Dashboard was really just search, and is largely dead. The bones of Dashboard were used to build the framework for Beagle.
You can do dashboard and so much more with the functionality in Beagle. Any future Dashboard-like app would probably be from-scratch on top of a Beagle back end.
There's a difference though. Software is an evolving thing for business. You have to replace your software every so often. When Office 2003 and XP are where win95 is today (The company that just laid me off still had four win95 boxes), people will be evaluating Office 2008 and Windows QXR or whatever.
It's not like every ten years we move to a new system of measurement.
One interesting comparison though is cell phones. As each generation of US cell phones came through, it was the world on GSM, the US on, say CDMA. Now many carriers are doing GSM. Cingular, Tmo and AT&T come to mind.
> Ever try typing a *lot* of information on a laptop?
Why, yes, yes I have. All day, every day, for the last four years. Code, email, IM, IRC, sysadmin, and the first four chapters of a book.
I have no problems with any RSI, I never notice the laptop keyboard at all. In this timespan there have been an IBM Thinkpad 600, two Dell Lattitudes, and an iBook 14". I liked the iBook best because it didn't include that abominable little nubby mouse stick in the middle of my keyboard.
As long as it's not a subnotebook with micro sized keys, your average notebook has spacing that's just fine for me, and I've never cared much about key throw.
What you're asking for is Emacs then? No holy war here, it's entirely possible that vi could do the same.
As far as I can tell, BBEdit does all that under Mac OSX.
I'll admit I almost never edit locally. It's almost always a remote ssh session to a server halfway across the world, so I have no in depth knowledge of windows editors. But I've used Emacs (Xemacs actually, in text mode remotely) to do the bulk of what you ask other than UTF-8. A quick google search seems to indicate that it's cool for UTF-8, and it does, in fact, run under win2k.
Even if MS has done it on purpose, wich I doubt, is that really illegal or that bad? If I produce an addon for a PS2 then you can't really complain if it doesn't work with an X-box even if the connectors look the same.
Is it bad? You really can't be serious? I agree it's probably not on purpose, it's currently a glitch or a bug, which is bad enough. If it WERE on purpose, which you propose, it's a hideous subversion of standards, worse than they've ever done.
It's not just the connector, it's a protocol. They are specifically marketing this as a BlueTooth device. That's a protocol, a refined set of specifications for how the product works, and how it interfaces. You're right in that if I made a joystick for PS2 that had the same pinout on the connector as the XBox (Which it doesnt, but we'll use your straw man example just for shits and giggles.) I'd be wrong to expect it to work on the XBox. Unless, of course, the controller/port in question was USB, or firewire, or, say, BlueTooth.
If, for example, you sold a hard drive which had a standard 50 pin connector, and you labeled it as "Narrow SCSI-2", and sold it as such, yet it only worked with the "SCSI" card that you also sold, then yes, I would be completely right in being upset.
I'm no Microsoft Basher, I personally use nothing but MS Intellimouse and Natural Keyboard products. But I would be highly pissed about buying a BlueTooth mouse and not having it work with the bluetooth adapter already in my machine.
When I was at my dotcom job, working for a large educational content producer, we used to get email and paper letters all the time from companies indicating that our news style stories contained references to their trademark without the requisite tm. Books-On-Tape used to send email to webmaster@ once a week. We also heard from Jacuzzi.
These letters were quickly discarded. We were never sued. We were never handed cease and desist letters. Hardly heavy handed big business.
In many countries, the US especially, if you do not defend your trademark, you can lose it. If you don't send notice of violation to every use you become aware of, someone can try to prove that you had abandoned your trademark, if they can prove you knew about it. Most courts would laugh this right out of the courtroom. But this is not a time to start attributing rational actions to Intellectual Property courts.
Reading the text of the requests on the smellotape site it's obvious that this is what's going on.
So, in essence, someone got pissy about it, even though it's largely irrelevant and started a website to complain. Slashdot, that veritable wasteland of journalistic and editorial standards, jumps right on the bandwagon because, hey, did someone mention the web?
You can't block IM by subnet. All you'd need is a Jabber client and a server with AIM/MSN/ICQ gateways. Anyone can run a Jabber server on any machine. I've done it.
You might be able to block by port, I can't recall what port jabber uses. But then, jabber is transport agnostic. You can theoretically Jabber by anything that can carry data. HTTP, SMTP, FTP, etc. So that's a losing proposition.
This is why I don't understand why more people don't use Jabber.
Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 1
It can, if you want. Since the whole theory behind Gentoo is "Compile everything locally and optimize as much as possible" It makes sense to have a way to put in the kernel patches that all the cool kids are playing with.
