As for desktops, it's about time we see this in a corporate setting on the desktop. All the functionality is there.........
Actually, not quite. If you look at Psyche, it's clearly being aimed at the corporate desktop, but the remote admin tools haven't been developed yet. There's kickstart and that's about it.
I'd bet almost anything that with the next few versions of Redhat, they start introducing stronger corporate desktop management software.
My observation over time has been that Linux seems to stay about 3 or 4 years behind Windows in the area of user interaction. For example, the latest RedHat 8.0 release with KDE finally has an elusive "buttery smoothness" that I first noticed with Win2K.
I think you noticed the increase in HZ, a relatively minor kernel tweak that makes it feel a lot more responsive on the desktop, but it slightly lowers server performance. Up until now Redhat haven't been trying on the desktop really, no optimizations that could have been done but weren't for instance.
Comparing Redhat and XP, well they both have strengths and weaknesses of course, and XP is on top, but not by as much as I was expecting. XP is still easier, but you can see that although it's not "done" yet (graphical install of packages, but no graphical uninstall for instance) Redhat is at long last moving forwards at full speed on the desktop. It'll be fascinating to see how Redhat 9 or whatever we're on by then stacks up against Longhorn usability wise.
Re:How exactly would Linux handle 5000 developers?
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They are all handled by Linux, easily, today. Basically because Linux has a decentralised management structure, ie you can have 3 teams working on the same thing in different ways and the best is chosen by competition. Look at how many people work on the Linux kernel - do you think the Windows kernel gets that much work put into it?
Actually, it was called OpenDoc, and it was open, cross platform and good. But Apple killed it, Microsoft wasn't interested and so we ended up with.... ActiveX! Yipee!
ActiveX was of course a rebranding of OLE which was the Windows object linking and embedding, the idea being that in the future apps would come as a set of ActiveX components that could merge themselves into a host application - hence, 1 app to do everything. Surprise surprise, it never took off.
Does anybody else get the impression that they're running at full speed, but that Linux might actually be running faster? At the moment of course, Windows is ahead of the game by a long way, but seeing the figures in that article made me wonder just how fast MS really can develop Windows.
I know there is a hard limit of about 5000 developers, during the Win2K development cycle they hit this limit and found it was almost impossible to manage. Therefore Windows development speed is basically linear, right? But Linux doesn't have that problem to anywhere near the same degree. I wonder how much of this is hype (most i expect) and how much will really finally make it. And I wonder where Linux will be when Longhorn does come out....
It's absolutely legal. Wine and WineX are clean room implementations and as such protected by law. The only problems that might arise are patent-related, but as there's practically nothing in Windows at the API level that hasn't been done before I doubt there is much risk of that.
I use Wine almost every day to run IE6 with the Adobe SVG Plugin and it works great. How do I do this? Simply, I got a copy of Crossover (a commercial distro of Wine) and pointed it at a build from Wine CVS.
Wine isn't yet easy enough to setup for most people, so Codeweavers do it for you. Think of them as the Redhat of Wine. It is possible to do anything you can do in CrossOver with WineHQ wine, but it's a lot harder. Wine is scheduled to get "ease of use" some time around 0.9 and 1.0 which are happening probably sometime mid to late next year.
Not subpixel rendering, that's not the same as antialiasing. Yes, if I switch on ClearType I get fuzzy fonts, but that's not ideal because CT is meant for LCDs not CRTs.
Don't believe me if you like, I used it for a couple of months, and never got AA working. Most annoying. What's amusing is that we sound like the old "Linux is great! Linux sucks!" arguments you see so often around here, I'm saying Windows didn't work for me, "well it works for me, you must be a luser or something" etc
As a possibly interesting aside, I work for QinetiQ, the newly privatized DERA which was UK Military of Defense research. They do a lot of consulting for the MoD and the government. About a year or two ago they produced a report which was the definitive report for the UK government on open source.
