While I don't agree that Windows is all THAT easy for anybody to use, I have to agree that wireless setup on Linux is ridiculous.
Linux got the printer problem mostly licked - you just select your printer and everything works under CUPS, just like in Windows.
They need to do the same thing for wireless. Knock off this nonsense about downloading NDISWrapper separately - INCLUDE NDISWrapper and every driver it supports in the default install whether wireless is detected or not. If the wireless is detected, but not identified properly, ASK THE USER, then go to the hardware database, pull out the drivers and firmware, set up the config files, and load up the wireless control utility and interact with the user in getting it to work. This isn't rocket science. All they have to do is the same crap Microsoft went through to get Zero Configuration Wireless working (when it does, anyway.)
Sure, there will still be problems with oddball wireless cards for which there are no drivers available under NDISWrapper. But there's no reason wireless setup has to be this hard on Linux for standard cards.
But the REAL problem is that distros would rather put their effort in Compiz and Beryl eye candy than in making really necessary hardware like wireless cards WORK out of the box.
It's not a LINUX problem - it's a DISTRO problem. Lack of adequate testing and manpower for bug resolution is another contributing factor.
Unfortunately, Kubuntu ships with the Wireless Assistant - which is a POS that does NOT work well with WEP among other defects, let alone WPA.
Also Kubuntu ships a firmware for a specific wireless card which is buggy and does not work as well as the EARLIER firmware for the card - which again proves that nobody tested the latest firmware.
Which is my point.
Nobody tested the Wireless Assistant with WEP - or cared if it failed the tests, apparently. Nobody tested the latest firmware. Nobody tested the Kubuntu 6.06 CD installer to see if it would exit the mount point change screen - which means the entire install process wasn't tested AT ALL.
Nobody tests squat on (X)buntu because they don't have the manpower.
This is why (X)buntu is not suitable for new Linux users. It is not mature enough.
Just as I've been saying - NOT ENOUGH MANPOWER TO DO THE JOB! Stuff that should come out in testing falls through the cracks. Result - stuff that should work out of the box doesn't. Too much emphasis from the distro on eye candy and adding features while not spending the effort to nail down the basics.
I mean, the Kubuntu 6.06 CD installer would not let you exit the mount point change screen! OBVIOUSLY the install process was NEVER TESTED on that release! I mean, how the hell could it have been?
Ubuntu is TOO NEW a distro to be recommended to newbie first users of Linux. They need a MATURE distro like Mandriva. I wouldn't recommend Fedora, but even SUSE would be better than Ubuntu because it is more mature.
Ubuntu is supposed to be better for newbies because it's "dumbed down". Unfortunately, it's "dumbed down" in the design and testing departments, too.
And configured badly because they don't have the manpower to do adequate testing or handle bugs when they arise.
To be fair, Ubuntu is a comparatively "new" distro, compared to SUSE, Red Hat and Mandriva.
Maybe in five years they'll be at the point where the more mature distros are - i.e., usable out of the box.
But they aren't there yet - and their rapid rise has in my opinion damaged the chances for Linux on the desktop as too many newbies are being recommended to use it while the distro is NOT ready for total newbies YET.
I run Kubuntu on my vanilla white box four-year-old desktop with no add-on hardware, and it works fine. ANY vanilla Linux would work fine on my box. Which is why I say Linux IS ready for the corporate desktop because corporate desktops tend to be vanilla desktops. (Corporate laptops are another matter.)
Add in a laptop with WiFi, custom hardware, add-on consumer peripherals like cameras, etc. - and Ubuntu hasn't a clue. Even the mature distros have trouble with the newest hardware. A newbie distro like Ubuntu isn't going to be good enough for the naive user simply because they CANNOT have the manpower to test every device out there.
The naive users need to try a MATURE distro like Mandriva instead of (X)buntu, in my opinion.
And (X)buntu needs to tone down its hype to match the expectations of the users.
Being the most POPULAR distro does NOT mean that it's the BEST distro - any more than Windows being a monopoly means it's the best OS.
In Kubuntu, if not Ubuntu apparently, you go to System Settings, Monitor and Display, and select your monitor, your driver, and your resolution.
It almost looks like the exact same dialog as Windows, except there are fewer tabs because the other stuff is set elsewhere. You even have the slider to set the resolution.
