dare a solo mission to save all of creation from falling under the Shadow of the East.
No, the Eagles are Tolkien's favorite deus ex machina, one he relied on far to often to write himself out of twists in the plot to which there was no obvious solution. But the point of dei ex machinis is to untangle a problematic story line, not to end the story itself prematurely.
W2K will run acceptably on Socket V hardware as long as it isn't running antivirus software and a software firewall. Once you add those background processes, it slows to a crawl. Linux, on the other paw, doesn't need to run those extra services. Plus, you can chose a lightweight window manager like XFCE or Fluxbox, which isn't an option with Windows. Slackware or a Slack-based XFCE distro like Vectorlinux, Zenwalk, Wolvix, etc. is what I install on hardware of that era.
Also, Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll from long before he took power and was even involved in a CIA plot to kill a previous president of Iraq. After Saddam took power the CIA helped him kill off his political opposition.
Like Noriega, Al Qaida, the Taliban and many others before him, Saddam's real crime wasn't that he a tyrant, a butcher or a dictator, but that he fed at the CIA trough and then later didn't obey orders. That is the one crime that always prompts U.S. military intervention and "liberation."
Unfortunately, Xubuntu Eft seems to have a bug upgrading from Dapper, at least with the with the update-manager. I'm not sure if using the aptitude/apt-get method works any better. I believe you can burn the image to a CD and insert it and Xubuntu will ask you if you want to upgrade. Or you can probably mount the iso and add it to your repository to upgrade, as per an earlier post in this discussion.
Luckily Automatix seems to be ready for Eft, even if EasyUbuntu's site is down at the moment.
PIIs start at 233 MHz, n'cest pas?
"Older machine" covers a lot of ground. ME-stake could have come on anything from about a 266 MHz machine with 64 MB of RAM to a 800 MHz or so with 256 MB. I'd have very different recommendations depending upon which end of the spectrum the machine fell. First of all, I'd suggest upgrading the memory to at least 128 MB to run a modern full-sized distro.
For a really lower end box I'd suggest a Slackware-based distribution with XFCE like Vectorlinux or Zenwalk. Slackware itself is remarkable fast on older hardware. I have a 400 MHz/128 MB machine on the back porch running KDE on 10.2 with no problem, and while it isn't exactly zippy, it works fine (and I won't lose any sleep if the neighborhood kids decide they need the machine more than I do). But Slack requires quite a bit of time and some experience with Linux to set up (when will the mouse wheel work out of the box without editing xorg.conf?) Though I haven't used it much, PC-BSD also seemed adequate running KDE on an older box (128 MB), as well, and isn't as fiddly as Slack.
For a machine with a little more pop I think Freespire would be fine. Xandros free addition is a little dated (2004), but would also work well for someone with Windows experience. It's version of KDE is ancient and doesn't have tabs, but I think it would be more intuitive for first time Linux users. PCLinuxOS is easy to set up and comes with MPlayer configured to play Windows formats without the need for win32-codecs.
A lot of the pain of setting up a desktop Linux box is to set it up to deal with proprietary formats that you are likely to encounter on the net, things like Flash, Realplayer, various codecs, Java, DVDs, etc. Many distros have been actually removing proprietary stuff from their default installs (for instance, libdvdcss is no longer part of PCLinuxOS). So any distro that has tools available to easily add that stuff might make your life easier. EasyUbuntu and Automatix automate all that stuff for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu and Mepis (Automatix), so that makes those distros very appealing. There is something similar available for Debian Etch and I suspect other projects like them are in the works for other major distros. (Anyone know?)
Bearing this in mind, I might suggest Xubuntu, the XFCE version of Ubuntu. It will run on 128 MB machines and the proprietary multimedia stuff is easy to add with those scripts. Plus, it has a very clean, simply interface that a new user would be less likely to find confusing. You can install from the liveCD "Desktop" edition if you have 192 MB of RAM or more or use the "Alternate CD" installation disc with 128 MB. I haven't tried it on a slow machine, but it is very snappy on my lappy.
