Like most others here, I'm very curious about what really happened to Streamcast's Morpheus network. But in practical terms, I settled for trying for the new "Preview Edition". The Musiccity web site last night said that it would be available "in two hours" and indeed after that page was unchanged for more than two hours, the new edition was on Download.com. I had been thinking about rebooting into Linux but this gave me another reason to stay in Windows.
Why? There are many gnutella clients for Linux that will operate with the new preview edition, which uses the gnutella protocol. If anything, it'd give you another reason to run Linux; unless you really like gnucleus a lot better than the other Linux gnutella clients.
The best Web downloads and installs were from Opera and Mozilla, which have minimal dependencies. Galeon is a small download but can be difficult to upgrade due to its Mozilla and GNOME dependencies.
Galeon *RPMs* are difficult to upgrade, but if you build it from source it works with any GNOME and Mozilla; just tell./configure where the directories for Mozilla and GNOME are if they aren't the default, and off you go! Of course, that doesn't count as "easy to install" in the minds of people who think that RPMs are always easier than a source tarball.:-)
I've used Mandrake pretty extensively, and even it has some weird problems (like asking which version of XFree86 you want to use, and not automatically detecting the monitor and setting a reasonable resolution.)
SuSE managed to configure my video-card for 1024x768 on the spot; configuring it to use 85Mhz refresh rates (which your vaunted Windows XP only does in a difficult to find "advanced" menu) was quite simple, requiring the changing of one line. It also didn't ask what version of XFree86 I wanted, though this actually could be an important question for people with old video cards.
There is just a lot of stuff on Linux that is poorly documented and/or buggy, and that carries over to the Windows versions of open-source software in a lot of cases. Netscape 6.2 (which I am using on a daily basis) is easily one of the worst email clients I have ever used.
Use recent (0.95 or later) versions of Mozilla instead of Netscape as a browser.
Use Evolution 1.x or KMail as your mail client, Netscape/Mozilla email is for dolts (present company excepted) who think that one program doing everything somehow makes things easier.
Since I'm flaming software and comparing distros here a bit, I don't expect this to be modded up.I hope you manage to read it anyway, since the objections you posted to Linux are based upon limitations that don't belong to Linux.
This also occurs with periodic polling programs, like mailers. Programs that poll, then wait for a fixed time will, if polling the same server, lock into synchronization. Then they all poll at about the same time. This phenomenon was discovered in Sendmail in the early 1980s, by someone at Lawrence Livermore Labs
The BinkleyTerm FidoNet mailer, a GPL'd store and forward mail and news program used in the 80s and 90s (back in the day there was over 32,000 nodes in the biggest Fido network), had a semi-random dialing pattern for that reason. It would dial out (as it's default) randomly between 1-2 minutes. The default was so long in order that BBS callers would have a chance to log in when "continuous mail" was being sent out. Mail-only systems could be set to dial faster, but still with a formula of a random time between 0.5 and 1.0 of the maximum dial cycle.
I wonder if it's authors knew of the Lawrence Livermore Labs study of Sendmail or if they picked this up from trial and error.:-)
The reason UNIX and UNIX applications are hard to configure, in most cases, is because Open Source programmers are lazy.
You must be thinking of Linux. UNIX(tm) was developed by AT&T and although for a while it was free to universities it is not open source; and is still a property of USL or whatever they're calling themselves now. Incidentally, with the exception of sendmail.cf, most Linux/Unix configuration files aren't that hard to understand by ordinary mortals, and have the advantage of being easily manipulatable by stream editors, scripts, and the like. (Even GUIs if you want them.) Sometimes in fact you need to have a text editor's search and block copy commands for repetive systems adminstration tasks that would be very labor-intensive if everything was a GUI.
I'll say something else that will probably get me modded down. After the recent flirtation between AOL and RedHat, I'm not sure that the moralistic arguments against MS hold up so well.
There was no flirtation between AOL and Red Hat except on some news websites, it was a rumor it turns out. Also, Alan Cox said that if AOL tries to take over Red Hat he would leave; which means that Red Hat's main Linux coder indeed does have a sense of values beyond the average big corporate ones.
Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is giving extraordinary sums of money to real nuts and bolts making the world a better place kinds of causes. Gates could literally turn out to be the most significant philanthropist in the history of the world.