Again, this has nothing to do with LINUX per se - but with a distro that apparently didn't bother to copy the best way of doing this stuff as used in a dozen other distros or even Windows.
Dump Ubuntu. I'm coming to the conclusion that it is crap. Switch to Mandriva or Novell where you have a real control panel of one sort or another that lets you tweak stuff, instead of a dumbed down philosophy borrowed from Windows...
"learning how to get grub to boot into windows automatically and to hide the grub menu."
Say what?
Try doing the same thing in Windows if you want to see lack of intuitive...let alone the ability to do it at all.
This gets me. Somebody installs Linux, then tries to make it look like Windows by booting into Windows automatically and hiding the boot menu - which is the point of dual-booting.
All because they don't want to hit the down arrow key at boot time and press enter...
Geez, it's a crying shame that somebody has to log in at a network prompt instead of just clicking on the "Welcome" screen...
That's another one...
Then they want dual monitors set up by default perfectly... One of my current clients has a dual monitor setup. I had to futz around with it for half an hour in Windows to get it to display the DESKTOP on the SAME monitor as the goddam system panel...Windows says arrange your monitors on the setup dialog the way they are physically...They WERE...Still didn't work...
Jesus...
There's this clown in alt.comp.freeware who has nothing better to do with his life than install one Linux distro after another on his weird-ass hardware with LS-120 drives, and SCSI hard drives manufactured by God knows who, and all this other custom non-standard crap. And then he comes on ACF and bitches constantly about how nothing works, and how Linux will never be ready for ANYBODY to use until his shit works...
Meanwhile, at LEAST TWENTY-FIVE MILLION people are using Linux on the desktop, if the stats from ten years ago about NINE MILLION people using Linux were at all accurate.
So nobody gives a shit if nine hundred million are using Windows vs twenty-five million on Linux.
Linux WORKS for twenty-five million people.
Does it work perfectly? NO! Can it stand to get major changes? SURE! Are the distros fucking up? YOU BET!
Doesn't mean it doesn't WORK.
I have been running one version of Linux or another for the last year and a half or two years on my nice four-year-old vanilla white box desktop with no significant problems at all (other than some stupidities from Kubuntu that are easily equaled by the stupidities I see on my Windows XP side of the same box.)
Not intuitive, my ass. That has utterly NOTHING to do with it. Linux is no more and no less "intuitive" than Windows XP. I had to learn both Windows and Linux from scratch six years ago. And I'm 58 years old. I had no more trouble learning either of them, nor have I ever seen any significant difference in general usability. NEITHER are the least bit "intuitive". I have little experience on the Mac, but I suspect even the Mac is not all THAT "intuitive".
I have to agree that the following response from an Ubuntu developer launchpad doesn't help very much:
Re: [Bug 22336] Re: laptop overheats when performing CPU intensive tasks. from Scott James Remnant at 2006-10-17 17:15:59 UTC
On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 01:31 +0000, Trae McCombs wrote:
> The only reason I even REMOTELY considered switching to another distro was > because of this bug. Now I'm stuck. My laptop is broken, and I can't use > anything else. And Edgy won't be fixed either it seems. This means, it'll > be a whole nother 6 months I have to wait, and hope this bug is fixed. > This mail isn't really very helpful.
Nagging or wailing on a bug doesn't get it fixed.
This bug hasn't not been fixed (urgh, green wiggly lines) because developers don't believe it's that important.
This bug has not been fixed because the developers have no idea why this happens, and not enough information to find out. We don't even know where to begin to ask further questions.
At this point, the most useful thing somebody with this bug can do is get their laptop in front of a developer. Then the bug can be demonstrated, and explicitly demonstrated as not occuring with Mandriva 2007.
Also we'd really like to know whether this bug occurs with the pristine upstream kernel or not.
We can then also try various kernel packages on the laptop, bisecting until we figure out exactly which line of code causes the behaviour to occur or go away.
Perhaps somebody could get to UDS-MTV and bring their laptop?
Scott -- Scott James Remnant scott@ubuntu.com
I'd say this is an example of what is wrong with distros today (NOT Linux per se): lack of testing, lack of manpower to handle issues that arise, and too much time devoted to "featuritis" rather than nailing down the basics.
