Not so sure of that; more experienced Linux users will recognise strengths (and weaknesses) of most distros, without necessarily insisting that one is mecessarily better than the other.
For instance, while I recognise that the dependency-checking features inherent in package managers like deb or rpm can be valuable or useful, I find that they get in the way of how I like to work. Similarly, I don't expect my mongrel hybrid of self-compiled applications and tgz distro packages to satisfy requirements for someone who doesn't want to ever think about dependencies.
And those of us who mess around with init scripts are even more polarised. I personally shun sysvinit scripts and prefer something more BSD-ish, while others feel the reverse is more elegant. But that's personal preference. Both get the job done.
Want a sleek and fast linux ? Slackware's the answer.
You sound like a recent convert.:-D
I've been a huge fan of Slackware ever since it was Soft Landing Systems, but since my preferred GUI is Gnome rather than KDE, I fairly recently got tired of waiting for updates to the excellent Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware while it looked as if it was going nowhere, and tried out Arch Linux, and I haven't looked back.
It's optimised for 686 architectures, the package manager, like Slackware's, is nice and simple, but with much more powerful features for retrieving packages plus dependencies online and on-the-fly. And best of all, it has nice BSD-like init scripts with which any Slackware user will feel comfortable. It's less intuitive for the newbie to install than Slack, since there's a certain amount of manual editing of config scripts required, but neither is really designed for the newbie in any case...
My own recommendation is the Netcomm NB9W MyNetGateway, an all-in-one DSL2+ modem/router/WAP/VOIP machine. I've had one for a couple of years (I think) without ever needing to reset it, and I've set up other people with the same machine and had no calls or complaints.
One of the most timesaving things I ever did was to replace the default sh or bash with zsh.
zsh has so many features, it would be impossible to list them all here. In fact, I can't claim to know them all, but everybody takes what works for them.
Suffice to say that the completion, iteration, history and redirection tools are second to none if you're as lazy a typist as I am.
I've been using Unix for decades, and I never did get to like those verbose switches for chmod. It's so much quicker to use the numeric ones, e.g. 755 vs. +rwxr-xr-x.
Easy to remember how they work when you consider that 4=read, 2=write and 1=execute and you just add them up as required.
I normally consider it otiose to comment on moderation, but given that most of this thread has been moderated flamebait, it seems that the guidelines can't be clear enough for somebody. Someone with an agenda is clearly modding down anyone with whom he doesn't agree.
...but OTOH I remember someone (IIRC it might have been from IBM) saying that nobody would ever need a hard drive bigger than 10MB. But whether or not my recollections are correct, such predictions are inevitably consigned to the "famous last words" category.
Maybe when Bush is gone, and the FBI and Justice Department get some decent management, we'll see some action in this area.
Sure, Bush will be gone, but that doesn't mean you'll get any decent management (if that isn't an oxymoron).
I won't go as far as to say that shit floats to the top (OK, maybe I will) but where else are you going to put all those unskilled workers other than management?;-)
What could do what I say? Ah yes, that's it, the Fair Tax - taxing consumption instead of savings and earning as the current ridiculous system does.
Well, don't come whining to me if your government introduces such a tax, and you end up worse off - just like everyone else has under such a taxation system. I speak from comparatively recent experience since a consumption tax was introduced here in Australia in 2000 and the effect on most household purses was almost immediate.
Sure, if you can show me a government that is prepared to stop slugging you for income tax as well, your suggestion might (possibly) stand up, but good luck with that.
That aside, your remark that Poor people are poor because they're stupid with their money has to be one of the more repugnant statements I have read on Slashdot in quite a while, and is symptomatic of what is wrong with the attitude of our administrations. Sometimes people are poor because of the hand they have been dealt.
I concur. I have a RAZR2 V9, which on the whole is quite a good phone. Strongly built (compared to other clamshell devices I have had), and just a bit overly heavy as a result, mine has stood up to quite a few knocks with few marks. The buttons are less than optimal, since they are a bit hard to identify by touch, but the display isn't bad. The battery is a bit small, which limits time between charges, but on the plus side, I can charge it via the USB port, so I can travel with just one charger for all of my devices.
But their Windows-centric software sucks to the extent that it really limits the phone's usefulness, since the only meaningful thing that can be done easily is maintenance of contacts lists. Hopefully, adopting the Android OS might eventually get some cross-platform operability happening. Though I'm not holding my breath...
maybe i'm wrong, and Australians are more receptive to the voice of reason than Americans are. but then again, a rational society would not be facing this dilemma, since they wouldn't put anyone in power who'd even be considering this kind of nationwide internet censorship. i mean, the Chinese at least have an excuse since they don't really elect their government officials. but Australia?
Unfortunately, America doesn't have a total monopoly on stupidity. Australia didn't really have much choice at the last election. The incumbent Prime Minister was an outright fascist who was so in love with himself that he refused to accept the value of anyone else's point of view, and his replacement is an insufferable narrow-minded suburban prig with as much imagination as one might expect from the glorified parking attendant that he is.