By Default, the kernel sources that you emerge are stock. But there is a package available called "gentoo-sources" which contains all sorts of fun stuff, like the preempt patch, O(1), net enhancements, etc.
So, typing "emerge gentoo-sources" will go get that package and apply it to your kernel source tree.
Gentoo does NOT automatically compile the kernel for you, there's no way it could. You still have to make menuconfig, make dep, etc. and put the resulting bzImage in place.
But, just as I can get the latest version of, say, lynx by typing one command, I can get the latest kernel sources with another, and patch them with all the fun stuff with another.
Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 1
Do a dmesg.
If it's full of lines such as...
foo ended with preempt_count=7
Then what's happening is that XFS code is preventing the system from preempting. The system will still work, it just won't be preempting, and you'll be getting loads of errors in dmesg.
You'll end up getting one of the above lines in dmesg for every single process that runs on the system.
Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.
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Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My primary "desktop" at home is an IBM Thinkpad 600 with a p2/266 and 288megs of ram with a 5gig drive.
I can't give you hard benchmark figures, but I can give you personal experience. Redhat 7.2 in X on the machine was very slow. Switching VC's lagged, compiling the kernel in a Konsole would make the cursor lag around the screen and trying to load too many things really bogged the system down.
But, with a Stage1 Gentoo 1.1a install (Stage 1 compiles everything, Stage 2 and three use increasingly larger lists of precompiled binaries.) with CCFLAGS and CCXFLAGS set to '-O3 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4' in make.conf, the system is decidedly faster in KDE3. I run XChat without gnome, Konsole, Konqueror, and the KDE desktop all compiled locally with the above optimizations. It's incredibly responsive and very very usable.
Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff. The only snag there is that my laptop was done with XFS as it's sole filesystem, and pre-empt and XFS don't play well, at all.
Is it perfect? No. OpenOffice takes forever to load. Mozilla takes less time but it's still a while, but it runs very well once it's going. (This is binary OO and Moz, not compiled locally.)
The system just plain doesnt have the balls to run something like CrossoverPlugin with QT5, and compiling a kernel still bogs the system down a bit, but not as much as with redhat. It's still a very usable machine.
And, the biggie, "emerge KDE" took 12 hours. X took a bit less than that. A recent "emerge --update world" which updates every package on the system that's been updated on the main rsync/cvs tree took 24 hours. I have other machines that I use in the interim, so it's not a huge problem for me.
Let me agree with one thing alot of Gentoo fans here have said. This is not a dist for everyone. It's not something I'd use for my parents, for example. But it's not a hardcore experts only dist either.
Many here have made a big deal about "I don't want to have to compile everything." The thing is, you don't compile a thing. You never type make. Want XChat? type "emerge xchat" and portage will go out to the fast repository at ibiblio and download the tar.bz2, compile and install. You do nothing but the one command.
Want ImageMagick? type "emerge ImageMagick" and it'll do the same. Whoops, it wants libjpeg and libpng which you don't have installed? It'll go grab those too and install them first. You've typed exactly one command.
Sure, it takes longer to compile something than it does to install it from a binary rpm. That's a fact of life. But is it worth taking that time for binaries that run 5-10% faster because of the local optimizations? It is for me. I'm currently laying plans for a new desktop that's a dual AthlonMP 2100, with a make.conf flag to make with -j3 it'll compile pretty damn fast. And when the next Gentoo is released with gcc3, there will be athlon optimizations which will make the apps just that much faster.
I've turned several friends of mine on to Gentoo. Hardcore dist bigots who have all been incredibly impressed. I can't say enough nice things about it.
Every revision of redhat frustrated me more and more from the severe bloat. I had all but given up on Linux for OpenBSD. Gentoo has been impressive enough to pull me back from that brink. I've got a dual processor machine on the way (And OpenBSD has no SMP) and Gentoo got the nod. (Which, of course, the trolls will love, since, you know, BSD is dead)
I find that problems vary by game. back in the day DOOM or the original Quake would make me want to hurl after a few minutes, but I could play Descent without problem. I blamed it on the bob and roll effect.
Recently I played Halo on a friend's XBOX and became ill and remained ill for hours afterwards. Of course, this was on his Sony Projection TV, displayed on his bare wall at 117" diagonal. And the display was, due to a rickety table the projector sat on, rotated about three degrees counter clockwise. Makes me queasy just thinking about it.
My wife, notorious for her motion sickness problems, has to turn her head when the new Commercial for Driver on the XBOX comes on TV. It will make her sick, just watching it on a 37" TV from across the room.