Arklinux automatically sets up a user called arklinux who has no password and essentially root privileges. You'd think that might be worthy of a comment. The system automatically boots to this arklinux user. I thought I was using Windows. You can give arklinux a password so no one uses the account and set up a new regular account with a password, but that wouldn't necessarily occur to a newbie.
There does not appear to be a GUI tool to configure file sharing. Even Konqueror won't do it. If you right click on a folder and try to create a share and it stalls out after excreting a dialogue box. I think even KateOS is more polished (I've never actually used KateOS, but it is from Poland, hence the reference).
Oh, and the reviewer is lucky he used the System Install rather than going down the Expert path. The version of qtparted they used seems to be broken. See the Arklinux forum.
Trying to start Celestia and Stellarium (and Dog only knows what else) causes X to buckle.
Another problem with smaller distros is that there isn't much of a community to help you if you are having problems. For instance there are fewer than 200 posts on the Arklinux forum spread over two languages. On the other paw, if I'm having problems with Yetis I can go over to the Bigfootforums where there are roughly 230,000 posters who can help me out. The Ark developers respond on the forums when they can, but really, they need to spend their time being developers. One of the things I look for in a distro is a well-developed, friendly community, not so big that you get lost in the shuffle (e.g. Ubuntu) but large enough so there will be someone who can help you. Maybe Mepis or Slackware sized groups, perhaps 25-75 posts per day.
On the plus side, Arklinux does have a very snappy and responsive "feel" to it, and I rather liked some of the customizations the developers chose. Maybe part of that is due to its cutting edge nature, particularly GCC 4.1, KDE 3.54 & X.Org 7.1 (which also accounts for some of the instability and video card problems).
It seems like if you put all the developers together from some of the smaller but very promising distros, say, Frugalware, Arklinux, Ultima, and Vectorlinux Soho, for Slackware-derived up-to-date KDE-centric Linices, you could come up with a really kickass operating system. But I am not sure developer time is necessarily additive, absent a pay-check because of issues of geographic proximity and human egos.
Also, I believe the live CD doesn't come with an installer, unlike most of its ilk.
Now try that with Mozilla or Seamonkey. Whoops, not in the repositories, and they won't install with the standard Mozy tar.gz installer unless you first install the "deprecated" gtk1 package with apt-get because kynaptics is broken and they are probably going to move to Adept, except it is even more broken at the moment. Not something a Newbie will figure out, I'm afraid.
About, but not the only. I have a free punkass.com POP3 email account, but there are several other providers that still provide free POP3 & Web Based email,as well. Plus you can always use some program like yahoopops, fetchyahoo or yahoo2mbox to download most any web based email to a POP3 email client.
I gave a link for a $500 HP Wintel laptop, then I stumbled across one for $400 this week at BestBuy, not MIR. 512 MB of PC4200, 1.46 GHz Celeron M with 1 MB of L2 cache, 1280x768, 6-in-1 digital media reader (I gather Mac lappies don't routinely have those), firewire, USB 2.0, wireless and wired LAN, 5.2 lbs., 60 GB SATA drive. Supposedly Vista-ready and it comes with a remote and ear buds, so hopefully people will think you have an iPod in the cyber-cafe. You could almost buy 3 of these for the price of the cheapest new Apple notebook.
Beat Windows XP Home in to a corner with QTPARTED, then blow on Mepis or Ubuntu or whatever your favorite distro is & you've got a great, secure little dual-booting box. Linux for surfing and coding, Windows for gaming and using proprietary hardware.
I know lots of folks have had issues with a lot of Wintel hardware failing, but that issue is hardly unique. Mac hardware fails, too, and lots of cheap Wintel hardware lasts for years without any issues. I built an AT box with the cheapest stuff I could find 10 years ago (well, I splurged on a $107 FIC PA-2007 motherboard). Though I upgraded a few things (32 MB EDO to 128 MB of SDRAM, Pentium I 120 MHz CPU to a K-6 300, 1.7 GB HD to a 5 GB WD HD), nothing EVER failed. It went from Windows 95A to being a Debian Sarge server in a room where I didn't have to listen to the fans. It arrived in La Paz, Bolivia about a week ago, where hopefully the Ministry of Health will continue to use it for years.