Sure, the Prime Minister's office will no doubt spin this any way it likes, but when it comes down to it, the policy is still driven by the so-called "moral panic" imperative. We never voted for internet censorship (that idea wasn't mentioned in the run-up to the election) but that won't stop them trying to get it through.
The silver lining is that they have to sweet-talk a lot of MPs to get the policy through Parliament, so there's hope that they might still get the kick in the pants that they deserve.
I knew a Texan once. He was a huge bloke, must have weighed 400 pounds. He was do big that when he died, nobody could make a coffin big enough to hold him.
So they gave him an enema and buried him in a shoe-box.
Heh. When my old RPN Hewlett-Packard calculator decided to crap its pants in the middle of an exam back in the days when I was studying mechanical engineering, I went out the next day and bought myself a slide rule and taught myself how to use it. (When I was at high school, we had to use books of tables, which was OK but slow.)
I've changed direction several times since then, but I've never regretted that particular decision, even though I mostly use a TI-89 now.
If you're seriously worried about power savings, then perhaps the Athlon processor wasn't the wisest choice of CPU in the first place. Not that I don't like them; my desktop machine is also an Athlon, but I was aware of the caveats when I bought it.
Luxury! Many years ago, I used to work at a computer bureau where customers' input written on paper forms was punched in to mag tape encoding machines (or punch-cards for small jobs or run parameters). Them were the days...
But there was only one keyboard, the master console ( or in this case the "Supervisory Printer Operator" or SPO), and it was essentially a sort of teletype machine that not even God could touch-type on. That (Burroughs B3700) computer's history seems to be pretty much lost. Not even Google seems to find much about it now except for this old advertisement.
If I have to use a kludgy pile of excreta to run a dodgy pile of software, I'd rather just do without, thank you very much if it's all the same to you.
My point still stands. It would be lame for Google to insist that one uses an emulator (not that they have said any such thing) when they have ample resources to create a native piece of software. No excuses.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so sure of that; more experienced Linux users will recognise strengths (and weaknesses) of most distros, without necessarily insisting that one is mecessarily better than the other.
For instance, while I recognise that the dependency-checking features inherent in package managers like deb or rpm can be valuable or useful, I find that they get in the way of how I like to work. Similarly, I don't expect my mongrel hybrid of self-compiled applications and tgz distro packages to satisfy requirements for someone who doesn't want to ever think about dependencies.
And those of us who mess around with init scripts are even more polarised. I personally shun sysvinit scripts and prefer something more BSD-ish, while others feel the reverse is more elegant. But that's personal preference. Both get the job done.
Want a sleek and fast linux ? Slackware's the answer.
:-D
You sound like a recent convert.
I've been a huge fan of Slackware ever since it was Soft Landing Systems, but since my preferred GUI is Gnome rather than KDE, I fairly recently got tired of waiting for updates to the excellent Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware while it looked as if it was going nowhere, and tried out Arch Linux, and I haven't looked back.
It's optimised for 686 architectures, the package manager, like Slackware's, is nice and simple, but with much more powerful features for retrieving packages plus dependencies online and on-the-fly. And best of all, it has nice BSD-like init scripts with which any Slackware user will feel comfortable. It's less intuitive for the newbie to install than Slack, since there's a certain amount of manual editing of config scripts required, but neither is really designed for the newbie in any case...
My own recommendation is the Netcomm NB9W MyNetGateway, an all-in-one DSL2+ modem/router/WAP/VOIP machine. I've had one for a couple of years (I think) without ever needing to reset it, and I've set up other people with the same machine and had no calls or complaints.
Also useful here is man filename | col -b | grep whatever if you have a huge manpage (gcc, for instance) and you're looking for something specific.
You ever heard of the 'apropos' command?
You beat me to it. apropos would probably have to be the newbie's best friend.
Also whatis, which also appears on some systems as wtf.
One of the most timesaving things I ever did was to replace the default sh or bash with zsh.
zsh has so many features, it would be impossible to list them all here. In fact, I can't claim to know them all, but everybody takes what works for them.
Suffice to say that the completion, iteration, history and redirection tools are second to none if you're as lazy a typist as I am.
chmod -Rf ug+w
I've been using Unix for decades, and I never did get to like those verbose switches for chmod. It's so much quicker to use the numeric ones, e.g. 755 vs. +rwxr-xr-x.
Easy to remember how they work when you consider that 4=read, 2=write and 1=execute and you just add them up as required.
real UNIX admins don't sudo - they su - .
On some systems, it's useful to sudo su.
My BSD server doesn't run X11 because it doesn't have a screen. Its only access point is via ssh, because that's all it needs.
I normally consider it otiose to comment on moderation, but given that most of this thread has been moderated flamebait, it seems that the guidelines can't be clear enough for somebody. Someone with an agenda is clearly modding down anyone with whom he doesn't agree.
...but OTOH I remember someone (IIRC it might have been from IBM) saying that nobody would ever need a hard drive bigger than 10MB. But whether or not my recollections are correct, such predictions are inevitably consigned to the "famous last words" category.
