Others have mentioned pilot-link, jpilot, and kpilot. There's also gnome-pilot, which is basically like hotsync for Windows. It's based on pilot-link, but is a good front-end. You can also sync with Evolution, an Outlook clone. The conduits for Evolution need a little help (a few people, including me, are working on that), but the mostly work. Evolution also doesn't have a memos component to it (though check out the evolution-memos project for a working Memos component that I've been working on - even has a working gnome-pilot conduit)
I'd say support for the Palm is good, but not mature yet. gnome-pilot makes it easy to sync with AvantGo and the other major conduits. JPilot is good at that, too, and is basically a clone of Palm Desktop. pilot-link is the basis for most Palm support, and is usually kept up-to-date with the latest releases from PalmSource and Palm vendors.
The solution to this is to buy a watch on a carabiner. They're cheap, you get interesting comments from people (went to a career fair and people commented on how it looked good), and it won't get in your way anymore.
10.1 worked just fine for me. How did you "upgrade"? Typically, I'd just change the urpm sources to the new version and update everything - worked from 10.0 to 10.1, and then 10.1 to 10.2 (LE2005). Sometimes upgrading from CDs caused problems (been a while, though).
I've never gotten screwed on the free versions. The main thing is that they don't come with flash, acroread, etc. - but I can get those using the PLF sources (see the easyurpmi stuff in other posts). Maybe you missed a free CD?
The only complaint I have currently is that setting up external CRT monitor support on a laptop (Thinkpad R51) couldn't be done in a GUI - I could never get the refresh rate above 60Hz. Manually editing the xorg.conf file (with help from google) fixed this, but it'd be nice to have it in Mandrake's GUI like everything else. Even my wireless worked fine once I installed the firmware (2200BG, available from PLF)
As for running in 128MB of RAM, that's not distro-specific in most cases. It depends on what WM and desktop you use, and what programs (Eclipse and OO.o take quite a lot of RAM).
It's definitely not real-time (that'd be hard to do anyway). It's out of date by a long time. I was looking at the satellite imagery of my college campus, and they're still showing a building being built that's been in use since last Spring. Another building that was being used last year hasn't even been started in their images.
HP is very reliable... look at their reputation for scientific instruments etc.
Their scientific instruments division was split off and became Agilent quite a few years ago. As for their reliability, only their printers are reliable (if you take care of them). I've had a scanner die, another scanner required Windows to reboot twice before it worked again (sounds like a bad driver), and their DVD burner/video-in combination device (dc4000) is very unreliable (again, the driver is horrible and causes a lot of problems, including freezing Windows). Their PCs tend to die more frequently than any other major brand I know of.
So they WERE reliable while they still had Agilent, they aren't now.
Imagine yourself in 5 years time. The web browser has all this stuff on it which means it is as good an interface as any other GUI widget stack. Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever effectively is the window manager with tabbed browsing and links to your favourite 'applications'.
The problem I have with this network reliability. Many connections go down at least once a day (even if it's only for a few minutes). Also, what if you're using applications provided by someone other than your ISP? The network connection could go down between you and that application. Until networks are as reliable as the phone service (which will be a while - 15 to 20 years maybe?), I can't see people wanting to use this type of service.
And this is pissing me off. I need more memory for my PIII-800 (PC100 memory) and it's cheaper to buy memory for my laptop that I got back in the summer!
I've actually been using Mandrake 10.1 Community on my Thinkpad since it was released and have been impressed with the speed of Mandrake's programs. The GUI programs for 10.0 and before are great, but you're right they're slow. 10.1 on the other hand has very fast GUI programs (and they work much better than before).
I don't find they get outdated too soon, but I'll sometimes switch to the cooker (development) packages. Not only that, but Mandrake comes out with a new version every 6-9 months it seems, so it's very easy to just upgrade your packages to that new version (without a reinstall).
I'm still using 9.2 on my desktop, and except for Evolution, everything's pretty much up-to-date.
About the club: the reason you have to pay for KDE 3.3 sounds like because Mandrake hasn't gotten it stable enough to be happy with it. If you really want KDE 3.3, then cooker has it. That's also why they haven't put out Gnome 2.8 yet. Those will both probably be in the 10.2. I also don't know what you mean by the package selection system being slim. The CDs actually have most of the packages, and you can get a few more if you put in FTP sites for the software sources instead.
