As soon as I saw the thread, I wondered how long it would take for the Gentoo fanboys to jump on it. Obviously, I wasn't mistaken.
Of course, there's only one distro that really meets the criteria for the best balance of stability, high-level support options, security, rapid updates, and ease of administration.
Yeah, my karma was maxed out at 50 ages ago, but I can't remember when I last saw a figure. I'm sure someone can enlighten us as to exactly when the video-game scoring was done away with, but as far as I'm concerned, "Excellent" is good enough for me.
I think someone's trying to dig up the FUD they read in 1998 and pass it off as informed opinion...
Err, if you had taken the trouble to read my post properly, you would have noticed that having just paid out good money (which, incidentally, I did not say I regretted) for a Mac, I had more motivation to make the damn thing work than to spread misinformation about it. I had no preconceptions about Apple other than what I had briefly come into contact with some 20 or more years ago, and I was more than happy to give them a fair trial.
Linux' support for NFS is not very good and never has been very good; if you're creating network mounts on a Linux machine that need to be read on anything else then you should be using Samba. Linux NFS just isn't good enough.
Crap. Linux NFS support works perfectly well with my BSD systems, and I don't know how much closer to the original Unix NFS you're going to get than that. On my network, the nodes have to work both as server and client, and if I find that a Linux, NetBSD or FreeBSD machine takes some 5 minutes to mount an NFS share on an OS X machine (with portmap running on all nodes) then I think that is reasonably good evidence that there's something wrong with the OS X implementation. As for Samba, I hate it, and have absolutely no reason to run it, since I have no Windows boxes.
As for configuration, on any of my BSD or Linux boxes, all I need is a single line in my/etc/exports files to make NFS happen. You cannot possibly make any informed claim that OS X makes it that simple.
This aside, you seem to have interpreted my post as an anti-Mac rant. You misunderstood. The whole point of the thread (go back to the top of the page) was about switching from Linux to Mac. I don't ask anyone to moderate my post as insightful or whatever, since I already have all the karma I need. I was simply raising some issues which might be of interest to anyone who is considering switching from Linux to OS X.
I too have been using Linux for 10 years, and my wife has also been perfectly happy with the Slackware boxes I've set up for her. However, when she bought a laptop the other week, she told me she really wanted a Mac, for a couple of reasons which are not particularly relevant here.
On the plus side, most native apps are reasonably solid and stable, and the interface is simple and easy to use.
On the negative side, we both found that interface is so simple there's not much you can do to customise it. As for integrating the Mac into my *nix (NFS) network, that was a real bitch, and it still isn't right. Apple really made it harder for me when they put all the network settings into that binary database rather than applying the simple Unix-style approach.
We were also a bit disappointed by the general lack of basic games, having been spoilt by the great suite that comes by default with Gnome. Sure, I know about Fink, but my experience is that X11 apps don't seem to render that well on the Mac screen.
Yes, if the world does not stabilize and poses a clear-and-present danger to the USA. It's sad we even have to do this. But, time to play big brother again and baby sit.
Which leads us back to the original topic of the thread: Global Warming. I know you all appear to have forgotten that, since the whole thread seems to have been hijacked by empty-headed Bush-ite cheerleaders,
The point is, the US is not going to be able to just "babysit" the rest of the world as temperatures and sea levels rise. Like it or not, the US is going to have to deal with the environmental situation it helped cause, along with everybody else.
And the civil unrest in the Congo has killed about 10 times as many people as were killed by last month's earthquake and tsunami. There has been very little international outcry over those death tolls.
True. But then, there's no oil in the Congo. That's why the US hasn't set up a dictatorship there that they can later remove under the banner of "liberation".
I think you're forgetting the X amount of (billion) dollars that the US spends every year not just on internal but external catastrophe aid.
Look up the US annual military budget, and then say that.
Furthermore, the US is far and away the biggest culprit for causing global warming, and IMO it is fitting that the US should suffer the consequences along with everybody else.
Here in Australia, it used to be possible to purchase "No Junk Mail", or rather, "Australia Post Only" stickers at the post office.
Seems this is no longer possible. When I asked the guy behind the counter if the reason for that was because Australia Post is largely responsible for delivering junk mail these days, he said "I wouldn't deny it, Sir".