Is a way to edit OSX.icns files in Gimp. Or at least convert them to PNG. There are some spectacular icons for those of us who run KDE or Gnome. I currently use several icons from xicons on my KDE3 desktop, unfortunately, to get them I had to grab OSX screenshots and cookie-cutter them out.
I have a dual machine at home (An old beat up dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6) running FreeBSD 4.4. I had problems with it. It seems every time I tried to cvs update my ports tree to get such things as sudo, it would blow up the tree so badly I'd have to remove it and cvs get it again. That happened three times.
I never upgraded it to 4.5, as I worried it would blow the whole damn thing up and I'd lose my 30gig of mp3's. It runs decent with 4.4 as a samba server and running the streamer portion of my personal icecast server (piped through libmp3lame to downsize the mp3's to 96k/sec CBR).
I had grown tired of Linux distributions. Redhat insists on installing all sorts of useless crap, I have never gotten debian to work right for me (I just want to compile my own perl without apt continually trying to install it's own, is that too much to ask?). I installed OpenBSD 3.0 on a spare box in December and never looked back.
It works better than FreeBSD, for me, and is nicely tunable just the way I like it. I didn't need linux, this was the way to go.
Now that I'm looking at a new server, possibly to get big hits, I want SMP. Gentoo linux is linux done the BSD way. ports, cvs updates, slim. I've now got the choice between Gentoo with SMP and OpenBSD without. Since it's going to be aimed at MySQL and will have pf or iptables rules limiting access to the net at large, I'm not incredibly concerned with the security as I would be if this was a shell box. I'll have the only login.
I'm torn. I love OpenBSD, but I think my needs may be better met with Gentoo at this juncture.
Well, sort of. When I last checked the SMP tree on cvs, it would report both CPU's, but not actually dispatch any processes to the second one.
And, yes, RAM and disk are bottlenecks, though with a gig of PC2700 DDR and Ultra320 drives, they arent much of a bottleneck.
Each time someone mentions SMP and OpenBSD, someone invariably says "You don't need that." And for the majority, you'd be right. Most consumers and even mid level users don't need it.
But there are those of us who could benefit. High volume net services such as big hit apache, large volume postfix, and the like will benefit from being spread across multiple CPU's in my experience. MySQL will take advantage of native threading if it's there and span processors, and gain some scalability.
I'm currently doing alot of work with XML and generating web pages on the fly with XSP and taglibs and running them through real time XSLT translation. Under high volume, two processors are better than one.
I think of OpenBSD as a great secure place to run Apache and MySQL and postfix.
Theo and the core think of it as a crypto swiss army knife. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
SMP done wrong is worse than no SMP at all, I heartily agree. While I understand that it's important for some, having some freaky new crypto card implemented while I have a processor spinning idly doesnt fill me with glee.
I'm not one of those guys who bitches about what OpenBSD hasn't done for me. It's an amazing piece of work and that it was created largely for free by a group of itinerant hackers is more astounding to me than you can imagine. I am not a kernel hacker, so I don't have the ability to do it myself. But the fact that it's so ubiquitous elsewhere makes me wish it were a higher priority.
It works VERY well. The cvs-update-and-compile method of system maintenance is astonishingly useful. I love everything about OpenBSD.... except one.
There is no SMP support. There is a cvs branch for SMP development, but after a year the only thing it does is RECOGNIZE the second CPU. It doesnt actually do anything with it.
So, I'm about to build a new server, SMP, and I have two choices. I can run OpenBSD on one CPU hoping for the day I can reboot and have the second fire up, or I can run Gentoo linux, which has all the cvs-and-compile chocolaty goodness of BSD, but will do SMP.
FreeBSD has smp. I believe NetBSD has smp. Darwin has SMP. OpenBSD doesn't. With SMP hardware so cheap (At least on the i386 side) it's ludicrous that it's not in there.
My first name is Chris, My last initial is T. In the entire several hundred person staff full of people with first name last initial, I was the only one with a different username, as the ultra religious sysadmin manager refused to create me the login "christ".
You're perfectly alright with the fact that a wimpy kid can get bitten by a "genetically engineered" spider, and miraculously overnight gain incredible muscle mass, strength, agility, the ability to stick to walls or ceilings, glandular "web shooters" which mystically appear in each wrist which can shoot a volume of web "substance" greater than the volume of his body, and an innate ESP-like "Spider Sense" (Did they do that in the movie?).
But the fact that he manages to snatch a girl out of the air by falling faster in a nice tuck position in a latex body suit than the girl fully clothed in a spread eagle position, that bothers you.