I've noticed that for non-x.0 versions (i.e. not 9.0 or 10.0), Mandrake has been trying to release stable products. 9.0 seemed rushed, and had many bugs, but 9.1 and 9.2 were very stable. The same goes for 10.0 as 9.0. It seemed rushed ("we have to get the 2.6 kernel out! oh, and udev, too), but they've actually integrated that all in like it should've been done for 10.1 (devfsd isn't used anymore).
So all in all, Mandrake 10.1 is definitely something worth switching to. The Mandrake-specific programs are much faster, the system is very stable, and there are a lot of packages to choose from (as many as any other distributions, I've found).
Until linux supports windows games natively (doubtful), my desktop (gaming) box is staying windows and my servers, laptop, and media center is staying linux.
Doom 3 is now on Linux natively. Other games will start coming around, and eventually all games will run on Linux (as well as Windows still, I have a feeling).
It'll be a slow process, but in 5-10 years I think we'll see this actually happen. You also don't have to buy Cedega. You can download the source/binary stuff and finish the compile job. It takes a little to get it working, but it does. Of course, you can support Cedega and pay for the binaries.
Miranda is for Windows only, though, whereas Gaim is for Linux and Windows. If you want one program for both OS's, then it'd be best to use Gaim.
Using Gaim for both also makes it easy to transfer existing away messages and other settings from one machine to the other, since they use the same settings format.
I'm not saying Miranda's a bad program (actually it looks pretty good based on screenshots, though I've never tried it), but it's definitely not multi-platform, which is the benefit of Gaim
The premium customers get to test it out and find the bugs. The regular customers get it after the bugs are fixes. Sounds good to me;)
I'm more thinking of the LG CD-RW drive bug with 10.0 Community. There was a command in Mandrake's kernel that wiped out the firmware in some of LG's CD-RW drives. The people trying Community found the bug, had to go through some long process to get their CD-RW drives working again and then when 10.0 Official came out, those who downloaded it for free have no more bugs! So we can pay to test Mandrake!
there's currently a known bug in kernel-2.6.8.1 for CD burning Bug #10840
the correction is available / should be included soon : http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3659
current impact on K3B : K3B news cannot recognize CD writer
According to the bug, this is now fixed with kernel 2.6.8.1-8mdk. So, you just need to update the kernel after install (which is acceptable for an RC).
Actually, Mandrake has been polishing their Mandrake Control Center since 9.0 or so. I've been using 10.1 beta, and while there are quite a few bugs in general (such as everything I type in a window suddenly coming out in some pictograph font-set), I think they've finally gotten the control center working without many bugs.
Windows is proprietary, and yet it does not prevent me in anyway from doing those things I wish to do, web browsing, email, programming, gaming and much much more.
Except when you crash it (and yes, I crashed windows 2000 in less than 5 minutes earlier today)
You could always write a patch for it. I took a look at the gaim source code a few weeks ago to fix a bug and it didn't seem too hard to comprehend. The naming scheme actually made sense (unlike some other code I've looked at from other projects).
You're probably right that it wouldn't be that hard to put it back up, and I know I'd thank you for creating a fix for it.:)
That's why you upgrade the routers and put a cap on upload speed (and if you want, download speed). My college was having massive troubles with bandwidth usage a few years ago because we had old hubs that couldn't control bandwidth. Once the network was upgraded to switches that capped the upload speed to 50 Kb/s off campus (people were uploading too much by leaving Kazaa running), our bandwidth usage went back to "normal". The people who run the residential network still go after high bandwidth users.
You don't solve the bandwidth problems by banning something, something new will just take its place. You control how much bandwidth each person uses and go after those who abuse the network.
My grandma didn't understand why her children and grandchildren were telling her she needed to switch to broadband from dialup.
"we have two phone lines, so it doesn't stop people from calling us"
"but I don't need anything faster!"
Um. Right.... So, we convinced her to switch (it's really not that expensive and it meant she could get rid of a phone line), and now she wouldn't go back. The main reason is because of the games she plays online, but she also has to download decent-sized attachments as well as virus updates and windows updates.
Really, the users just don't know what they're missing. If they knew, they'd switch (assuming they could afford it).
It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.
Sounds like you didn't choose the correct mouse during configuration. Since Mandrake 8 or so, I've never had a problem with the mouse wheel - it's always worked when I booted into Mandrake the first time after an install. I'm currently running Mandrake 9.2.