Bill Gates admitted in an interview in national media that his total financial giving in one year was an astoundingly-high-for-a-billionaire 50,000 dollars, all of it spent on computers running Windows in the Seattle Public Library system. When asked about this he said he just "didn't have enough time" to administer charitable giving. When this news made headlines within a short period of time Bill Gates established his foundation, but don't think it's not for PR rather than out of the goodness of his heart.
Ah, I also have fond memories of running a BBS under Desqview-386. The non-/X version, I only had a 386 with 4 megs of RAM. It multitasked DOS so well when properly tuned that I used one meg for a diskcache with Hyperdisk to provide staged writes (Microsoft's "Smartdisk" was anything but) with enough room to spare to run three or four additional programs. One window for a mail reader, one for the 24 hour BBS, and one or two for additional programs plus infinite tiny DOS shell windows for command line jobs. Not only that, I had Linux 0.95 (later 0.99) set up for dual-boot on it's own 20 meg partition.:-)
Anyhow, turning nostalgia mode off, Linux Window managers could learn from Desqview's sophisticated cut and paste proceedures. It was possible to smoothly paste from, for example, a word processor to cells of a spread-sheet because you could specify keystrokes to go between each piece of data. If the cutting and pasting didn't require any special keys, just press return or space bar to make each line delimited by them. It was simple or powerful, depending upon your needs. KDE (and GNOME, etc.) rock, but they could learn a thing or two about clipboard management from humble Desqview.
Why not just use XP or 2K? They run Windows apps better than Lindows, and sure seems just as stable as Linux...
Windows XP may be more stable than 9x, but it (and IE6 that comes with it) has some very significant security problems out of the box. Also, many of the huge patches from Windows Update that supposedly fix the major security holes found so-far reportedly make it a lot more unstable. (OTOH, I do slightly reccomend Win2000, except that you've thrown out the main reason then for dual-booting Micrsoft, the games; because of it's lack of compatability in that area.)
If the budget will allow I'd really like to use LCD flat screens as I figure they'll last longer with no tubes etc
LCD flat screens are actually less durable than CRTs, so don't get them for that. Their main advantages are footprint and portability, but they can break rather easily.
Windows, love it or loathe it, has very nice true-type, well-hinted fonts. They are very easy to read, even when small. They have serif, they have sans-serif, and both are beautiful.
There's a nice little script included in XFree86 4.x tools called fetchmsttfonts (type that in carefully:-) ) that will (legally, believe it or not) download and install MS's true type fonts. Try it out, you'll get good Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
BTW, it sends MS's EULA through your pager, press q to exit it to go to the next step.
I use an nVidia card and that is one reason why I don't use FreeBSD. There is some sort of "initiative" going on, but since I do a lot of desktop work under Linux despite what people say about it not being ready for the desktop, I need it *now*.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that BSD doesn't yet support USB keyboards without compiling a custom kernel. The system I run now has these, and does not have non-USB ports for the "human interface" equipment, rendering even BSD without X totally uninstallable on this computer. Many computers are being built like this, and until FreeBSD supports them it means that many desktop machines built in the last year or two cannot install FreeBSD, not to mention the other BSDs.
Don't get me wrong, I think BSD is wonderful, but the hardware support in Linux is far superior, and in my case a requirement.
Interesting info about Gravenreuth, but SuSE 7.3 was actually stopped - a temporary court injunction baring them from distributing SuSE Linux in Germany was filed by the judge, according to the story previously posted here. However, it appears that they weren't stopped much longer than a day or so.:-)
SuSE Linux is LSB and FHS complient. This of course makes it have less compatability with all other distributions because (Red Hat is an egregious offender) the norm is to be non-complient.:-(
Install Gnome with the default wm of elightenment. E is a very slick looking window manager. Beautiful eyecandy. However, the second I try to maximise the window, I practicaly have to go searchign through documentation.
GNOME's default window manager is Sawfish, not Enlightenment. Sawfish's buttons are indeed confusing at first, so maybe you're thinking of it anyway. Enlightenment is indeed maximal eye-candy however.