Just Checking.
As for me, I'd have to go with Harry Potter, because everyone knows that brooms can't fly.
Old laptops can be useful. Just not with MacOS.
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Apple Drops Mac OS 9
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· Score: 1
My primary workstation at home is an IBM thinkpad 600. I got it FREE.
That's a p2/266 with a five gig drive. Had 64 megs RAM when I got it. $80 at crucial.com and it's at 288. (two 128meg sticks and 32 on the motherboard).
It's currently running Gentoo Linux. Every binary on my system except OpenOffice and Mozilla were compiled on my box with a lengthy set of gcc optimizations in CFLAGS. That's everything from zsh to KDE, XFree 4.2, etc.
Gentoo supplies a unified kernel patch, which includes all the fun goodies like preempt kernel and various latency patches.
I run KDE3. That means Konsole and Konqueror. KDE has no decent IRC app, so I have XChat compiled with no gnome support. Ditto for gnome. I read mail remotely in a terminal with mutt, but I've played with KMail, and even compiled all of gnome just to play with Evolution. (it's easy. I typed "emerge evolution" as root, and went to bed. When I woke up, the system had all of Gnome and evolution and all dependancies.)
I'm about to upgrade the CPU. p2/400 cpu's (MMC-2 form factor) have sold on ebay recently for as low as $26USD. I'll still have only a bit more than a hundred bucks in this thing.
I'm also pondering a hard drive upgrade. That will be the big expense. I'm weighing exactly how much space I need. 20gig for a bit above $100? or do I splurge on the 48gig drives and drop $350?. I'm also pondering either a USB or firewire drive. I've got a whole PCMCIA port doing nothing and firewire cards are cheap.
I use this machine daily. I surf the web, I listen to mp3's, I read my mail, I converse on IRC. I code, either in XEmacs remotely in a Konsole, or using Kate over kio_fish (Off tangent remark: kio_fish is fucking brilliant, if only I could use a few non KDE apps to access those remote drives).
Is it a speed demon? No. Is it flawless? No. Is it usable? Absolutely.
The system bogged down a bit using a more complex theme like mosfet's Liquid. I reverted to something more generic and it's downright zippy. Changing windows is fast, changing desktops is fast. The only time the system bogs down is if I'm compiling something, listening to mp3's and otherwise stressing the machine. But it never stops being usable.
Sure, it has it's faults. A bug in the thinkpad bios will make lm_sensors blow away certain EEPROM info on the system and turn it into an irreparable black doorstop. The little nubby mouse thing (Trackpoint?) has the annoying habit of masking the middle mouse button off a mouse connected to the PS2 port, forcing you to use Emulate3Buttons on external mice. And IBM never did learn how to make batteries worth a damn. Certain combinations of batteries and BIOS revisions can cause the "Smart" batteries to think they're empty, when they aren't. Some people report having a battery last only 3 months before total failure.
But those things aside, it's an incredibly usable machine. It does what I want.
Three different Linux installations have failed for me.
Celeron 600, 320megs Ram with Redhat 7.1.
Thinkpad 600 (P2/266) with 288 megs RAM and RH7.2
same Thinkpad 600 with Gentoo linux.
No printing subsystem installed, I rarely, if ever, print anything.
Installing 641d in my home dir and running soffice, the splash screen shows up, then the system wants to sync my address book, which I don't have one. Hitting cancel on that dialog the main window freezes hard. Only a kill -9 from an XTerm gets rid of it.
Installing OO in -net mode and then running setup to place the stub in my home dir, soffice complains about not finding/usr/local/openoffice641d, even when it's there.
This behavior has occurred on all three setups. The two Redhat setups had Gnome and KDE2, the Gentoo setup has no Gnome and full KDE3.
I ended up deleting it. Searching back through the mail archives I could find no reference to this type of error, but it's now occurred for me on two boxes with three different dists.
Any ideas? Could the lack of CUPS or lprNG be causing it?
Daemon News gets AMD to pony up a dual Athlon MP 1500+ system in exchange for "certification" and a review.
Daemon News is a dual headed site, "publishing" a once monthy web based "zine" full of largely irrelevant BSD "stories". They also have the daily section which is a low volume slashdot clone centered on BSD news running an inferior Slash clone based in PHP.
Though, being an OpenBSD user, I check the site regularly for snippets of news not picked up elsewhere, it has always felt like a site some guy runs in his basement. So, I was surprised that AMD would send them hardware.
And how much better off are we for AMD's gift? Are there any shocking revelations? Well, no. FreeBSD works in SMP mode, though the install kernel doesn't recognize the second CPU. Shocking. I've run FreeBSD as an MP3 fileserver/streamer in my basement for months on an old Dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6 I had laying around.