It was very positive. I don't know if it was ever made public (I don't see why it wouldn't be) but I have a copy at home, and it made for pleasant reading. And here at work, Linux and open source is everywhere. When I was doing a demo of my project about a week ago, as I demoed it my boss was talking and he said "Oh yes, this is all done using only open source and free software" which got lots of approval from the customers and other project managers etc (in fact my brief was, do it with open source if possible). My boss uses windows but with cygwin and the Gimp. There are several Linux workstations in my small dept alone. They are big into open source here. This reflects into the next generation of technologies for the military
I think it must just be a government/civil service thing, but they seem to have a soft side for it. One thing I do think is dumb is that if the US DoD has made up its mind on open source that Microsoft amongst others should be telling them they are wrong, and denying choice. Uh, what? So people can no longer choose products based on what they think, in case it's "discrimination" or something? Hmmm.
Yeah, I know the theory. But it never worked for me at small sizes. Most of the text on my screen was 10 or 12pt, and I could only get Windows to start antialiasing stuff at I think 14pt or 16pt and above. A friend of mine told me you can use a TweakUI type tool to make it start AA at lower point sizes, but then the tables have been neatly turned - Linux is the one that looks great out of the box, and Windows is the one that needs fiddling and configuration to make it work. And I'd have never guessed at the name of the tool my friend told me to use, because of course there is no documentation:)
Look. This guy stands up on Slashdot and bitches about how something doesn't work. I point out that it's brand new, and tell him how to make it work. It involves using a different set of installers to normal. No, they don't have obvious names. In a few months when more distros are shipping with the font gadgetry needed, it'll be on by default and nobody will have to think about it again.
Can you imagine if Apple treated folks that way? I can't tell you how many times I've been at the apple store and heard something along the lines of "No no sir...clicking the X button only closes the _window_. The program is still running. See, Apple does that so you can clear up graphical space on the screen without losing the ability to use your program."
No, that's what minimization is for. Apple does that because that's how they've always done that, and because they are too tied down by the weight of history to change it. The fact that apps stay open when the last window has closed is one of the most confusing things about a Mac, everybody I've seen who's not used a Mac before gets bitten by that one - multiple times.
Explaining HOW to do something is always curt, and makes the new guy feel like a dumbass. Explaining WHY you do something always makes it easier to do next time.
The why is simple, and I did explain it - it's because antialiasing is new, so it's not on by default, so you have to get special builds of it if you're on Redhat. The how is important too, because rather stupidly that link doesn't appear in the release notes.
Note that if you went into an Apple store and started bitching at the salesperson about how much Apple suck because I used a Mac yesterday and kept hitting the wrong keys, kept forgotting to shut down apps etc you'd probably get a curt response as well. If the guy had asked nicely - how do I get antialiased Mozilla - then he'd have got multiple nice responses. Instead, he took the attitude that because random feature X didn't just automagically happen right away, clearly the whole thing sucks and will never go anywhere. Right. Whatever.
I had the day off today so I installed Redhat 8.0 (SURPRISE!) and tried to get Mozilla 1.2 up and running with anti-aliased fonts.
Talk about jumping in at the deep end! Antialiased fonts are brand new to Linux, and although it's the best at them (no really, compare some screenshots, it beats OS X hands down), not everything supports it yet.
To get Mozilla with antialiased fonts, uninstall the current Mozilla RPMs and use these:
On RedHat, it's that simple. I dunno what you were trying to do, but hopefully this will make it easier for you.
verybody hears so much about Linux so they install it only to be disappointed to such an extreme that they'd never want to bother again (I know that I do not).
Well, I'm sorry that you expected Linux to be perfect and then it wasn't. Remember that on Windows XP (at least on all the installs I've ever used) it doesn't even antialias most text, so that's hardly a mainstream feature. But yes, point taken. It's not perfect. It'll never be perfect, that's impossible. It is getting better very fast.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when Gnome or KDE drop dead (I can't wait) and some consistency settles in.
Not going to happen. It's called competition, it's natural, healthy and good, and it happens in every other part of life. We manage somehow. As for UI consistency, that's improving in leaps and bounds too. In fact in RedHat 8 the differences between KDE and GNOME apps are marginal, mostly hidden. What was lacking in consistency for you?
Not quite the same. When the post above talked about Windows compatability, he meant Linux is able to be compatible with Windows without the permission of Microsoft.
That is the crucial difference. There is one reason, and one reason alone that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and that's because Microsoft is in the driving seat. They guard all the doors, they hold all the keys. If you want to do anything with your computer, you have to pay the gatekeeper the toll.