OTOH, I have to say that I think this whole notion of controlling the hardware from software in the OS - power, cooling, etc. - is a recipe for disaster. I mean, Windows XP STILL has occasional shutdown problems. Windows 98, 2000 and XP ALL had ridiculous problems with power control for YEARS.
It just doesn't work.
The bottom line: the manufacturers need to take power control OUT of the OS and put it back in the BIOS where it is independent of whatever bugs are introduced by the OS programmers. I don't see why the kernel needs to be concerned about the fan speed or how much power is being consumed by the CPU. That should be AUTOMATED - and not by the kernel, but by the hardware itself.
Either that, or they need to have this stuff programmed by the people who MAKE the hardware and KNOW what the hardware requires to be properly controlled. I don't think that's the case now, based on the screwups that keep happening.
How in hell are OS developers supposed to be able to program a general purpose hardware controller that works with every piece of Taiwan crap that comes out on the market?
"He was kind of an Excel guru and used about every function in Excel, and had 5 years of data in Excel documents. Not all of them converted the right way(tm)."
This is the real problem - people burying critical company data into a format that isn't open, isn't even the right format for long-term storage and analysis, and in many cases, not even the right format for doing the job in the first place (Excel is not a database, nor is it a financial analysis program, no matter how many people use it for that.)
In other words, poor IT management leads to users running amok resulting in vendor lock-in.
Add in the lack of planning for dealing with such issues in an OS migration, and it's not surprising migrations don't always work.
Add in the proprietary software companies who tie everything to Windows even when their software doesn't need to, and it looks hopeless.
The answer of course is for OSS programmers to put the proprietary companies out of business by developing better software. It's not rocket science and OSS programmers could make themselves a nice living by developing open software that does the job and then supporting it.
I'm coming to the conclusion that it's a waste of time even trying to convert most corporations to OSS. Maybe it's better to deal strictly with startups, assist them in doing IT right in the first place, then wait for them to put the dumb corporations out of business. May take twenty or thirty years, but avoiding the fights with corporate idiots might be worth it.
Put all these morons out of business and make the money they're too stupid to save.
I agree - corporations will drive Linux acceptance on the desktop. Slowly, but it will happen as long as Microsoft keeps screwing up.
Corporations will also solve the Linux driver problem. Once corporations start demanding Linux desktops, the peripheral manufacturers will be leaned on by the major retailers and companies like IBM to produce Linux drivers.
Only a matter of time - maybe another ten years, but it will happen.
Or at least, it will happen IF clowns like Ubuntu don't keep screwing up the basics of making an OS that just works...
Like the other poster who does video work, one of my clients is a media conversion company.
Yes, their drives are horribly fragmented, both the NTFS ones and the FAT32 ones (they have both). They have been loading, editing, and unloading large video files probably for the last year or more without defragging. Their disks are showing fragmentation from 40% to 90%. And it impacts their video capture rates.
Speaking of zero size files, try deleting those sometime in Windows. Fun. Windows hasn't a clue what to do with them.
Knoppix 5.1.1. with the ntfs-ng system deletes them with no problem.
The real issue I have with any file copy process is when it can't read one file and just dies. What it should do is continue the copy process, then present a list of files it couldn't copy at the end, so you know what went wrong. Rolling back the copy process is not a good approach, either. I agree, figuring out which files need to be copied then is a pain - but would be better handled if the file copy were alphabetical.
As for modifying the input data during the process, I see no reason why the system can't handle in the same way - skip the missing file and complete the rest of the operation.
This is the difference between the UNIX "do the right thing, and do it quietly" approach vs the Microsoft "dumb down the process and then screw up" approach.
"It's always bad news for a filesystem when its author manages to lose something that way: it tends to hinder development, and make one wonder what else is buried where."
Heh, funny!
Got to agree - the Reiser FS is history unless it's taken totally away from him no matter how the court case turns out. I expect it will be, though whether it will advance much without his vision for it, in comparison with ext4 or whatever, I'm not sure.
"Can have lots and lots of files in the same folder without limit (not so important for everyone I guess)"
Important to me as I have literally thousands of files in some directories. Some are image files, some are Web documents. I try to organize the document files under subdirectories when I get around to it, but the image files tend to be in one directory (although if I have over 2000 or more images of one subject, I break it up into more than one directory.)