And what does the author tell us about performance? Why, two incredibly useful tidbits.
A) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running KDE than a Pentium 133 with 64 megs of ram.
B) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running Seti@home than a Pentium II 300.
So, here's a shout out to all the hardware companies on the planet. If you contact me and send me free shit, I'll happily certify that it works, keep it, and write an obtuse, irrelevant and worthless "review" on how your system is faster than the Toshiba 386 laptop I currently do my Non Linear video editing and POVRAY on.
Slashdot Mirror
Dashboard was really just search, and is largely dead. The bones of Dashboard were used to build the framework for Beagle.
You can do dashboard and so much more with the functionality in Beagle. Any future Dashboard-like app would probably be from-scratch on top of a Beagle back end.
It's not like every ten years we move to a new system of measurement.
One interesting comparison though is cell phones. As each generation of US cell phones came through, it was the world on GSM, the US on, say CDMA. Now many carriers are doing GSM. Cingular, Tmo and AT&T come to mind.
I bought the iBook July 17th, 2002. The motherboard died August 4th, 2003, two weeks out of warranty.
I just got off the phone with Apple Support. They're shipping me a box to send in the iBook. Free.
Oh Frabjous Day.
Maybe they learned a lesson from the ipod battery fiasco?
> Ever try typing a *lot* of information on a laptop? Why, yes, yes I have. All day, every day, for the last four years. Code, email, IM, IRC, sysadmin, and the first four chapters of a book. I have no problems with any RSI, I never notice the laptop keyboard at all. In this timespan there have been an IBM Thinkpad 600, two Dell Lattitudes, and an iBook 14". I liked the iBook best because it didn't include that abominable little nubby mouse stick in the middle of my keyboard. As long as it's not a subnotebook with micro sized keys, your average notebook has spacing that's just fine for me, and I've never cared much about key throw.
Here Here. I forgot to mention that above. I also have used jEdit on an HTML project I had to do locally. It's an amazing piece of code.
What you're asking for is Emacs then? No holy war here, it's entirely possible that vi could do the same.
As far as I can tell, BBEdit does all that under Mac OSX.
I'll admit I almost never edit locally. It's almost always a remote ssh session to a server halfway across the world, so I have no in depth knowledge of windows editors. But I've used Emacs (Xemacs actually, in text mode remotely) to do the bulk of what you ask other than UTF-8. A quick google search seems to indicate that it's cool for UTF-8, and it does, in fact, run under win2k.
Bought an Atari SH204 20meg hard drive for my beloved 520ST, $985.
Inside was the circuitry to make the atari interface speak MFM/RLL, and a full height 5.25" Rodime 20meg hard drive. 65ms seek time.
If I've done my math right, that's $50,432 per gig.
Is it bad? You really can't be serious? I agree it's probably not on purpose, it's currently a glitch or a bug, which is bad enough. If it WERE on purpose, which you propose, it's a hideous subversion of standards, worse than they've ever done.
It's not just the connector, it's a protocol. They are specifically marketing this as a BlueTooth device. That's a protocol, a refined set of specifications for how the product works, and how it interfaces. You're right in that if I made a joystick for PS2 that had the same pinout on the connector as the XBox (Which it doesnt, but we'll use your straw man example just for shits and giggles.) I'd be wrong to expect it to work on the XBox. Unless, of course, the controller/port in question was USB, or firewire, or, say, BlueTooth.
If, for example, you sold a hard drive which had a standard 50 pin connector, and you labeled it as "Narrow SCSI-2", and sold it as such, yet it only worked with the "SCSI" card that you also sold, then yes, I would be completely right in being upset.
I'm no Microsoft Basher, I personally use nothing but MS Intellimouse and Natural Keyboard products. But I would be highly pissed about buying a BlueTooth mouse and not having it work with the bluetooth adapter already in my machine.
These letters were quickly discarded. We were never sued. We were never handed cease and desist letters. Hardly heavy handed big business.
In many countries, the US especially, if you do not defend your trademark, you can lose it. If you don't send notice of violation to every use you become aware of, someone can try to prove that you had abandoned your trademark, if they can prove you knew about it. Most courts would laugh this right out of the courtroom. But this is not a time to start attributing rational actions to Intellectual Property courts.
Reading the text of the requests on the smellotape site it's obvious that this is what's going on.
So, in essence, someone got pissy about it, even though it's largely irrelevant and started a website to complain. Slashdot, that veritable wasteland of journalistic and editorial standards, jumps right on the bandwagon because, hey, did someone mention the web?