Fedora has it beat and doesn't have some money grubbing exclusive "club". I've found Fedora to be everything I need on the desktop, with all the above features and more.
Why do you think that Fedora has Mandrake beat on the desktop? Mandrake has everything you'd ever need: most of the open-source programs out there, great configuration utilities, and a great rpm setup using their urpmi (similar to Debian's apt-get).
The club is only "necessary" if you want to get the releases right now and get some other proprietary software (much of which you can download yourself - they just offer it in an easy-to-use format). I'm not a member of the club (I'm poor right now), and yet I'm able to get the ISOs for free a few weeks after they're released to the club.
Perhaps the Mandrake developers should stop begging for money and contribute to something that has a chance.
You do realize that companies do need to make money. Based on my last experience with RedHat 9, I won't be trying Fedora for quite a while. I was able to configure everything much more easily in Mandrake than I was in RedHat.
Mandrake has contributed a great set of software, and if you'd actually try version 9.0 and up, you'd agree it has a great chance of becoming popular with Grandma. (versions 7 & 8 were good, too, but not good enough for Grandma)
Far better that all drug compnaies get nationalised (then rationalised, shutting down the overlap, perhaps putting their doctors back out to practice) and that drugs are researched and produced cooperatively around the world for the benefit of people.
Actually, it's been shown that it's better for them to overlap on their work. For one, the side effects of each drug may be different. For another, they might actually come up with two similar, but chemically different medications (and therefore two different patents). One drug may help others better, while another may help another part of the population better.
I'm trying to remember which two drugs I'm thinking about in particular, but I'm pretty sure they were heartburn drugs. If anyone else knows of any off-hand, feel free to post them.
Look at what's happening with the poor old folk from the USA who have to come to lovely Canada for their affordable medicine.
This is a problem with the U.S.'s drug program, and not necessarily the companies. The FDA requires many more tests than Canada, last I checked. This makes it cost a lot more money to get the drug approved for use, and therefore drug price goes up. Whether these extra precautions are taking it to far is another topic. Drug companies might be gouging a little, but it's been show that it's mainly the FDA's requirements that causes the cost increases.
There are two basic things I think that could be done to solve this: 1) lower FDA standards (again, whether they're too high/restrictive now is another topic), or 2) subsidize medication for those on national health care or without a health plan.
Congress has decided that they should subsidize those on national health care, but I don't know the details on this or the effectiveness of the plan they've enacted.
Maybe software patents should be done away with, but I can't believe that you'd really agree with getting rid of all patents.
Take drug patents: it costs a lot of time and money to just come up with a drug worth patenting. Drug patents give incentives to corporations to create medicines to help people because they know they'll be able to regain a lot of the money they put into coming up with the medicine.
This isn't about them putting up a sitefinder website, but that they're using their power as the main DNS provider to make any mis-typed site redirect to their web page.
ICANN believes this is a misuse of the power entrusted to VeriSign. I'd have to agree with them. If I mis-type a website, I want a "site not found" error or something useful, not a verisign web page.
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Others have mentioned pilot-link, jpilot, and kpilot. There's also gnome-pilot, which is basically like hotsync for Windows. It's based on pilot-link, but is a good front-end. You can also sync with Evolution, an Outlook clone. The conduits for Evolution need a little help (a few people, including me, are working on that), but the mostly work. Evolution also doesn't have a memos component to it (though check out the evolution-memos project for a working Memos component that I've been working on - even has a working gnome-pilot conduit)
I'd say support for the Palm is good, but not mature yet. gnome-pilot makes it easy to sync with AvantGo and the other major conduits. JPilot is good at that, too, and is basically a clone of Palm Desktop. pilot-link is the basis for most Palm support, and is usually kept up-to-date with the latest releases from PalmSource and Palm vendors.
The solution to this is to buy a watch on a carabiner. They're cheap, you get interesting comments from people (went to a career fair and people commented on how it looked good), and it won't get in your way anymore.
10.1 worked just fine for me. How did you "upgrade"? Typically, I'd just change the urpm sources to the new version and update everything - worked from 10.0 to 10.1, and then 10.1 to 10.2 (LE2005). Sometimes upgrading from CDs caused problems (been a while, though).
I've never gotten screwed on the free versions. The main thing is that they don't come with flash, acroread, etc. - but I can get those using the PLF sources (see the easyurpmi stuff in other posts). Maybe you missed a free CD?
