Yeah, I know. It's been down for extended periods several times since the name change, though. And even when it is up, the linux-kernel archive is still stuck at the third week of May.
I found Slashdot's kernel announcements to be a useful place to hold discussions about the new kernels that didn't belong on linux-kernel. With LinuxHQ's list archive no longer current (and LinuxHQ itself down seemingly as often as not) that resource would be even more valuable, but, no, we don't have it any more because a few morons who don't think that newbies should know about all that scary development stuff made a big stink here and on the kernel list.
And who are you to be saying who "needs" to be running 2.3? I probably don't _need_ to be running it - I'm not working on USB or any of the other stuff that's new in 2.3 - but I am anyway. I figure that if it nukes my box, no problem... I'm not doing it on a main server for exactly that reason. And I might run across a problem with it that others wouldn't because of my particular hardware setup... I doubt there are many people doing kernel dev on a 386. And then I can either track down the problem myself (though I can seldom do it fast enough to keep up with the fixes that everyone else is sending in) or submit a bug report to linux-kernel so someone else can track it down. That's how free source works.
Can anyone confirm whether or not this affects 2.3.x kernels? The line in question is present in 2.3.4 (which came out today, though you'd never know it, 'cause Rob appears to have knuckled under to the 31337 weenies and quit announcing dev releases), so my guess would be yes...
You are correct.. I just got off my lazy butt and went and checked the standard. Hmm. I could've sworn I'd seen somewhere an example of DIV being used as an inline...
This reinforces my original statement that the DIVs on my example page can't be grouped using SPANs; they have to be grouped using other DIVs. It does indicate, though, the use for SPANs... you use 'em inside Ps and stuff where DIVs aren't allowed...
The page is divided up several ways with DIVs... some of them are there for physical layout, others for font colors and such. The relevant ones to the banner placement are the two that contain the columns, which are float: left and float: right respectively, and defined to be 45% width, so they should resize freely but always be able to sit side-by-side. The HR and the banner images are contained in another DIV which is clear: both, so it shouldn't allow floating elements on either side of it. Since it comes after the columns on the page, it should drift down until it's below the floating columns. If the DIV enclosing the banners weren't clear: both, it could legitimately fill in the space between the columns, but that's not the case.
And I think trying to group DIVs with SPANs falls into a kind of hazy area in the standard... I'm too lazy to check the standard right now, but I think the way it works is block-level elements can enclose other block-level elements or inline elements, but inline elements can only enclose other inline elements, not block-level elements.
DIV is sometimes a block-level element and sometimes an inline, and SPAN is always an inline, which means enclosing DIVs inside SPANs is legal until the moment you do something with the DIV that an inline can't do, thus forcing it to be block-level... such as enclose another block-level element - like a P - in it. Since the DIVs on that page do contain Ps, I believe enclosing them in SPANs is illegal...
DIV and SPAN appear to be functionally identical, anyway, except for the block vs. inline thing, so I'm not sure there's ever a reason to use SPAN...
I've seen it do that with the banner images while it was in the process of rendering, but it's always moved them to the bottom where they should be when it got the rest of the page figured out...
Okay, for starters... Mozilla is *not* Netscape 4. Not any more. Anything you thought you knew about Netscape, it does not apply to Mozilla.
If you think that Netscape's CSS support is atrociously bad, you are entirely correct. If you think that that means Mozilla's is too, you are completely wrong.
Yes, IE is much better CSS-support-wise than Netscape. That's not hard... Netscape's CSS support is literally worse than none at all. IE is far from perfect, though. There's some fairly useful stuff they didn't even try to implement, and they don't seem to have any plans to do so. And, of course, being Microsoft, there's a lot of useless flash added that isn't mentioned in the standard anywhere. Embrace-and-extend, always...
Mozilla does CSS. Period. Oh, there are a few minor things that aren't there yet (there doesn't seem to be any support for text direction, for instance) and a few bugs where things that are implemented don't work right (try setting up a transparent GIF with the background-image for IMGs set to a different GIF that's fixed to the background, and see what happens) but for the most part, it just works. And it blows IE away.