One thing I notice about Kubuntu is that it's slower opening directories with over a thousand files in them than Windows is. Under a thousand files I don't really notice it, but significantly over a thousand files and Kubuntu definitely takes more time to open the directory and list the files. You can hear the disk thrash. I suspect it has to write some cached stuff out to bring in the new stuff. Once the new stuff is in, though, subsequently opening the same directory is fast. Perhaps I should up my RAM from 512MB to 1GB and see if that makes a difference in the initial opening.
Yes, I've seen that FS Driver. I need to look into installing it on my Windows side and testing it. I'm just scared of screwing up my Linux partitions from Windows. I installed my Windows XP on FAT32 just to be sure I wouldn't screw up an NTFS partition by writing to it from Linux. Even though the ntfs-ng system is now supposedly safe, I still am nervous about a driver that occasionally refuses to complete an operation because it might corrupt the file system if it did do the operation.
But I should install both and test them anyway. Or go beyond that and just up my RAM and convert my XP into a VM running under VMware Server...
I've got over 200GB of stuff in FAT32 partitions plus the Linux stuff (all backed up for the most part except for very new stuff), so I'm a little more paranoid about file system security than I would be if I only had 20GB of stuff. I had a nightmare issue when my previous Windows 2000/XP/Linux triple boot hosed the partition table due to a Windows 2000 bug a year or two ago, and I'd prefer not to have to reinstall everything AND spend a day or two restoring data from DVDs - especially when I need this machine to do contracted client support.
Well, I run Kubuntu 6.10 on my four-year-old-plus desktop with no significant problems speedwise. The CPU is an AMD 1.67GHz (Intel 2.0GHz equivalent) with 512MB RAM. I don't notice any significant speed differences between it and the Windows XP on the other partition - except that KDE takes longer to open directories with a large number of files in them than Windows does (these are FAT32 file systems for compatability between the OSs except for the main Kubuntu partitions which are ext3).
Boot time definitely seems faster in Kubuntu than Windows XP. Of course, XP gets to the desktop faster, but it's still mostly unusable until all the anti-malware and Windows services stop loading. I haven't timed it precisely, but Kubuntu I'm sure is faster probably by five or ten seconds - and that's even with my large number of image directories that the desktop wallpaper changer has to load before the desktop appears. That's nearly the slowest part of booting on my machine - actually loading the desktop. I do use a wallpaper changer on XP as well, so perhaps that has an equivalent effect.
So I don't know that Ubuntu is more oriented to newer machines, depending on what you consider "newer".
Which article is totally wrong, because practically everything Eugenia describes doing REQUIRED A TWEAK!
Then she labels this distro "mature"!
It's nuts!
Ubuntu with this many bugs and inabilities is a freakin' DISASTER!
I'm switching back to Mandriva or PCLinuxOS rather than upgrading my Kubuntu. Sorry, but Fawn just sounds like a mess.
OTOH, in my case, I don't run on a laptop, nor do I use ANY add-on consumer hardware (except an external USB drive occasionally and my USB key, both of which work fine (now that I have automount working properly!)). So I'm running a vanilla, four-year-old desktop and Kubuntu 6.10 runs fine on it with only a few stupid screwups (and bad design decisions Ubuntu is known for like conflating root and normal user and dumbing down the system control panel - give me back Mandriva Control Center or YAST!) So I could probably upgrade to Fawn without noticing most of the issues Eugenia found. Still, I think it's time to switch distros again...either to Mandriva who presumably has more people to do testing or to PCLinuxOS where the maintainer is seriously interested in making sure things work as advertised for the most part.
"I needed to have more information for my laptop's LCD. By manually entering the vertical and horizontal sync in the xorg.conf file it fixed the problem for my 1440x900 screen and I was able to load the LiveCD and finally install Feisty on the hard drive."
"Compiz is now part of Ubuntu although turned off by default because it still has major problems."
"installing new apps is now a breeze. Although Ubuntu has 5 GUI applications that are package-related and that can create some confusion..."