What bugs? OK, I know... but one of the major strengths of Firefox is that if you find a bug and report it, the bug usually has a high likelihood of getting fixed, or otherwise you will be shown a pretty good reason why not.
Sounds like the final nail in the coffin for the independant (non-corporate) American Farmer.
How do you think farmers outside the US feel? It's bad news for nations locked into so-called "free trade" deals with the US, like Canada and (shortly) Australia, but it's even worse news for struggling farmers in India or Asia.
Round-Up is a pesticide? Every plant I spray it on seems to die in a few days...
Indeed, Roundup is a herbicide (which, in itself it relatively benign - coffee is widely regarded by many chemists as more toxic). The principle is that by running a total monoculture, the farmer can maximise his profit margin.
Not quite; however, measures that Monsanto are pursuing in the US have nothing on their vastly more predatory practices abroad. In India, for instance, there is widespread concern that Monsanto and others are adding to the common lot of hunger and poverty.
The whole point is that in science a theory is a hypothesis which practitioners have gone to some rigorous lengths to disprove, without success, and which consequently is regarded as a de facto fact.
It has nothing to do with the typical conversational use of the word, along the lines of "in theory, pigs could fly, if only...".
Indeed, there are still a few glitches Firefox still has to get ironed out - not least of which is the ongoing rendering problem it has with slashdot.org. Though to be fair, that might be more an issue with the way Slashcode has written their code.
I used to go to the trouble of compiling Mozilla without messenger/composer/kitchensink etc, and for a long time the small codespace and good-ish performance made it worthwhile until Firefox hit 0.8ish and became stable enough to be usable. However, thanks to Firefox I haven't needed to fire up Mozilla in months, and I doubt if I'll bother downloading Moz2.0.
The journal in question does not "begin with talking about KDE". It links to an article where KDE is mentioned in the context of desktop development, which IMO is entirely legitimate.
I'm not buying into which desktop is "superior" as I'm no longer as partisan as I used to be; I'm a longstanding (since ~1997) Gnome user, but I now find myself using KDE about 40% of the time. Both have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses.
I find a more obvious tool is simply the Slackware install disks (and presumably those of most of the other distributions too).
A seasoned sysadmin should be able to fight his way out of most sticky situations by booting from any of these and using the tools contained therein. After all, chroot is your friend.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with knoppix, I just never got around to downloading the ISO...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, there's only one distro that really meets the criteria for the best balance of stability, high-level support options, security, rapid updates, and ease of administration.
Slackware. :-P
Where? No profit in Debian AFIK.
And no, I'm not trolling for Deb, I'm a Slackware fan, but let us at least get the facts straight...
Yeah, my karma was maxed out at 50 ages ago, but I can't remember when I last saw a figure. I'm sure someone can enlighten us as to exactly when the video-game scoring was done away with, but as far as I'm concerned, "Excellent" is good enough for me.
Err, if you had taken the trouble to read my post properly, you would have noticed that having just paid out good money (which, incidentally, I did not say I regretted) for a Mac, I had more motivation to make the damn thing work than to spread misinformation about it. I had no preconceptions about Apple other than what I had briefly come into contact with some 20 or more years ago, and I was more than happy to give them a fair trial.
Linux' support for NFS is not very good and never has been very good; if you're creating network mounts on a Linux machine that need to be read on anything else then you should be using Samba. Linux NFS just isn't good enough.
Crap. Linux NFS support works perfectly well with my BSD systems, and I don't know how much closer to the original Unix NFS you're going to get than that. On my network, the nodes have to work both as server and client, and if I find that a Linux, NetBSD or FreeBSD machine takes some 5 minutes to mount an NFS share on an OS X machine (with portmap running on all nodes) then I think that is reasonably good evidence that there's something wrong with the OS X implementation. As for Samba, I hate it, and have absolutely no reason to run it, since I have no Windows boxes.
As for configuration, on any of my BSD or Linux boxes, all I need is a single line in my /etc/exports files to make NFS happen. You cannot possibly make any informed claim that OS X makes it that simple.
This aside, you seem to have interpreted my post as an anti-Mac rant. You misunderstood. The whole point of the thread (go back to the top of the page) was about switching from Linux to Mac. I don't ask anyone to moderate my post as insightful or whatever, since I already have all the karma I need. I was simply raising some issues which might be of interest to anyone who is considering switching from Linux to OS X.