If you want proof, take a look at this page with Netscape (careful... it crashes 4.06, and possibly other versions), IE, and Mozilla, in turn. I wrote the page to the standard without regard for how real-world browsers rendered it, just to see how well they'd do.
Netscape 4.51 makes a mess of it, and manages to get the text color screwed up so that it's black on black in one place. IE (4 and 5 appear to act the same) gets all the basics... it ignores the first-line and first-letter stuff and some of the fixed background-image stuff - and possibly also the line-through on the DEL tag, I don't recall just now. Mozilla gets it all perfectly.
Oh, as a side note... has anyone gotten Mozilla to work on a libc5 Linux system? Or am I going to have to wait for my Slack 4.0 disk with the glibc2 runtime libs to arrive? I've been using the Solaris version with the display redirected (gotta love X) at work, but I don't have that option at home (would be nice if I had a spare Enterprise 5500 kicking around at home, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen)...
Hm... JPEGs have worked fine for me, at least in the Solaris and Win32 versions (haven't gotten the Linux version working yet... libc5/6 problems, I think). I had the GIMP unable to use JPEGs for quite a while, and finally went and deleted every trace of libjpeg from my system, then installed the very latest version (available on ftp.gimp.org) and recompiled GIMP, and finally it's fixed. Maybe that would work for you?
If your machine isn't used primarily for playing games, the Cyrix is a pretty good deal. In integer-intensive operations like, say, compiling the Linux kernel, it'll whip a Pentium's butt at the same clock speed. And clock speed isn't a particularly good rule against which to compare processors. If you're comparing a 233MHz 6x86 against a 233MHz K6, it's good to remember that the Cyrix costs half as much... and if you want to throw a 233MHz Intel into the mix, the Cyrix's price advantage is even more obvious...
Basically, if you're concerned about maximum possible performance, get an Intel (or get an Alpha or something if you don't care about x86 compatibility). If you want the best price/performance ratio, there's AMD. And if you want acceptable performance at absolute dirt cheap prices, get a Cyrix.
Hey! I'm not balding! And I've put on weight the last few months, but I can't really be described as fat, either.
But, yeah, Strange Days rocked. The only problem I had with it was the timeline... we've got seven months to develop simstim if they're going to meet their deadline, and the movie isn't all that old... It'd have been more believable if they'd set it 20 years down the road... but then they wouldn't have been able to do the whole millennial bit.
Oh, it had the albino-looking chick who was in the Matrix in it, too, but her line was better in Strange Days. "Enjoy the party..."
When I say "AT", I mean "AT".:) I love those big old monster boxes. I do much the same thing you do, but I prefer the 286 desktop machines - the original ATs - over any tower I've run across.
And as far as PC2000 is concerned, M$ can blow me. They can have my ISA slots the day I find a PCI (or AGP!;) ) monochrome vid card to drive my secondary displays...
Of all those features, the only one that seems to require changing the form factor of the case is putting the ports directly on the board... and it's not entirely clear to me that that one is a net win, anyway. While fewer cables is a good thing, I think the modularity that the old design provides is a better thing. It's nice to be able to choose 9- or 25-pin serial ports at will, for example.
Jon, articles like this one are the reason so many people dislike you so strongly.
There is no defining authority on what people must/must not do to be a geek. And if one were to be appointed, there are a whole lot of people who'd be higher on the list of nominations than you are. So stop trying to tell us what we're supposed to think, what we must do to be official, authorized geeks. Try observing and recording rather than defining, and I expect you'll find that geeks like you better. Though your status in our peculiar gift-exchange culture may be low enough now that nothing'll help...
Oh, and when a programmer tells you that "the Zone" he gets into isn't a place, you might want to try believing him, instead of making up wild hypotheses about what he's really thinking that he didn't tell you about. You're mixing up two concepts without understanding either one.