"I manually installed libdvdcss because this is not included in the restricted list and Totem now refuses to playback any DVD if you try to load it via Totem's menu"
"Please note that Ubuntu mistakenly loads the BCM43xx driver for my Broadcomm/Dell 1390 WiFi card and that resulted in a lot of errors in the terminal by the system (missing firmware?). I had to blacklist the BCM43xx driver before I could successfully install ndiswrapper and finally get WiFi support. [Update: I installed the bcm43xx-cutter package and installed the required firmware and WiFi now works with the open source driver which unfortunately is not stable (I lose connection after a minute or so)"
"Another fine moment is that Ubuntu supports suspend-to-RAM (sleep) on my laptop out of the box, although I noticed that once every 5-6 wake ups some stuff can get screwy (e.g. X dying, network card not responding etc)"
"There were very few the times that I had to pop to the terminal to carry out an important action."
"Some of these problems include: the i810 driver would not playback HD video (Xv crashing) if I would not add the Cachelines option in the Xorg.conf, copy/paste from Firefox does not work if Firefox is then closed down (this was fixed last year for Gnome apps, time to fix Firefox too), Gossip does not connect to anything else but jabber.org (e.g. no gtalk), digicam's RAW files open by default with the wrong applications (only Cinepaint and UFRaw can handle these but they are not set as defaults for the RAW mime types), I have bad AC97 "scratchy" sound with most SDL games (e.g. Neverball, LTris etc), Bluetooth would not work at all here if you don't run "hcitool hci0 reset" before loading the service, there is no option in the gnome-mouse pref panel to disable tap-to-click on touchpads (gsynaptics is really buggy so I prefer to not mess with it), HAL is not built with libsmbios and so the new Gnome "brightness applet" does not support any DELL laptop, FFmpeg is built without AAC (so it's not possible to encode videos for my cellphone) etc. However, these are not problems that I can't live with or not find workarounds."
Excuse me, folks, but this is a litany of screwed up stuff nobody should have to tolerate on ANY OS - even Windows.
Why is it that the distros STILL do not have a database of every commonly used monitor with an effective method of detecting - or EVEN ASKING THE USER - to identify the monitor and installing the correct horizontal and vertical sync? I mean, I can understand it that my old ViewSonic 6 isn't detected properly in every distro, but the latest monitors? NOBODY can get the proper HV sync figures into the hardware database? C'mon!
Why does Ubuntu need FIVE package management programs? That is just ridiculous...I thought Fedora Core 5 was braindead for having TWO! What, we can't get ONE program to function properly, so we cover that up by installing FOUR MORE?
WHY is Totem, the least competent media player, the default? Why is Kaffeine demoted when it obviously can play encrypted DVDs without hosing itself just because libdvdcss is installed?
Why are so many obviously crippled and not ready for primetime packages being included in so many distros - like Compiz? Is it just because of "featuritis" inherited from Microsoft?
And we see that Wi-Fi and laptop hibernation STILL do not work properly? What is this, rocket science? Linux finally got the printer problem licked so that now you just select the printer and
However, my real issue is lousy marketing on my part. I need to get my Web site up to snuff and make myself appear sufficiently valuable that my clients will perceive me as being WORTHY of more money.
This is something I learned - or didn't learn, actually - from Robert Ringer's "Winning Through Intimidation" years ago. You only get paid what you're PERCEIVED to be worth - not what you actually ARE worth (which is subjective in any case.)
Which is why alpha assholes make the big bucks and the rest of us scrimp by on the leavings.
I definitely agree that only losers want me at this point. I'm just not sure if there are any NON-loser customers out there.
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While I don't agree that Windows is all THAT easy for anybody to use, I have to agree that wireless setup on Linux is ridiculous.
Linux got the printer problem mostly licked - you just select your printer and everything works under CUPS, just like in Windows.
They need to do the same thing for wireless. Knock off this nonsense about downloading NDISWrapper separately - INCLUDE NDISWrapper and every driver it supports in the default install whether wireless is detected or not. If the wireless is detected, but not identified properly, ASK THE USER, then go to the hardware database, pull out the drivers and firmware, set up the config files, and load up the wireless control utility and interact with the user in getting it to work. This isn't rocket science. All they have to do is the same crap Microsoft went through to get Zero Configuration Wireless working (when it does, anyway.)
Sure, there will still be problems with oddball wireless cards for which there are no drivers available under NDISWrapper. But there's no reason wireless setup has to be this hard on Linux for standard cards.