You might be able to block by port, I can't recall what port jabber uses. But then, jabber is transport agnostic. You can theoretically Jabber by anything that can carry data. HTTP, SMTP, FTP, etc. So that's a losing proposition.
This is why I don't understand why more people don't use Jabber.
By Default, the kernel sources that you emerge are stock. But there is a package available called "gentoo-sources" which contains all sorts of fun stuff, like the preempt patch, O(1), net enhancements, etc.
So, typing "emerge gentoo-sources" will go get that package and apply it to your kernel source tree.
Gentoo does NOT automatically compile the kernel for you, there's no way it could. You still have to make menuconfig, make dep, etc. and put the resulting bzImage in place.
But, just as I can get the latest version of, say, lynx by typing one command, I can get the latest kernel sources with another, and patch them with all the fun stuff with another.
If it's full of lines such as...
Then what's happening is that XFS code is preventing the system from preempting. The system will still work, it just won't be preempting, and you'll be getting loads of errors in dmesg.
You'll end up getting one of the above lines in dmesg for every single process that runs on the system.
I can't give you hard benchmark figures, but I can give you personal experience. Redhat 7.2 in X on the machine was very slow. Switching VC's lagged, compiling the kernel in a Konsole would make the cursor lag around the screen and trying to load too many things really bogged the system down.
But, with a Stage1 Gentoo 1.1a install (Stage 1 compiles everything, Stage 2 and three use increasingly larger lists of precompiled binaries.) with CCFLAGS and CCXFLAGS set to '-O3 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4' in make.conf, the system is decidedly faster in KDE3. I run XChat without gnome, Konsole, Konqueror, and the KDE desktop all compiled locally with the above optimizations. It's incredibly responsive and very very usable.
Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff. The only snag there is that my laptop was done with XFS as it's sole filesystem, and pre-empt and XFS don't play well, at all.
Is it perfect? No. OpenOffice takes forever to load. Mozilla takes less time but it's still a while, but it runs very well once it's going. (This is binary OO and Moz, not compiled locally.)
The system just plain doesnt have the balls to run something like CrossoverPlugin with QT5, and compiling a kernel still bogs the system down a bit, but not as much as with redhat. It's still a very usable machine.
And, the biggie, "emerge KDE" took 12 hours. X took a bit less than that. A recent "emerge --update world" which updates every package on the system that's been updated on the main rsync/cvs tree took 24 hours. I have other machines that I use in the interim, so it's not a huge problem for me.
Let me agree with one thing alot of Gentoo fans here have said. This is not a dist for everyone. It's not something I'd use for my parents, for example. But it's not a hardcore experts only dist either.
Many here have made a big deal about "I don't want to have to compile everything." The thing is, you don't compile a thing. You never type make. Want XChat? type "emerge xchat" and portage will go out to the fast repository at ibiblio and download the tar.bz2, compile and install. You do nothing but the one command.
Want ImageMagick? type "emerge ImageMagick" and it'll do the same. Whoops, it wants libjpeg and libpng which you don't have installed? It'll go grab those too and install them first. You've typed exactly one command.
Sure, it takes longer to compile something than it does to install it from a binary rpm. That's a fact of life. But is it worth taking that time for binaries that run 5-10% faster because of the local optimizations? It is for me. I'm currently laying plans for a new desktop that's a dual AthlonMP 2100, with a make.conf flag to make with -j3 it'll compile pretty damn fast. And when the next Gentoo is released with gcc3, there will be athlon optimizations which will make the apps just that much faster.
I've turned several friends of mine on to Gentoo. Hardcore dist bigots who have all been incredibly impressed. I can't say enough nice things about it.
Every revision of redhat frustrated me more and more from the severe bloat. I had all but given up on Linux for OpenBSD. Gentoo has been impressive enough to pull me back from that brink. I've got a dual processor machine on the way (And OpenBSD has no SMP) and Gentoo got the nod. (Which, of course, the trolls will love, since, you know, BSD is dead)
I find that problems vary by game. back in the day DOOM or the original Quake would make me want to hurl after a few minutes, but I could play Descent without problem. I blamed it on the bob and roll effect.
Recently I played Halo on a friend's XBOX and became ill and remained ill for hours afterwards. Of course, this was on his Sony Projection TV, displayed on his bare wall at 117" diagonal. And the display was, due to a rickety table the projector sat on, rotated about three degrees counter clockwise. Makes me queasy just thinking about it.
My wife, notorious for her motion sickness problems, has to turn her head when the new Commercial for Driver on the XBOX comes on TV. It will make her sick, just watching it on a 37" TV from across the room.
