I had heard all about this new & cool Caldera 2.2 installation, and wanted to try it for myself. I have to agree that I found it lacking in a couple of key ways, although surely they won't be that tough to fix... (especially if Caldera has the guts to GPL).
/dev/modem and/dev/cdrom weren't set up at all (that could be challenging for all the newbies flocking to the Lizard), sound was very difficult to configure on my laptop (sndconfig is a truly wonderful thing), and I also got the LI on Lilo (had to boot from a floppy and fix lilo manually -- Lizard didn't prompt, as Redhat does, for where to install the boot record, just tried to install it on/dev/hda5, the partition with linux on it... the old master boot record that I'd had set up to boot between linux and windows now was apparently left with nothing to point to and just burped when I tried to reboot). Also, Lizard didn't prompt me to set up a boot disk... I was just luck that the one I'd made with a RedHat install worked.
Why did those of us who use linux start using it, anyway? For me, raised on DOS/Windows, and not knowing that any other os existed (except macos, of course), my first experience with linux was at the same time frightening and exhilerating. Frightening because I had two pre-configured machines that I was stuck administering with 0 prior experience, and thousands of miles away from anyone to help. Exhilerating, because as I learned the linux command line I could feel how powerful it was. No more crashes. No more fuzzy dos error messages that don't tell you anything. Just solid, powerful computing that does what you tell it to. It was like a breath of fresh air when you've never breathed it before. There really is something out there besides Microsoft crap!
I'm not a programmer, but if we do as this article suggests and kill the cli, ban non-redhat distros, and combine gnome and kde into one synonymous monolith with a pretty interface and automated tools, why should I use it? Hell, most of the programs I want to use are already available for windoze, if linux becomes a clone, what's the point?
I want to see linux achieve mainstream, but not at the expense of its soul, as it were.
True story: I was working at a small ISP, and was using an NT box as a RADIUS server (big mistake, lots of crashes... management decision), and also using it as a serial gateway to connect to various pieces of hardware on the rack. One day, after rebooting Windows NT from yet another bsod (our 2 linux servers, by the way, were heavily loaded with e-mail, web and dns servers, and they ran fine), Windows detected new hardware! Suspiciously, I ran through the dialogue, with no real way to stop it, and... oh, no! damn! no! there's no modem there! stop it!
...
when the dust settles, I only have one serial port to use for my hardware, as the other has been usurped by the ghost modem.
The problem with this multiplicity of window managers, apps, etc, is that they increase the learning curve for the average user, which, as has been pointed out, is not what they sat down at the computer to think about. Would it not be best to have a uniform look and feel for the average user which can be easily escaped by those with the inclination to do so?
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I had heard all about this new & cool Caldera 2.2 installation, and wanted to try it for myself. I have to agree that I found it lacking in a couple of key ways, although surely they won't be that tough to fix... (especially if Caldera has the guts to GPL).
/dev/cdrom weren't set up at all (that could be challenging for all the newbies flocking to the Lizard), sound was very difficult to configure on my laptop (sndconfig is a truly wonderful thing), and I also got the LI on Lilo (had to boot from a floppy and fix lilo manually -- Lizard didn't prompt, as Redhat does, for where to install the boot record, just tried to install it on /dev/hda5, the partition with linux on it... the old master boot record that I'd had set up to boot between linux and windows now was apparently left with nothing to point to and just burped when I tried to reboot). Also, Lizard didn't prompt me to set up a boot disk... I was just luck that the one I'd made with a RedHat install worked.
/dev/modem and
Why did those of us who use linux start using it, anyway? For me, raised on DOS/Windows, and not knowing that any other os existed (except macos, of course), my first experience with linux was at the same time frightening and exhilerating. Frightening because I had two pre-configured machines that I was stuck administering with 0 prior experience, and thousands of miles away from anyone to help. Exhilerating, because as I learned the linux command line I could feel how powerful it was. No more crashes. No more fuzzy dos error messages that don't tell you anything. Just solid, powerful computing that does what you tell it to. It was like a breath of fresh air when you've never breathed it before. There really is something out there besides Microsoft crap!
I'm not a programmer, but if we do as this article suggests and kill the cli, ban non-redhat distros, and combine gnome and kde into one synonymous monolith with a pretty interface and automated tools, why should I use it? Hell, most of the programs I want to use are already available for windoze, if linux becomes a clone, what's the point?
I want to see linux achieve mainstream, but not at the expense of its soul, as it were.
True story: I was working at a small ISP, and was using an NT box as a RADIUS server (big mistake, lots of crashes... management decision), and also using it as a serial gateway to connect to various pieces of hardware on the rack. One day, after rebooting Windows NT from yet another bsod (our 2 linux servers, by the way, were heavily loaded with e-mail, web and dns servers, and they ran fine), Windows detected new hardware! Suspiciously, I ran through the dialogue, with no real way to stop it, and... oh, no! damn! no! there's no modem there! stop it!
...
when the dust settles, I only have one serial port to use for my hardware, as the other has been usurped by the ghost modem.
The problem with this multiplicity of window managers, apps, etc, is that they increase the learning curve for the average user, which, as has been pointed out, is not what they sat down at the computer to think about. Would it not be best to have a uniform look and feel for the average user which can be easily escaped by those with the inclination to do so?