The only complaint I have currently is that setting up external CRT monitor support on a laptop (Thinkpad R51) couldn't be done in a GUI - I could never get the refresh rate above 60Hz. Manually editing the xorg.conf file (with help from google) fixed this, but it'd be nice to have it in Mandrake's GUI like everything else. Even my wireless worked fine once I installed the firmware (2200BG, available from PLF)
As for running in 128MB of RAM, that's not distro-specific in most cases. It depends on what WM and desktop you use, and what programs (Eclipse and OO.o take quite a lot of RAM).
Do a clean install. You might actually like it!
It's definitely not real-time (that'd be hard to do anyway). It's out of date by a long time. I was looking at the satellite imagery of my college campus, and they're still showing a building being built that's been in use since last Spring. Another building that was being used last year hasn't even been started in their images.
So they WERE reliable while they still had Agilent, they aren't now.
And this is pissing me off. I need more memory for my PIII-800 (PC100 memory) and it's cheaper to buy memory for my laptop that I got back in the summer!
I've actually been using Mandrake 10.1 Community on my Thinkpad since it was released and have been impressed with the speed of Mandrake's programs. The GUI programs for 10.0 and before are great, but you're right they're slow. 10.1 on the other hand has very fast GUI programs (and they work much better than before).
I don't find they get outdated too soon, but I'll sometimes switch to the cooker (development) packages. Not only that, but Mandrake comes out with a new version every 6-9 months it seems, so it's very easy to just upgrade your packages to that new version (without a reinstall).
I'm still using 9.2 on my desktop, and except for Evolution, everything's pretty much up-to-date.
About the club: the reason you have to pay for KDE 3.3 sounds like because Mandrake hasn't gotten it stable enough to be happy with it. If you really want KDE 3.3, then cooker has it. That's also why they haven't put out Gnome 2.8 yet. Those will both probably be in the 10.2. I also don't know what you mean by the package selection system being slim. The CDs actually have most of the packages, and you can get a few more if you put in FTP sites for the software sources instead.
I've noticed that for non-x.0 versions (i.e. not 9.0 or 10.0), Mandrake has been trying to release stable products. 9.0 seemed rushed, and had many bugs, but 9.1 and 9.2 were very stable. The same goes for 10.0 as 9.0. It seemed rushed ("we have to get the 2.6 kernel out! oh, and udev, too), but they've actually integrated that all in like it should've been done for 10.1 (devfsd isn't used anymore).
So all in all, Mandrake 10.1 is definitely something worth switching to. The Mandrake-specific programs are much faster, the system is very stable, and there are a lot of packages to choose from (as many as any other distributions, I've found).
It'll be a slow process, but in 5-10 years I think we'll see this actually happen. You also don't have to buy Cedega. You can download the source/binary stuff and finish the compile job. It takes a little to get it working, but it does. Of course, you can support Cedega and pay for the binaries.
He was asking which ones are good, not which ones exist. It's very easy to find ones that exist, but how do you know if they're good? Ask.
Miranda is for Windows only, though, whereas Gaim is for Linux and Windows. If you want one program for both OS's, then it'd be best to use Gaim. Using Gaim for both also makes it easy to transfer existing away messages and other settings from one machine to the other, since they use the same settings format. I'm not saying Miranda's a bad program (actually it looks pretty good based on screenshots, though I've never tried it), but it's definitely not multi-platform, which is the benefit of Gaim
The premium customers get to test it out and find the bugs. The regular customers get it after the bugs are fixes. Sounds good to me ;)
I'm more thinking of the LG CD-RW drive bug with 10.0 Community. There was a command in Mandrake's kernel that wiped out the firmware in some of LG's CD-RW drives. The people trying Community found the bug, had to go through some long process to get their CD-RW drives working again and then when 10.0 Official came out, those who downloaded it for free have no more bugs! So we can pay to test Mandrake!
- there's currently a known bug in kernel-2.6.8.1 for CD burning Bug #10840
- the correction is available / should be included soon : http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3659
- current impact on K3B : K3B news cannot recognize CD writer
According to the bug, this is now fixed with kernel 2.6.8.1-8mdk. So, you just need to update the kernel after install (which is acceptable for an RC).Actually, Mandrake has been polishing their Mandrake Control Center since 9.0 or so. I've been using 10.1 beta, and while there are quite a few bugs in general (such as everything I type in a window suddenly coming out in some pictograph font-set), I think they've finally gotten the control center working without many bugs.