Also, I'm not saying that ALL Apple hardware is overpriced and over-hyped. I'm actually very attracted to the MacMini because it is so quiet & energy-efficient, and not too expensive, though I could build a much more powerful Wintel SFF box for a lot less and it would be a lot easier to service (fix, upgrade).
No, an $1100 eMac & a $300 Airport Extreme, plus some software she didn't need. She could have bought a $250 Linspire box or I would have built her an even nicer system for $350. I've seen these cheap GQ Linspire boxes on sale for as little as $100 since then. And since the Airport Extreme isn't quite extreme enough to go up a couple of floors so her husband can use it & she plugs in directly to her DSL modem, she wouldn't have needed to spend $20 after mail in rebate on some perfectly functional commodity wireless router. (We were looking for wireless NICs for her husband's machine so I priced the routers at that time.)
Actually, she told me she spent $1800 at the Apple store, which is altogether believable since some eMacs did indeed cost $1500. I was just being ultra-conservative because she might have had to purchase a monitor, keyboard, speakers, etc. if she'd bought the GQ machine, plus SDRAM RAM to upgrade the GQ box was more expensive in those days. Her old monitor was a kind of crummy 14" model and her previous computer was AT, and I'm not sure if those cheapo GQ boxes come with any peripherals. Anyway, I sold her a $3 USB scroll mouse and it made quite a difference to her computing experience.
Right, and you can buy a perfectly serviceable Windows laptop with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM for $500 new if you keep your eyes open. OK, it will only have 256 MB of RAM, but for $30 you can kick that up to 512 MB, which is plenty for any operating system but Vista (or maybe Linux with xgl/compriz). My friend shopped around a bit and bought a new Toshiba for $400. Shopping around doesn't really help you with Apple, plus you get to pay $100 premium if you want a different color, I understand.
But I guess I cheap PC lappie won't be as "cool" as an Apple. Seems like the majority of the folks I see at the local cyber-cafe have Macs, though they are a small fraction of the market. I guess that's what you want when you want to be seen.
Frankly, though I have a couple of techie friends who swear by Macs, most of the folks I've seen using them bought them because they were told they were "more advanced" and they would have been better served buying a cheap clone and pocketing the cash.
Case and point, I know a 75 year old folksinger who thought she needed a Mac to make music (this despite the fact that she couldn't figure out how to play the directory of MP3s that I put on her Desktop). She paid as much for her bleeding wireless router as an entire faster PC would have cost her (and her husband still can't connect to her $300 Airport Extreme upstairs). And despite this eMac having a reasonably fast CPU and enough RAM (256) I couldn't stand using this Apple POS because it was so pokey. The Apple default is to turn on every stupid piece of eye candy like transparency and animated oscillating taskbars. And they tuck the preferences away so that a fairly computer savvy person couldn't easily turn that crap off without Googling around. The lack of a second mouse button with a context menu or a scroll wheel didn't help figuring things out. But it looked "cool." It seems like Mac is a cult of form-over-function. All the connectors were tucked away away on the side of this all-in-wonder POS. 10 out of 10 for aesthetics, minus several dozen for convenience.
All she does is a little light web surfing and email. I could have bought her the $150 Fry's "GQ" special with Linspire pre-installed, kicked up the RAM to 640 MB for $40, and it would have been more responsive and done everything she needed, and she could be getting interest on the $1200 she would have saved.
Sure, the GQ would be made with low quality commodity parts. But Apples are now mostly commodity components these days and those eMacs had plenty of hardware problems, particular RasterShift and failing capacitors. At least if the GQ's motherboard or power supply failed they would be cheap and easy to replace. I don't think the eMacs were designed to be consumer serviceable, any more than the MacMini or the iPod. Take 'em in to the Apple store when the battery fails, or better yet, buy a new one. Feh.