This is what keeps Microsoft in power. So when you say, "the Mac is Windows compatible", I say, sure, but it's the wrong sort of compatability. What has happened on Linux is that the keys have been cloned and alternative doors have been constructed. What has happened on the Mac is that it's simply approaching the Microsoft doors from a different direction to normal.
At the end of the day, if MS wanted to stop the Mac being "Windows compatible" tomorrow, it could. It'd pull Office, IE and the next service pack for Windows would suddenly no longer work in Virtual PC (or they'd buy out/cripple/put out of business whoever makes it) and the EULA would say you're not allowed to run Windows in a PowerPC virtual machine or something. Most of the Macs Windows compatability requires Microsofts approval to operate - for apps (the most important) you must pay for Windows, for Office compatability everybody buys MS Office.
I'm not even going to go into the difference in quality of experience when you run Office in Virtual PC vs Office in Wine/Crossover (hint: crossover works best).
Sorry, I did try to find one but couldn't (i don't recall where I got them from). Check on Moz FTP under the experimental experimental, you want RH8 XFT builds.
Mozilla now is like ie 3/4 at the time... A far better product to use (standard compliance not withstanding), but as stable as a 2 legged stool.
Well don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your wrong, setups vary, but considering that reliability increases constantly and in April of this year the MTBF was over 24 hours, I can tell you the statistics don't reflect this. Please don't tell people to avoid Moz because it's unstable...
Oh btw, MTBF is an industry standard measurement of reliability, it stands for Mean Time Before Fail, and is the average amount of time it takes before the app crashes. Considering that very few people will run Mozilla under heavy usage for more than 24 hours straight, that basically means that for most people it doesn't crash.
For reference, the MTBF of M11 was 1 hour. We've come a long way since then;)
Well, all those things are mirrored pretty heavily. Mozilla is paid for by AOL remember, so it's not such a big deal. For the case of RedHat, I think they are the biggest user of bandwidth on the whole of the east coast, and they are mirrored extensively. Obviously, there is a pretty big difference between 100,000 people downloading a few gigs of data and 10mb.
Er, yes. I find Moz to be plenty fast enough, and I use a truckload of extensions which don't quite work in Pheonix yet.
I don't really see what all the fuss is about, I'm using XFT builds for Redhat 8 that Blizzard puts out and they're snappy and look great. I did try Phoenix when I was on Windows, but found it to be no faster than Mozilla but with fewer features. I might try it again in a bit, but Moz is just fine for me.
I'm waiting on Galeon 2 myself, at least then it'll integrate well with gnome.
I'm sorry, not trying to start a flame war or anything. But who is this story for? Windows users?
Yes, all those 95% of people who use the only platform that has decent DRM in it.
This service needs IE, WMA, and a Windows Box?
Unfortunately yes, as I expect using WMA is the only adequate way to keep some semblance of control. No other platform really has any equivalent (good/bad, up to you).
The songs won't work in my car, walkman or the kids boom-box?
I don't know, but considering I sent the BBC a patch for their javascript news headline ticker over a year that made it work in not just IE but also Mozilla, and they have never applied it (would have taken all of 2 minutes), I don't think the BBC are the best people to be talking about standards compliance really.
Actaully with RedHat 8, when you first install it it asks you to add yourself to the RedHat network (which I did). When an exploit is found, they email you with information about which machines are the problem. A red warning symbol also appears in the system tray, you just click it (or run up2date if the ! symbol hasn't appeared yet) and it updates it all.
I've had RH8 installed for about a month now, and so far there's been 1 patch to the kernel. It was hardly a major exploit but updating was easy so I did so. It took a while, but I just left it running in the background and got on with my work.
Windows has a similar feature, but I'm not sure if they email you when new patches are available.
But just like letting grade-school students use calculators for their arithmetic, I'm not certain these things are best for students. Sure, you get usable code out quickly, but without an understanding of the underlying algorithms and logic. I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
An interesting point, but I don't quite agree with the analogy.
The reason an overreliance on calculators is seen as bad is because often in the real world there is a need to do fast mental arithmetic when you don't have or want to use a calculator, so people who depend on them too much are disadvantaged later on in life quite severely.