It's tougher to do on Linux, and still tougher on MacOS and xBSD and OpenSolaris.
How so? Security is really very much the same between Linux and any other Unix-like OS.
Maybe when Bush is gone, and the FBI and Justice Department get some decent management, we'll see some action in this area.
;-)
Sure, Bush will be gone, but that doesn't mean you'll get any decent management (if that isn't an oxymoron).
I won't go as far as to say that shit floats to the top (OK, maybe I will) but where else are you going to put all those unskilled workers other than management?
What could do what I say? Ah yes, that's it, the Fair Tax - taxing consumption instead of savings and earning as the current ridiculous system does.
Well, don't come whining to me if your government introduces such a tax, and you end up worse off - just like everyone else has under such a taxation system. I speak from comparatively recent experience since a consumption tax was introduced here in Australia in 2000 and the effect on most household purses was almost immediate.
Sure, if you can show me a government that is prepared to stop slugging you for income tax as well, your suggestion might (possibly) stand up, but good luck with that.
That aside, your remark that Poor people are poor because they're stupid with their money has to be one of the more repugnant statements I have read on Slashdot in quite a while, and is symptomatic of what is wrong with the attitude of our administrations. Sometimes people are poor because of the hand they have been dealt.
I concur. I have a RAZR2 V9, which on the whole is quite a good phone. Strongly built (compared to other clamshell devices I have had), and just a bit overly heavy as a result, mine has stood up to quite a few knocks with few marks. The buttons are less than optimal, since they are a bit hard to identify by touch, but the display isn't bad. The battery is a bit small, which limits time between charges, but on the plus side, I can charge it via the USB port, so I can travel with just one charger for all of my devices.
But their Windows-centric software sucks to the extent that it really limits the phone's usefulness, since the only meaningful thing that can be done easily is maintenance of contacts lists. Hopefully, adopting the Android OS might eventually get some cross-platform operability happening. Though I'm not holding my breath...
maybe i'm wrong, and Australians are more receptive to the voice of reason than Americans are. but then again, a rational society would not be facing this dilemma, since they wouldn't put anyone in power who'd even be considering this kind of nationwide internet censorship. i mean, the Chinese at least have an excuse since they don't really elect their government officials. but Australia?
Unfortunately, America doesn't have a total monopoly on stupidity. Australia didn't really have much choice at the last election. The incumbent Prime Minister was an outright fascist who was so in love with himself that he refused to accept the value of anyone else's point of view, and his replacement is an insufferable narrow-minded suburban prig with as much imagination as one might expect from the glorified parking attendant that he is.
Sure, the Prime Minister's office will no doubt spin this any way it likes, but when it comes down to it, the policy is still driven by the so-called "moral panic" imperative. We never voted for internet censorship (that idea wasn't mentioned in the run-up to the election) but that won't stop them trying to get it through.
The silver lining is that they have to sweet-talk a lot of MPs to get the policy through Parliament, so there's hope that they might still get the kick in the pants that they deserve.
I knew a Texan once. He was a huge bloke, must have weighed 400 pounds. He was do big that when he died, nobody could make a coffin big enough to hold him.
So they gave him an enema and buried him in a shoe-box.
If you're that inept at coping with basic challenges like this, what are you doing on Slashdot? "News for nerds"...
Heh. When my old RPN Hewlett-Packard calculator decided to crap its pants in the middle of an exam back in the days when I was studying mechanical engineering, I went out the next day and bought myself a slide rule and taught myself how to use it. (When I was at high school, we had to use books of tables, which was OK but slow.)
I've changed direction several times since then, but I've never regretted that particular decision, even though I mostly use a TI-89 now.
Honestly, I've yet to come across any Linux computer that ever needs rebooting. Kernel upgrades (if necessary) excepted, of course...
If you're seriously worried about power savings, then perhaps the Athlon processor wasn't the wisest choice of CPU in the first place. Not that I don't like them; my desktop machine is also an Athlon, but I was aware of the caveats when I bought it.
Not sure why we have the non-story about it outperforming Vista though...
;-)
My thought exactly. Well, almost. My first thought was that a snail towing a 65-ton truck might outperform Vista, but I'm very polite.
Luxury! Many years ago, I used to work at a computer bureau where customers' input written on paper forms was punched in to mag tape encoding machines (or punch-cards for small jobs or run parameters). Them were the days...
But there was only one keyboard, the master console ( or in this case the "Supervisory Printer Operator" or SPO), and it was essentially a sort of teletype machine that not even God could touch-type on. That (Burroughs B3700) computer's history seems to be pretty much lost. Not even Google seems to find much about it now except for this old advertisement.
You are going to Starbucks to drink coffee, right?
I wouldn't. If I want decent coffee, I'll stay at home and make it myself.
quit whining, use wine
If I have to use a kludgy pile of excreta to run a dodgy pile of software, I'd rather just do without, thank you very much if it's all the same to you.
My point still stands. It would be lame for Google to insist that one uses an emulator (not that they have said any such thing) when they have ample resources to create a native piece of software. No excuses.