The first is "Deep Hack Mode", that state a programmer gets into where the code flows like water, and every compile is error-free. It's a state of mind, not a place, and may be the thing hackers value above all else. It's not, in fact, unique to hacking... I've experienced it when swinging a broadsword, too (a different kind of hacking, you might say)... there, it's a state of mind where everything starts to slow down, you can see where your opponent is going and react before he starts to move, and your blade goes exactly where it needs to be without conscious guidance. You don't *go* anywhere, though, you aren't in some other world... it's the same old world, it's just running a little slow.
The other concept is that of cyberspace, a completely immersive virtual reality, which *is* another world (for sufficiently small values of "world"), that may or may not exist in the same space as this one. Gibson's matrix did... there was a one-to-one correspondence between real space and virtual space. Stephenson's didn't, and is a more accurate reflection of where I personally think we're headed. The point is, though, that cyberspace and deep hack mode are _not_ the same thing.
Yeah, Slack is slow to increment version numbers... I've got a Slackware 4.0 CD on the way; it'll be replacing the Slackware 3.0 CD I've been doing installs off for years. Slack 3.0 was 1.2.13-based, Slack 4.0 is 2.2.7-based... so they apparently didn't consider the change from the 1.2 series to the 2.0 series to be sufficient cause to change the major version number...
In the same time, Red Hat has gone from 2.0 to 6.0... and, y'know, I never did figure out what the big difference was between 4.x and 5.x that made them increment the version number...
What I want to know is, what does ATX get me that makes it worth having to toss out all of my venerable AT form factor hardware in order to upgrade my machines? And is it going to be possible to buy an AT K7 motherboard?
As you point out, the applications have been out there for ages. With a simple recompile, you can run, say, gcc on anything from AIX to Win32. This isn't terribly different from binary compatibility, because Unix admins aren't generally scared of a recompile. Despite this, and despite the lack (until recently) of big commercial software packages, Linux has grown and thrived.
Now, you're suggesting that binary compatibility will kill Linux, because people would prefer paying money to run Linux binaries in emulation on a commercial Unix over running them natively on a Linux system for free? Does the DEA know about that stuff you've been smoking?
If you have a single box and enough time to keep up with every software update that comes across Freshmeat, you may be right. If you've got more than one machine to keep track of, frequently install on new machines, or just don't have the time to keep track of every release of every minor package on your system, distributions come in very handy.
I've been using a Slackware 3.0 CD to do my installs for years (and, for those of you who are used to Red Hat and SuSE and so on changing major version numbers every ten minutes, Slack's last.0 release was based on the 1.2.13 kernel), and I've been upgrading my boxen piecemeal for just as long. I've got entire ~ftp directories full of the packages I need to turn a freshly installed Slack 3.0 system into a 2.2.9 box. But, for all that, I'm sure I've missed as much stuff as I've upgraded.
For me, a new Slackware release is a chance to update everything in one fell swoop. I can re-do the four years of customization that have gone into my oldest box. It's really not all that much, when I think of it. The/home volume, a couple of tweaks to support my peculiar hardware and network configuration, a few software packages I've added... most of which come with modern distributions, but just didn't exist when Slack 3.0 came out. At this point, it's easier to re-do my tweaks on an effectively new system than it is to upgrade the system I've got. And when I set up a new box, I'll have a more recent starting point for my upgrading, which will probably carry me through 'til Slack 5.0 comes out in 2003 with the 3.2.10 kernel.
And, regarding the relative merits of the different distributions... your post seems to imply that you've never used anything but Red Hat 5.2. If that's the case, I can see how you might think all distributions are the same. As someone who's owned Slackware 3.0 and Red Hat 4.2 boxen, and extensively used Red Hat 5.*, Mandrake, and assorted other Slackwares between 3.2 and 3.6, I can assure you that they are *not* all the same. Oh, yeah, they can be _made_ to be the same, but it's pretty silly to start with a Red Hat installation when what you really want is something more like Slackware. That's why I use my Slackware 3.0 CD for new installations, in preference to my more recent Red Hat 4.2 disk... I find it easier to update Slack than to make Red Hat behave in something resembling a rational manner.