On the other hand, this doesn't apply to computing abstractions. I've been programming for many years in many different types of apps, and I've never needed to write a quicksort routine. Why? Because when I needed one there was always a preprovided abstraction I could use that meant I didn't have to concentrate on the details, I could just use it. Ditto for low level coding - I used to be able to directly program sound cards in the days of DOS. Could I now? No, I haven't needed to do that for years, the OS means I don't have to. I can concentrate on telling the computer what to do, rather than how to do it for the most part, which is imho good.
The point is, if we don't get the word out about palladium, it will be illegal to use this bios in its free state. That's the least of our worries.
I was under the impression that if you were to do this, it would simply be that the Palladium services would be unavailable. It certainly wouldn't be illegal, not even in the US unless you attempted to add Palladium into LinuxBIOS but allowing it to circumvent the system somehow, and even then it'd only be illegal in the US.
Does anyone know if this helps us in the war against Palladium and DRM?
No, because Palladium is optional, according to the official Microsoft FAQ it can be disabled if you so wish, and indeed the services it provides are only engaged when a program requests it.
Unless things change significantly over at Redmond, there is no war.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, not quite. If you look at Psyche, it's clearly being aimed at the corporate desktop, but the remote admin tools haven't been developed yet. There's kickstart and that's about it.
I'd bet almost anything that with the next few versions of Redhat, they start introducing stronger corporate desktop management software.
I think you noticed the increase in HZ, a relatively minor kernel tweak that makes it feel a lot more responsive on the desktop, but it slightly lowers server performance. Up until now Redhat haven't been trying on the desktop really, no optimizations that could have been done but weren't for instance.
Comparing Redhat and XP, well they both have strengths and weaknesses of course, and XP is on top, but not by as much as I was expecting. XP is still easier, but you can see that although it's not "done" yet (graphical install of packages, but no graphical uninstall for instance) Redhat is at long last moving forwards at full speed on the desktop. It'll be fascinating to see how Redhat 9 or whatever we're on by then stacks up against Longhorn usability wise.
They are all handled by Linux, easily, today. Basically because Linux has a decentralised management structure, ie you can have 3 teams working on the same thing in different ways and the best is chosen by competition. Look at how many people work on the Linux kernel - do you think the Windows kernel gets that much work put into it?
ActiveX was of course a rebranding of OLE which was the Windows object linking and embedding, the idea being that in the future apps would come as a set of ActiveX components that could merge themselves into a host application - hence, 1 app to do everything. Surprise surprise, it never took off.
I know there is a hard limit of about 5000 developers, during the Win2K development cycle they hit this limit and found it was almost impossible to manage. Therefore Windows development speed is basically linear, right? But Linux doesn't have that problem to anywhere near the same degree. I wonder how much of this is hype (most i expect) and how much will really finally make it. And I wonder where Linux will be when Longhorn does come out....
It's absolutely legal. Wine and WineX are clean room implementations and as such protected by law. The only problems that might arise are patent-related, but as there's practically nothing in Windows at the API level that hasn't been done before I doubt there is much risk of that.
Actually, yes
Ha! Gotcha! :)
Please please please setup Vipuls Razor - that we can all benefit from the spamminess of your account!
There are more here
I use Wine almost every day to run IE6 with the Adobe SVG Plugin and it works great. How do I do this? Simply, I got a copy of Crossover (a commercial distro of Wine) and pointed it at a build from Wine CVS.
Wine isn't yet easy enough to setup for most people, so Codeweavers do it for you. Think of them as the Redhat of Wine. It is possible to do anything you can do in CrossOver with WineHQ wine, but it's a lot harder. Wine is scheduled to get "ease of use" some time around 0.9 and 1.0 which are happening probably sometime mid to late next year.