Windows is proprietary, and yet it does not prevent me in anyway from doing those things I wish to do, web browsing, email, programming, gaming and much much more.
Except when you crash it (and yes, I crashed windows 2000 in less than 5 minutes earlier today)
You could always write a patch for it. I took a look at the gaim source code a few weeks ago to fix a bug and it didn't seem too hard to comprehend. The naming scheme actually made sense (unlike some other code I've looked at from other projects).
:)
You're probably right that it wouldn't be that hard to put it back up, and I know I'd thank you for creating a fix for it.
That's why you upgrade the routers and put a cap on upload speed (and if you want, download speed). My college was having massive troubles with bandwidth usage a few years ago because we had old hubs that couldn't control bandwidth. Once the network was upgraded to switches that capped the upload speed to 50 Kb/s off campus (people were uploading too much by leaving Kazaa running), our bandwidth usage went back to "normal". The people who run the residential network still go after high bandwidth users. You don't solve the bandwidth problems by banning something, something new will just take its place. You control how much bandwidth each person uses and go after those who abuse the network.
My grandma didn't understand why her children and grandchildren were telling her she needed to switch to broadband from dialup. "we have two phone lines, so it doesn't stop people from calling us" "but I don't need anything faster!" Um. Right.... So, we convinced her to switch (it's really not that expensive and it meant she could get rid of a phone line), and now she wouldn't go back. The main reason is because of the games she plays online, but she also has to download decent-sized attachments as well as virus updates and windows updates. Really, the users just don't know what they're missing. If they knew, they'd switch (assuming they could afford it).
That would be a problem with your hardware and drivers. You need new ones.
It's one of those stupid things that's a pain in the ass for newbies who wonder why they can't scroll mozilla. And a non-functioning wheel out of the box leaves a *really* negative impression on people I've helped switch to Linux. I even had to manually do that on my Mandrake 9.2 box sitting behind me now.
Sounds like you didn't choose the correct mouse during configuration. Since Mandrake 8 or so, I've never had a problem with the mouse wheel - it's always worked when I booted into Mandrake the first time after an install. I'm currently running Mandrake 9.2.
Why do you think that Fedora has Mandrake beat on the desktop? Mandrake has everything you'd ever need: most of the open-source programs out there, great configuration utilities, and a great rpm setup using their urpmi (similar to Debian's apt-get).
The club is only "necessary" if you want to get the releases right now and get some other proprietary software (much of which you can download yourself - they just offer it in an easy-to-use format). I'm not a member of the club (I'm poor right now), and yet I'm able to get the ISOs for free a few weeks after they're released to the club.
You do realize that companies do need to make money. Based on my last experience with RedHat 9, I won't be trying Fedora for quite a while. I was able to configure everything much more easily in Mandrake than I was in RedHat.
Mandrake has contributed a great set of software, and if you'd actually try version 9.0 and up, you'd agree it has a great chance of becoming popular with Grandma. (versions 7 & 8 were good, too, but not good enough for Grandma)
I'm trying to remember which two drugs I'm thinking about in particular, but I'm pretty sure they were heartburn drugs. If anyone else knows of any off-hand, feel free to post them.
This is a problem with the U.S.'s drug program, and not necessarily the companies. The FDA requires many more tests than Canada, last I checked. This makes it cost a lot more money to get the drug approved for use, and therefore drug price goes up. Whether these extra precautions are taking it to far is another topic. Drug companies might be gouging a little, but it's been show that it's mainly the FDA's requirements that causes the cost increases.
There are two basic things I think that could be done to solve this: 1) lower FDA standards (again, whether they're too high/restrictive now is another topic), or 2) subsidize medication for those on national health care or without a health plan.
Congress has decided that they should subsidize those on national health care, but I don't know the details on this or the effectiveness of the plan they've enacted.
Maybe software patents should be done away with, but I can't believe that you'd really agree with getting rid of all patents.
Take drug patents: it costs a lot of time and money to just come up with a drug worth patenting. Drug patents give incentives to corporations to create medicines to help people because they know they'll be able to regain a lot of the money they put into coming up with the medicine.
Taking an all-or-nothing stance is ignorant.
This isn't about them putting up a sitefinder website, but that they're using their power as the main DNS provider to make any mis-typed site redirect to their web page.
ICANN believes this is a misuse of the power entrusted to VeriSign. I'd have to agree with them. If I mis-type a website, I want a "site not found" error or something useful, not a verisign web page.