And I'd agree with you that Linux is pretty unusable unless you know what's happening inside your system. And, no, none of the distributions actually prevent you from learning that, but a lot of the stuff Red Hat does seems designed precisely to obscure it as much as possible. I know, it's not deliberate, it's just a side effect of making the GUI tools easier to use and simpler to write, but it feels obscurationist to an old-fashioned command-line junkie. And that's the reason I use Slackware instead of anything else (though I've been considering giving Debian a whirl). And that's why I just sent in my $40 for the new Slack 4.0 disks.
Actually, I liked the CGI Gungans... the way their flesh moved was something subtle, fluid, and definitely neither foam rubber nor human flesh, which I think is a good thing in establishing that they are, in fact, an alien race.
Also, there were several times when I was distracted from what Jar-Jar was saying by watching the animation of his motion, which, all things considered, is definitely a plus.
Takes it about 4 hours to compile a recent kernel. I upgraded it from 8M to 20M of RAM back around 2.1.120 or so... before that, it would take it 7-8 hours, sometimes more. Not a big deal... I'd start it up, leave it alone overnight, and in the morning, there'd (usually) be a shiny new kernel waiting for me.
Oh, and I run X on the thing, too.:) It really doesn't have enough horsepower to handle X and Netscape at the same time, so when I want to read Slashdot on it, I run Netscape on one of my other machines and use display redirection... very handy.
The slowest compile I've ever personally witnessed was on my laptop. 386SX-25, 4M of RAM. Took it a little over 12 hours to build a 1.2.13 kernel.
Re:Stop posting 'Stop posting linux kernel updates
on
Linux 2.3.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
The latter is obviously a greater waste of bandwidth. It contains zero useful information, whereas the former contains the information that there is, in fact, a new kernel out. The signal-to-noise ratio of the news about the kernel updates, however low, is therefore infinitely higher than that of the whiners, which is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know. It's been down for extended periods several times since the name change, though. And even when it is up, the linux-kernel archive is still stuck at the third week of May.
I found Slashdot's kernel announcements to be a useful place to hold discussions about the new kernels that didn't belong on linux-kernel. With LinuxHQ's list archive no longer current (and LinuxHQ itself down seemingly as often as not) that resource would be even more valuable, but, no, we don't have it any more because a few morons who don't think that newbies should know about all that scary development stuff made a big stink here and on the kernel list.
And who are you to be saying who "needs" to be running 2.3? I probably don't _need_ to be running it - I'm not working on USB or any of the other stuff that's new in 2.3 - but I am anyway. I figure that if it nukes my box, no problem... I'm not doing it on a main server for exactly that reason. And I might run across a problem with it that others wouldn't because of my particular hardware setup... I doubt there are many people doing kernel dev on a 386. And then I can either track down the problem myself (though I can seldom do it fast enough to keep up with the fixes that everyone else is sending in) or submit a bug report to linux-kernel so someone else can track it down. That's how free source works.
Can anyone confirm whether or not this affects 2.3.x kernels? The line in question is present in 2.3.4 (which came out today, though you'd never know it, 'cause Rob appears to have knuckled under to the 31337 weenies and quit announcing dev releases), so my guess would be yes...
You are correct.. I just got off my lazy butt and went and checked the standard. Hmm. I could've sworn I'd seen somewhere an example of DIV being used as an inline...
This reinforces my original statement that the DIVs on my example page can't be grouped using SPANs; they have to be grouped using other DIVs. It does indicate, though, the use for SPANs... you use 'em inside Ps and stuff where DIVs aren't allowed...
The page is divided up several ways with DIVs... some of them are there for physical layout, others for font colors and such. The relevant ones to the banner placement are the two that contain the columns, which are float: left and float: right respectively, and defined to be 45% width, so they should resize freely but always be able to sit side-by-side. The HR and the banner images are contained in another DIV which is clear: both, so it shouldn't allow floating elements on either side of it. Since it comes after the columns on the page, it should drift down until it's below the floating columns. If the DIV enclosing the banners weren't clear: both, it could legitimately fill in the space between the columns, but that's not the case.