Don't believe me if you like, I used it for a couple of months, and never got AA working. Most annoying. What's amusing is that we sound like the old "Linux is great! Linux sucks!" arguments you see so often around here, I'm saying Windows didn't work for me, "well it works for me, you must be a luser or something" etc
It was very positive. I don't know if it was ever made public (I don't see why it wouldn't be) but I have a copy at home, and it made for pleasant reading. And here at work, Linux and open source is everywhere. When I was doing a demo of my project about a week ago, as I demoed it my boss was talking and he said "Oh yes, this is all done using only open source and free software" which got lots of approval from the customers and other project managers etc (in fact my brief was, do it with open source if possible). My boss uses windows but with cygwin and the Gimp. There are several Linux workstations in my small dept alone. They are big into open source here. This reflects into the next generation of technologies for the military
I think it must just be a government/civil service thing, but they seem to have a soft side for it. One thing I do think is dumb is that if the US DoD has made up its mind on open source that Microsoft amongst others should be telling them they are wrong, and denying choice. Uh, what? So people can no longer choose products based on what they think, in case it's "discrimination" or something? Hmmm.
Yeah, I know the theory. But it never worked for me at small sizes. Most of the text on my screen was 10 or 12pt, and I could only get Windows to start antialiasing stuff at I think 14pt or 16pt and above. A friend of mine told me you can use a TweakUI type tool to make it start AA at lower point sizes, but then the tables have been neatly turned - Linux is the one that looks great out of the box, and Windows is the one that needs fiddling and configuration to make it work. And I'd have never guessed at the name of the tool my friend told me to use, because of course there is no documentation :)
Can you imagine if Apple treated folks that way? I can't tell you how many times I've been at the apple store and heard something along the lines of "No no sir...clicking the X button only closes the _window_. The program is still running. See, Apple does that so you can clear up graphical space on the screen without losing the ability to use your program."
No, that's what minimization is for. Apple does that because that's how they've always done that, and because they are too tied down by the weight of history to change it. The fact that apps stay open when the last window has closed is one of the most confusing things about a Mac, everybody I've seen who's not used a Mac before gets bitten by that one - multiple times.
Explaining HOW to do something is always curt, and makes the new guy feel like a dumbass. Explaining WHY you do something always makes it easier to do next time.
The why is simple, and I did explain it - it's because antialiasing is new, so it's not on by default, so you have to get special builds of it if you're on Redhat. The how is important too, because rather stupidly that link doesn't appear in the release notes.
Note that if you went into an Apple store and started bitching at the salesperson about how much Apple suck because I used a Mac yesterday and kept hitting the wrong keys, kept forgotting to shut down apps etc you'd probably get a curt response as well. If the guy had asked nicely - how do I get antialiased Mozilla - then he'd have got multiple nice responses. Instead, he took the attitude that because random feature X didn't just automagically happen right away, clearly the whole thing sucks and will never go anywhere. Right. Whatever.
Talk about jumping in at the deep end! Antialiased fonts are brand new to Linux, and although it's the best at them (no really, compare some screenshots, it beats OS X hands down), not everything supports it yet.
To get Mozilla with antialiased fonts, uninstall the current Mozilla RPMs and use these:
Redhat XFT RPMS
On RedHat, it's that simple. I dunno what you were trying to do, but hopefully this will make it easier for you.
verybody hears so much about Linux so they install it only to be disappointed to such an extreme that they'd never want to bother again (I know that I do not).
Well, I'm sorry that you expected Linux to be perfect and then it wasn't. Remember that on Windows XP (at least on all the installs I've ever used) it doesn't even antialias most text, so that's hardly a mainstream feature. But yes, point taken. It's not perfect. It'll never be perfect, that's impossible. It is getting better very fast.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when Gnome or KDE drop dead (I can't wait) and some consistency settles in.
Not going to happen. It's called competition, it's natural, healthy and good, and it happens in every other part of life. We manage somehow. As for UI consistency, that's improving in leaps and bounds too. In fact in RedHat 8 the differences between KDE and GNOME apps are marginal, mostly hidden. What was lacking in consistency for you?
Virtual PC runs Windows.
Not quite the same. When the post above talked about Windows compatability, he meant Linux is able to be compatible with Windows without the permission of Microsoft.
That is the crucial difference. There is one reason, and one reason alone that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, and that's because Microsoft is in the driving seat. They guard all the doors, they hold all the keys. If you want to do anything with your computer, you have to pay the gatekeeper the toll.
This is what keeps Microsoft in power. So when you say, "the Mac is Windows compatible", I say, sure, but it's the wrong sort of compatability. What has happened on Linux is that the keys have been cloned and alternative doors have been constructed. What has happened on the Mac is that it's simply approaching the Microsoft doors from a different direction to normal.