I prefer to run KDE; but that's primarily because I have the latest hardware; otherwise I'd probably be running Blackbox, Windowmaker, or fvwm. (But probably not fvwm95; I don't like to be reminded of Windows.;-) )
This article uses the piggy spam icon and if you click on it it is listed among the spam articles rather than in the "ask slashdot" catagory. It looks like someone made a mistake that needs fixing, especially since it's a little more than just cosmetic due to the topical indexing error.
I bought FreeBSD Power Pack, because the package and ports scheme was better than RPMs, it had better memory management so it'd run OK on an old 486 with 16 megabytes of RAM, and was more True Unix(tm). Unfortunately, it wouldn't recognize my ancient double-speed CD-ROM drive. (Don't laugh.)
Recently I made a big system upgrade, to a new Pentium 4 system with USB everything. I installed Linux; I heard FreeBSD wouldn't install with a USB keyboard and this system doesn't have a PS/2 keyboard port.
FreeBSD is great stuff, but it doesn't have the PC hardware support that Linux does; there *are* advantages to having hundreds of hackers working on supporting any concievable device you could think of.
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- Use recent (0.95 or later) versions of Mozilla instead of Netscape as a browser.
- Use Evolution 1.x or KMail as your mail client, Netscape/Mozilla email is for dolts (present company excepted) who think that one program doing everything somehow makes things easier.
Since I'm flaming software and comparing distros here a bit, I don't expect this to be modded up.I hope you manage to read it anyway, since the objections you posted to Linux are based upon limitations that don't belong to Linux.I wonder if it's authors knew of the Lawrence Livermore Labs study of Sendmail or if they picked this up from trial and error. :-)
Star Trek was saved from the axe for a few more seasons by a letter writing campaign, so don't think you can't make a difference.
SuSE is the most conformat with LSB and the FHS, and from an internationalization perspective it too is one of the best.
Anyhow, turning nostalgia mode off, Linux Window managers could learn from Desqview's sophisticated cut and paste proceedures. It was possible to smoothly paste from, for example, a word processor to cells of a spread-sheet because you could specify keystrokes to go between each piece of data. If the cutting and pasting didn't require any special keys, just press return or space bar to make each line delimited by them. It was simple or powerful, depending upon your needs. KDE (and GNOME, etc.) rock, but they could learn a thing or two about clipboard management from humble Desqview.
Now BSD's logo will need four prongs on the pitch-*fork* instead of three. ;-)
There's a nice little script included in XFree86 4.x tools called fetchmsttfonts (type that in carefully :-) ) that will (legally, believe it or not) download and install MS's true type fonts. Try it out, you'll get good Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
BTW, it sends MS's EULA through your pager, press q to exit it to go to the next step.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that BSD doesn't yet support USB keyboards without compiling a custom kernel. The system I run now has these, and does not have non-USB ports for the "human interface" equipment, rendering even BSD without X totally uninstallable on this computer. Many computers are being built like this, and until FreeBSD supports them it means that many desktop machines built in the last year or two cannot install FreeBSD, not to mention the other BSDs.
Don't get me wrong, I think BSD is wonderful, but the hardware support in Linux is far superior, and in my case a requirement.
Interesting info about Gravenreuth, but SuSE 7.3 was actually stopped - a temporary court injunction baring them from distributing SuSE Linux in Germany was filed by the judge, according to the story previously posted here. However, it appears that they weren't stopped much longer than a day or so. :-)
SuSE Linux is LSB and FHS complient. This of course makes it have less compatability with all other distributions because (Red Hat is an egregious offender) the norm is to be non-complient. :-(
I prefer to run KDE; but that's primarily because I have the latest hardware; otherwise I'd probably be running Blackbox, Windowmaker, or fvwm. (But probably not fvwm95; I don't like to be reminded of Windows. ;-) )
This article uses the piggy spam icon and if you click on it it is listed among the spam articles rather than in the "ask slashdot" catagory. It looks like someone made a mistake that needs fixing, especially since it's a little more than just cosmetic due to the topical indexing error.
Recently I made a big system upgrade, to a new Pentium 4 system with USB everything. I installed Linux; I heard FreeBSD wouldn't install with a USB keyboard and this system doesn't have a PS/2 keyboard port.
FreeBSD is great stuff, but it doesn't have the PC hardware support that Linux does; there *are* advantages to having hundreds of hackers working on supporting any concievable device you could think of.
Use checkinstall. You should be able to download it from freshmeat where I remember getting it.