And I think trying to group DIVs with SPANs falls into a kind of hazy area in the standard... I'm too lazy to check the standard right now, but I think the way it works is block-level elements can enclose other block-level elements or inline elements, but inline elements can only enclose other inline elements, not block-level elements.
DIV is sometimes a block-level element and sometimes an inline, and SPAN is always an inline, which means enclosing DIVs inside SPANs is legal until the moment you do something with the DIV that an inline can't do, thus forcing it to be block-level... such as enclose another block-level element - like a P - in it. Since the DIVs on that page do contain Ps, I believe enclosing them in SPANs is illegal...
DIV and SPAN appear to be functionally identical, anyway, except for the block vs. inline thing, so I'm not sure there's ever a reason to use SPAN...
I've seen it do that with the banner images while it was in the process of rendering, but it's always moved them to the bottom where they should be when it got the rest of the page figured out...
Hmm.. that's odd. You using M6? The banner graphics worked for me in both the Win98 and Solaris versions of M5...
Okay, for starters... Mozilla is *not* Netscape 4. Not any more. Anything you thought you knew about Netscape, it does not apply to Mozilla.
If you think that Netscape's CSS support is atrociously bad, you are entirely correct. If you think that that means Mozilla's is too, you are completely wrong.
Yes, IE is much better CSS-support-wise than Netscape. That's not hard... Netscape's CSS support is literally worse than none at all. IE is far from perfect, though. There's some fairly useful stuff they didn't even try to implement, and they don't seem to have any plans to do so. And, of course, being Microsoft, there's a lot of useless flash added that isn't mentioned in the standard anywhere. Embrace-and-extend, always...
Mozilla does CSS. Period. Oh, there are a few minor things that aren't there yet (there doesn't seem to be any support for text direction, for instance) and a few bugs where things that are implemented don't work right (try setting up a transparent GIF with the background-image for IMGs set to a different GIF that's fixed to the background, and see what happens) but for the most part, it just works. And it blows IE away.
If you want proof, take a look at this page with Netscape (careful... it crashes 4.06, and possibly other versions), IE, and Mozilla, in turn. I wrote the page to the standard without regard for how real-world browsers rendered it, just to see how well they'd do.
Netscape 4.51 makes a mess of it, and manages to get the text color screwed up so that it's black on black in one place. IE (4 and 5 appear to act the same) gets all the basics... it ignores the first-line and first-letter stuff and some of the fixed background-image stuff - and possibly also the line-through on the DEL tag, I don't recall just now. Mozilla gets it all perfectly.
Oh, as a side note... has anyone gotten Mozilla to work on a libc5 Linux system? Or am I going to have to wait for my Slack 4.0 disk with the glibc2 runtime libs to arrive? I've been using the Solaris version with the display redirected (gotta love X) at work, but I don't have that option at home (would be nice if I had a spare Enterprise 5500 kicking around at home, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen)...
Hm... JPEGs have worked fine for me, at least in the Solaris and Win32 versions (haven't gotten the Linux version working yet... libc5/6 problems, I think). I had the GIMP unable to use JPEGs for quite a while, and finally went and deleted every trace of libjpeg from my system, then installed the very latest version (available on ftp.gimp.org) and recompiled GIMP, and finally it's fixed. Maybe that would work for you?
If your machine isn't used primarily for playing games, the Cyrix is a pretty good deal. In integer-intensive operations like, say, compiling the Linux kernel, it'll whip a Pentium's butt at the same clock speed. And clock speed isn't a particularly good rule against which to compare processors. If you're comparing a 233MHz 6x86 against a 233MHz K6, it's good to remember that the Cyrix costs half as much... and if you want to throw a 233MHz Intel into the mix, the Cyrix's price advantage is even more obvious...
Basically, if you're concerned about maximum possible performance, get an Intel (or get an Alpha or something if you don't care about x86 compatibility). If you want the best price/performance ratio, there's AMD. And if you want acceptable performance at absolute dirt cheap prices, get a Cyrix.
Hey! I'm not balding! And I've put on weight the last few months, but I can't really be described as fat, either.