At the end of the day, if MS wanted to stop the Mac being "Windows compatible" tomorrow, it could. It'd pull Office, IE and the next service pack for Windows would suddenly no longer work in Virtual PC (or they'd buy out/cripple/put out of business whoever makes it) and the EULA would say you're not allowed to run Windows in a PowerPC virtual machine or something. Most of the Macs Windows compatability requires Microsofts approval to operate - for apps (the most important) you must pay for Windows, for Office compatability everybody buys MS Office.
I'm not even going to go into the difference in quality of experience when you run Office in Virtual PC vs Office in Wine/Crossover (hint: crossover works best).
Sorry, I did try to find one but couldn't (i don't recall where I got them from). Check on Moz FTP under the experimental experimental, you want RH8 XFT builds.
Well don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your wrong, setups vary, but considering that reliability increases constantly and in April of this year the MTBF was over 24 hours, I can tell you the statistics don't reflect this. Please don't tell people to avoid Moz because it's unstable...
Oh btw, MTBF is an industry standard measurement of reliability, it stands for Mean Time Before Fail, and is the average amount of time it takes before the app crashes. Considering that very few people will run Mozilla under heavy usage for more than 24 hours straight, that basically means that for most people it doesn't crash.
For reference, the MTBF of M11 was 1 hour. We've come a long way since then ;)
Well, all those things are mirrored pretty heavily. Mozilla is paid for by AOL remember, so it's not such a big deal. For the case of RedHat, I think they are the biggest user of bandwidth on the whole of the east coast, and they are mirrored extensively. Obviously, there is a pretty big difference between 100,000 people downloading a few gigs of data and 10mb.
I don't really see what all the fuss is about, I'm using XFT builds for Redhat 8 that Blizzard puts out and they're snappy and look great. I did try Phoenix when I was on Windows, but found it to be no faster than Mozilla but with fewer features. I might try it again in a bit, but Moz is just fine for me.
I'm waiting on Galeon 2 myself, at least then it'll integrate well with gnome.
Yes, all those 95% of people who use the only platform that has decent DRM in it.
This service needs IE, WMA, and a Windows Box?
Unfortunately yes, as I expect using WMA is the only adequate way to keep some semblance of control. No other platform really has any equivalent (good/bad, up to you).
The songs won't work in my car, walkman or the kids boom-box?
No, you can burn them to CD and use them there.
I don't know, but considering I sent the BBC a patch for their javascript news headline ticker over a year that made it work in not just IE but also Mozilla, and they have never applied it (would have taken all of 2 minutes), I don't think the BBC are the best people to be talking about standards compliance really.
I've had RH8 installed for about a month now, and so far there's been 1 patch to the kernel. It was hardly a major exploit but updating was easy so I did so. It took a while, but I just left it running in the background and got on with my work.
Windows has a similar feature, but I'm not sure if they email you when new patches are available.
An interesting point, but I don't quite agree with the analogy.
The reason an overreliance on calculators is seen as bad is because often in the real world there is a need to do fast mental arithmetic when you don't have or want to use a calculator, so people who depend on them too much are disadvantaged later on in life quite severely.
On the other hand, this doesn't apply to computing abstractions. I've been programming for many years in many different types of apps, and I've never needed to write a quicksort routine. Why? Because when I needed one there was always a preprovided abstraction I could use that meant I didn't have to concentrate on the details, I could just use it. Ditto for low level coding - I used to be able to directly program sound cards in the days of DOS. Could I now? No, I haven't needed to do that for years, the OS means I don't have to. I can concentrate on telling the computer what to do, rather than how to do it for the most part, which is imho good.
I guess that makes me one of the c0derz
I was under the impression that if you were to do this, it would simply be that the Palladium services would be unavailable. It certainly wouldn't be illegal, not even in the US unless you attempted to add Palladium into LinuxBIOS but allowing it to circumvent the system somehow, and even then it'd only be illegal in the US.
No, because Palladium is optional, according to the official Microsoft FAQ it can be disabled if you so wish, and indeed the services it provides are only engaged when a program requests it.
Unless things change significantly over at Redmond, there is no war.