Is a way to edit OSX .icns files in Gimp. Or at least convert them to PNG. There are some spectacular icons for those of us who run KDE or Gnome. I currently use several icons from xicons on my KDE3 desktop, unfortunately, to get them I had to grab OSX screenshots and cookie-cutter them out.
I have a dual machine at home (An old beat up dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6) running FreeBSD 4.4. I had problems with it. It seems every time I tried to cvs update my ports tree to get such things as sudo, it would blow up the tree so badly I'd have to remove it and cvs get it again. That happened three times.
I never upgraded it to 4.5, as I worried it would blow the whole damn thing up and I'd lose my 30gig of mp3's. It runs decent with 4.4 as a samba server and running the streamer portion of my personal icecast server (piped through libmp3lame to downsize the mp3's to 96k/sec CBR).
I had grown tired of Linux distributions. Redhat insists on installing all sorts of useless crap, I have never gotten debian to work right for me (I just want to compile my own perl without apt continually trying to install it's own, is that too much to ask?). I installed OpenBSD 3.0 on a spare box in December and never looked back.
It works better than FreeBSD, for me, and is nicely tunable just the way I like it. I didn't need linux, this was the way to go.
Now that I'm looking at a new server, possibly to get big hits, I want SMP. Gentoo linux is linux done the BSD way. ports, cvs updates, slim. I've now got the choice between Gentoo with SMP and OpenBSD without. Since it's going to be aimed at MySQL and will have pf or iptables rules limiting access to the net at large, I'm not incredibly concerned with the security as I would be if this was a shell box. I'll have the only login. I'm torn. I love OpenBSD, but I think my needs may be better met with Gentoo at this juncture.
And, yes, RAM and disk are bottlenecks, though with a gig of PC2700 DDR and Ultra320 drives, they arent much of a bottleneck.
Each time someone mentions SMP and OpenBSD, someone invariably says "You don't need that." And for the majority, you'd be right. Most consumers and even mid level users don't need it.
But there are those of us who could benefit. High volume net services such as big hit apache, large volume postfix, and the like will benefit from being spread across multiple CPU's in my experience. MySQL will take advantage of native threading if it's there and span processors, and gain some scalability.
I'm currently doing alot of work with XML and generating web pages on the fly with XSP and taglibs and running them through real time XSLT translation. Under high volume, two processors are better than one.
I think of OpenBSD as a great secure place to run Apache and MySQL and postfix.
Theo and the core think of it as a crypto swiss army knife. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
SMP done wrong is worse than no SMP at all, I heartily agree. While I understand that it's important for some, having some freaky new crypto card implemented while I have a processor spinning idly doesnt fill me with glee.
I'm not one of those guys who bitches about what OpenBSD hasn't done for me. It's an amazing piece of work and that it was created largely for free by a group of itinerant hackers is more astounding to me than you can imagine. I am not a kernel hacker, so I don't have the ability to do it myself. But the fact that it's so ubiquitous elsewhere makes me wish it were a higher priority.
It works VERY well. The cvs-update-and-compile method of system maintenance is astonishingly useful. I love everything about OpenBSD.... except one.
There is no SMP support. There is a cvs branch for SMP development, but after a year the only thing it does is RECOGNIZE the second CPU. It doesnt actually do anything with it.
So, I'm about to build a new server, SMP, and I have two choices. I can run OpenBSD on one CPU hoping for the day I can reboot and have the second fire up, or I can run Gentoo linux, which has all the cvs-and-compile chocolaty goodness of BSD, but will do SMP.
FreeBSD has smp. I believe NetBSD has smp. Darwin has SMP. OpenBSD doesn't. With SMP hardware so cheap (At least on the i386 side) it's ludicrous that it's not in there.
Three?
Ap - ple - goes - ser - ver
Looks like five to me. Were you perhaps reading it in the Metric Alphabet?
My first name is Chris, My last initial is T. In the entire several hundred person staff full of people with first name last initial, I was the only one with a different username, as the ultra religious sysadmin manager refused to create me the login "christ".
But the fact that he manages to snatch a girl out of the air by falling faster in a nice tuck position in a latex body suit than the girl fully clothed in a spread eagle position, that bothers you.
Just Checking.
As for me, I'd have to go with Harry Potter, because everyone knows that brooms can't fly.
That's a p2/266 with a five gig drive. Had 64 megs RAM when I got it. $80 at crucial.com and it's at 288. (two 128meg sticks and 32 on the motherboard).