But, yeah, Strange Days rocked. The only problem I had with it was the timeline... we've got seven months to develop simstim if they're going to meet their deadline, and the movie isn't all that old... It'd have been more believable if they'd set it 20 years down the road... but then they wouldn't have been able to do the whole millennial bit.
Oh, it had the albino-looking chick who was in the Matrix in it, too, but her line was better in Strange Days. "Enjoy the party..."
When I say "AT", I mean "AT". :) I love those big old monster boxes. I do much the same thing you do, but I prefer the 286 desktop machines - the original ATs - over any tower I've run across.
;) ) monochrome vid card to drive my secondary displays...
And as far as PC2000 is concerned, M$ can blow me. They can have my ISA slots the day I find a PCI (or AGP!
Of all those features, the only one that seems to require changing the form factor of the case is putting the ports directly on the board... and it's not entirely clear to me that that one is a net win, anyway. While fewer cables is a good thing, I think the modularity that the old design provides is a better thing. It's nice to be able to choose 9- or 25-pin serial ports at will, for example.
Jon, articles like this one are the reason so many people dislike you so strongly.
There is no defining authority on what people must/must not do to be a geek. And if one were to be appointed, there are a whole lot of people who'd be higher on the list of nominations than you are. So stop trying to tell us what we're supposed to think, what we must do to be official, authorized geeks. Try observing and recording rather than defining, and I expect you'll find that geeks like you better. Though your status in our peculiar gift-exchange culture may be low enough now that nothing'll help...
Oh, and when a programmer tells you that "the Zone" he gets into isn't a place, you might want to try believing him, instead of making up wild hypotheses about what he's really thinking that he didn't tell you about. You're mixing up two concepts without understanding either one.
The first is "Deep Hack Mode", that state a programmer gets into where the code flows like water, and every compile is error-free. It's a state of mind, not a place, and may be the thing hackers value above all else. It's not, in fact, unique to hacking... I've experienced it when swinging a broadsword, too (a different kind of hacking, you might say)... there, it's a state of mind where everything starts to slow down, you can see where your opponent is going and react before he starts to move, and your blade goes exactly where it needs to be without conscious guidance. You don't *go* anywhere, though, you aren't in some other world... it's the same old world, it's just running a little slow.
The other concept is that of cyberspace, a completely immersive virtual reality, which *is* another world (for sufficiently small values of "world"), that may or may not exist in the same space as this one. Gibson's matrix did... there was a one-to-one correspondence between real space and virtual space. Stephenson's didn't, and is a more accurate reflection of where I personally think we're headed. The point is, though, that cyberspace and deep hack mode are _not_ the same thing.
Yeah, Slack is slow to increment version numbers... I've got a Slackware 4.0 CD on the way; it'll be replacing the Slackware 3.0 CD I've been doing installs off for years. Slack 3.0 was 1.2.13-based, Slack 4.0 is 2.2.7-based... so they apparently didn't consider the change from the 1.2 series to the 2.0 series to be sufficient cause to change the major version number...
In the same time, Red Hat has gone from 2.0 to 6.0... and, y'know, I never did figure out what the big difference was between 4.x and 5.x that made them increment the version number...
What I want to know is, what does ATX get me that makes it worth having to toss out all of my venerable AT form factor hardware in order to upgrade my machines? And is it going to be possible to buy an AT K7 motherboard?
As you point out, the applications have been out there for ages. With a simple recompile, you can run, say, gcc on anything from AIX to Win32. This isn't terribly different from binary compatibility, because Unix admins aren't generally scared of a recompile. Despite this, and despite the lack (until recently) of big commercial software packages, Linux has grown and thrived.
Now, you're suggesting that binary compatibility will kill Linux, because people would prefer paying money to run Linux binaries in emulation on a commercial Unix over running them natively on a Linux system for free? Does the DEA know about that stuff you've been smoking?
If you have a single box and enough time to keep up with every software update that comes across Freshmeat, you may be right. If you've got more than one machine to keep track of, frequently install on new machines, or just don't have the time to keep track of every release of every minor package on your system, distributions come in very handy.