On the plus side, most native apps are reasonably solid and stable, and the interface is simple and easy to use.
On the negative side, we both found that interface is so simple there's not much you can do to customise it. As for integrating the Mac into my *nix (NFS) network, that was a real bitch, and it still isn't right. Apple really made it harder for me when they put all the network settings into that binary database rather than applying the simple Unix-style approach.
We were also a bit disappointed by the general lack of basic games, having been spoilt by the great suite that comes by default with Gnome. Sure, I know about Fink, but my experience is that X11 apps don't seem to render that well on the Mac screen.
Which leads us back to the original topic of the thread: Global Warming. I know you all appear to have forgotten that, since the whole thread seems to have been hijacked by empty-headed Bush-ite cheerleaders,
The point is, the US is not going to be able to just "babysit" the rest of the world as temperatures and sea levels rise. Like it or not, the US is going to have to deal with the environmental situation it helped cause, along with everybody else.
True. But then, there's no oil in the Congo. That's why the US hasn't set up a dictatorship there that they can later remove under the banner of "liberation".
Look up the US annual military budget, and then say that.
Furthermore, the US is far and away the biggest culprit for causing global warming, and IMO it is fitting that the US should suffer the consequences along with everybody else.
Seems this is no longer possible. When I asked the guy behind the counter if the reason for that was because Australia Post is largely responsible for delivering junk mail these days, he said "I wouldn't deny it, Sir".
What bugs? OK, I know... but one of the major strengths of Firefox is that if you find a bug and report it, the bug usually has a high likelihood of getting fixed, or otherwise you will be shown a pretty good reason why not.
OMG whattodo, whattodo, none of my computers has a copy of Internet Exploder since 1996... Fuckitty-fuck, what am I going to do in an emergency ?
The "scary" thing about that is not the beasties themselves, but the fact that commercial practices have forced fishermen to those extremes.
No, coffee is not a herbicide - unless you pour it on plants while it is still hot.:-)
How do you think farmers outside the US feel? It's bad news for nations locked into so-called "free trade" deals with the US, like Canada and (shortly) Australia, but it's even worse news for struggling farmers in India or Asia.
In any case, F1 progeny of many genetically engineered crops are essentially sterile.
Indeed, Roundup is a herbicide (which, in itself it relatively benign - coffee is widely regarded by many chemists as more toxic). The principle is that by running a total monoculture, the farmer can maximise his profit margin.
Not quite; however, measures that Monsanto are pursuing in the US have nothing on their vastly more predatory practices abroad. In India, for instance, there is widespread concern that Monsanto and others are adding to the common lot of hunger and poverty.
It has nothing to do with the typical conversational use of the word, along the lines of "in theory, pigs could fly, if only...".
...So, just what is so special about Opera that makes it so superior to Firefox or Mozilla that we should all fork out our hard-earned shekels for it?
Indeed, Mozilla has always rendered /. fine for me too. The problem appears (at least on my machines) to only affect Firefox.
I used to go to the trouble of compiling Mozilla without messenger/composer/kitchensink etc, and for a long time the small codespace and good-ish performance made it worthwhile until Firefox hit 0.8ish and became stable enough to be usable. However, thanks to Firefox I haven't needed to fire up Mozilla in months, and I doubt if I'll bother downloading Moz2.0.
True; furthermore, that article appears to rely on the user running an implementation of Gnome that includes hal/dbus for autoloading of media.
I don't know how many distributions do this by default, but I have found very good reasons for excluding it from my Dropline Gnome setup.
The journal in question does not "begin with talking about KDE". It links to an article where KDE is mentioned in the context of desktop development, which IMO is entirely legitimate.
I'm not buying into which desktop is "superior" as I'm no longer as partisan as I used to be; I'm a longstanding (since ~1997) Gnome user, but I now find myself using KDE about 40% of the time. Both have their strengths, and both have their weaknesses.
Yep. Cloning sheep. After all. the whole point of sheep is that they're all supposed to be the same...
:-D
A seasoned sysadmin should be able to fight his way out of most sticky situations by booting from any of these and using the tools contained therein. After all, chroot is your friend.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with knoppix, I just never got around to downloading the ISO...