It's currently running Gentoo Linux. Every binary on my system except OpenOffice and Mozilla were compiled on my box with a lengthy set of gcc optimizations in CFLAGS. That's everything from zsh to KDE, XFree 4.2, etc.
Gentoo supplies a unified kernel patch, which includes all the fun goodies like preempt kernel and various latency patches.
I run KDE3. That means Konsole and Konqueror. KDE has no decent IRC app, so I have XChat compiled with no gnome support. Ditto for gnome. I read mail remotely in a terminal with mutt, but I've played with KMail, and even compiled all of gnome just to play with Evolution. (it's easy. I typed "emerge evolution" as root, and went to bed. When I woke up, the system had all of Gnome and evolution and all dependancies.)
I'm about to upgrade the CPU. p2/400 cpu's (MMC-2 form factor) have sold on ebay recently for as low as $26USD. I'll still have only a bit more than a hundred bucks in this thing.
I'm also pondering a hard drive upgrade. That will be the big expense. I'm weighing exactly how much space I need. 20gig for a bit above $100? or do I splurge on the 48gig drives and drop $350?. I'm also pondering either a USB or firewire drive. I've got a whole PCMCIA port doing nothing and firewire cards are cheap.
I use this machine daily. I surf the web, I listen to mp3's, I read my mail, I converse on IRC. I code, either in XEmacs remotely in a Konsole, or using Kate over kio_fish (Off tangent remark: kio_fish is fucking brilliant, if only I could use a few non KDE apps to access those remote drives).
Is it a speed demon? No. Is it flawless? No. Is it usable? Absolutely.
The system bogged down a bit using a more complex theme like mosfet's Liquid. I reverted to something more generic and it's downright zippy. Changing windows is fast, changing desktops is fast. The only time the system bogs down is if I'm compiling something, listening to mp3's and otherwise stressing the machine. But it never stops being usable.
Sure, it has it's faults. A bug in the thinkpad bios will make lm_sensors blow away certain EEPROM info on the system and turn it into an irreparable black doorstop. The little nubby mouse thing (Trackpoint?) has the annoying habit of masking the middle mouse button off a mouse connected to the PS2 port, forcing you to use Emulate3Buttons on external mice. And IBM never did learn how to make batteries worth a damn. Certain combinations of batteries and BIOS revisions can cause the "Smart" batteries to think they're empty, when they aren't. Some people report having a battery last only 3 months before total failure.
But those things aside, it's an incredibly usable machine. It does what I want.
Celeron 600, 320megs Ram with Redhat 7.1.
Thinkpad 600 (P2/266) with 288 megs RAM and RH7.2
same Thinkpad 600 with Gentoo linux.
No printing subsystem installed, I rarely, if ever, print anything.
Installing 641d in my home dir and running soffice, the splash screen shows up, then the system wants to sync my address book, which I don't have one. Hitting cancel on that dialog the main window freezes hard. Only a kill -9 from an XTerm gets rid of it.
Installing OO in -net mode and then running setup to place the stub in my home dir, soffice complains about not finding /usr/local/openoffice641d, even when it's there.
This behavior has occurred on all three setups. The two Redhat setups had Gnome and KDE2, the Gentoo setup has no Gnome and full KDE3.
I ended up deleting it. Searching back through the mail archives I could find no reference to this type of error, but it's now occurred for me on two boxes with three different dists.
Any ideas? Could the lack of CUPS or lprNG be causing it?
Daemon News is a dual headed site, "publishing" a once monthy web based "zine" full of largely irrelevant BSD "stories". They also have the daily section which is a low volume slashdot clone centered on BSD news running an inferior Slash clone based in PHP.
Though, being an OpenBSD user, I check the site regularly for snippets of news not picked up elsewhere, it has always felt like a site some guy runs in his basement. So, I was surprised that AMD would send them hardware.
And how much better off are we for AMD's gift? Are there any shocking revelations? Well, no. FreeBSD works in SMP mode, though the install kernel doesn't recognize the second CPU. Shocking. I've run FreeBSD as an MP3 fileserver/streamer in my basement for months on an old Dual Celeron 366 Abit BP6 I had laying around.
And what does the author tell us about performance? Why, two incredibly useful tidbits.
A) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running KDE than a Pentium 133 with 64 megs of ram.
B) A dual Athlon 1500+ is much faster at running Seti@home than a Pentium II 300.
So, here's a shout out to all the hardware companies on the planet. If you contact me and send me free shit, I'll happily certify that it works, keep it, and write an obtuse, irrelevant and worthless "review" on how your system is faster than the Toshiba 386 laptop I currently do my Non Linear video editing and POVRAY on.