.0 release was based on the 1.2.13 kernel), and I've been upgrading my boxen piecemeal for just as long. I've got entire ~ftp directories full of the packages I need to turn a freshly installed Slack 3.0 system into a 2.2.9 box. But, for all that, I'm sure I've missed as much stuff as I've upgraded.
/home volume, a couple of tweaks to support my peculiar hardware and network configuration, a few software packages I've added... most of which come with modern distributions, but just didn't exist when Slack 3.0 came out. At this point, it's easier to re-do my tweaks on an effectively new system than it is to upgrade the system I've got. And when I set up a new box, I'll have a more recent starting point for my upgrading, which will probably carry me through 'til Slack 5.0 comes out in 2003 with the 3.2.10 kernel.
I've been using a Slackware 3.0 CD to do my installs for years (and, for those of you who are used to Red Hat and SuSE and so on changing major version numbers every ten minutes, Slack's last
For me, a new Slackware release is a chance to update everything in one fell swoop. I can re-do the four years of customization that have gone into my oldest box. It's really not all that much, when I think of it. The
And, regarding the relative merits of the different distributions... your post seems to imply that you've never used anything but Red Hat 5.2. If that's the case, I can see how you might think all distributions are the same. As someone who's owned Slackware 3.0 and Red Hat 4.2 boxen, and extensively used Red Hat 5.*, Mandrake, and assorted other Slackwares between 3.2 and 3.6, I can assure you that they are *not* all the same. Oh, yeah, they can be _made_ to be the same, but it's pretty silly to start with a Red Hat installation when what you really want is something more like Slackware. That's why I use my Slackware 3.0 CD for new installations, in preference to my more recent Red Hat 4.2 disk... I find it easier to update Slack than to make Red Hat behave in something resembling a rational manner.
And I'd agree with you that Linux is pretty unusable unless you know what's happening inside your system. And, no, none of the distributions actually prevent you from learning that, but a lot of the stuff Red Hat does seems designed precisely to obscure it as much as possible. I know, it's not deliberate, it's just a side effect of making the GUI tools easier to use and simpler to write, but it feels obscurationist to an old-fashioned command-line junkie. And that's the reason I use Slackware instead of anything else (though I've been considering giving Debian a whirl). And that's why I just sent in my $40 for the new Slack 4.0 disks.
Actually, I liked the CGI Gungans... the way their flesh moved was something subtle, fluid, and definitely neither foam rubber nor human flesh, which I think is a good thing in establishing that they are, in fact, an alien race.
Also, there were several times when I was distracted from what Jar-Jar was saying by watching the animation of his motion, which, all things considered, is definitely a plus.
I've got a glow-in-the-dark EXIT sign from a theatre I helped remodel that has an NRC stamp on it.
Takes it about 4 hours to compile a recent kernel. I upgraded it from 8M to 20M of RAM back around 2.1.120 or so... before that, it would take it 7-8 hours, sometimes more. Not a big deal... I'd start it up, leave it alone overnight, and in the morning, there'd (usually) be a shiny new kernel waiting for me.
:) It really doesn't have enough horsepower to handle X and Netscape at the same time, so when I want to read Slashdot on it, I run Netscape on one of my other machines and use display redirection... very handy.
Oh, and I run X on the thing, too.
The slowest compile I've ever personally witnessed was on my laptop. 386SX-25, 4M of RAM. Took it a little over 12 hours to build a 1.2.13 kernel.
The latter is obviously a greater waste of bandwidth. It contains zero useful information, whereas the former contains the information that there is, in fact, a new kernel out. The signal-to-noise ratio of the news about the kernel updates, however low, is therefore infinitely higher than that of the whiners, which is zero.
Near as I can tell, Alan's involved in everything.
There already is one. It's called "LinuxHQ Kernel Versions".
According to "finger @linux.kernel.org", 2.3.2 is already out.
:)
I've got to get a faster machine to do my dev kernel testing on. At this rate, my poor old 386-40 won't be able to keep up.