But the REAL problem is that distros would rather put their effort in Compiz and Beryl eye candy than in making really necessary hardware like wireless cards WORK out of the box.
It's not a LINUX problem - it's a DISTRO problem. Lack of adequate testing and manpower for bug resolution is another contributing factor.
Yeah, the GNOME Wireless Network Manager works.
Unfortunately, Kubuntu ships with the Wireless Assistant - which is a POS that does NOT work well with WEP among other defects, let alone WPA.
Also Kubuntu ships a firmware for a specific wireless card which is buggy and does not work as well as the EARLIER firmware for the card - which again proves that nobody tested the latest firmware.
Which is my point.
Nobody tested the Wireless Assistant with WEP - or cared if it failed the tests, apparently. Nobody tested the latest firmware. Nobody tested the Kubuntu 6.06 CD installer to see if it would exit the mount point change screen - which means the entire install process wasn't tested AT ALL.
Nobody tests squat on (X)buntu because they don't have the manpower.
This is why (X)buntu is not suitable for new Linux users. It is not mature enough.
I agree - it hasn't.
It's not mature enough for naive newbie users or anybody using anything but a plain desktop with no add-on consumer hardware.
They don't have the manpower for adequate testing and bug resolution. And that's a killer for a distro being hyped for new users.
It took Mandriva YEARS to become usable for new users. It still has the best rep for being the easiest for new users.
No, it is not.
It is not a mature distro. A mature distro is needed for the average user.
Note: I did NOT say that EVERY mature distro is for the average user. Fedora definitely is not.
(X)buntu has too many problems with testing and bug resolution to be recommended to newbie users.
"Windows has had the option to swap outthe default explorer shell in favour of another, since NT4, and the process is painless."
Yeah, right. The one time I tried that back in 2002, nearly destroyed my Windows install...
"FWI: I'm not fanboying, but I do use a Windows desktop alongside my Unix boxen boxen"
The usual dead giveaway - Windows shill...
BINGO!
Hit the nail on the head.
Just as I've been saying - NOT ENOUGH MANPOWER TO DO THE JOB! Stuff that should come out in testing falls through the cracks. Result - stuff that should work out of the box doesn't. Too much emphasis from the distro on eye candy and adding features while not spending the effort to nail down the basics.
I mean, the Kubuntu 6.06 CD installer would not let you exit the mount point change screen! OBVIOUSLY the install process was NEVER TESTED on that release! I mean, how the hell could it have been?
Ubuntu is TOO NEW a distro to be recommended to newbie first users of Linux. They need a MATURE distro like Mandriva. I wouldn't recommend Fedora, but even SUSE would be better than Ubuntu because it is more mature.
Ubuntu is supposed to be better for newbies because it's "dumbed down". Unfortunately, it's "dumbed down" in the design and testing departments, too.
BINGO!
And configured badly because they don't have the manpower to do adequate testing or handle bugs when they arise.
To be fair, Ubuntu is a comparatively "new" distro, compared to SUSE, Red Hat and Mandriva.
Maybe in five years they'll be at the point where the more mature distros are - i.e., usable out of the box.
But they aren't there yet - and their rapid rise has in my opinion damaged the chances for Linux on the desktop as too many newbies are being recommended to use it while the distro is NOT ready for total newbies YET.
I run Kubuntu on my vanilla white box four-year-old desktop with no add-on hardware, and it works fine. ANY vanilla Linux would work fine on my box. Which is why I say Linux IS ready for the corporate desktop because corporate desktops tend to be vanilla desktops. (Corporate laptops are another matter.)
Add in a laptop with WiFi, custom hardware, add-on consumer peripherals like cameras, etc. - and Ubuntu hasn't a clue. Even the mature distros have trouble with the newest hardware. A newbie distro like Ubuntu isn't going to be good enough for the naive user simply because they CANNOT have the manpower to test every device out there.
The naive users need to try a MATURE distro like Mandriva instead of (X)buntu, in my opinion.
And (X)buntu needs to tone down its hype to match the expectations of the users.
Being the most POPULAR distro does NOT mean that it's the BEST distro - any more than Windows being a monopoly means it's the best OS.
We just discussed this here the other day.
In Kubuntu, if not Ubuntu apparently, you go to System Settings, Monitor and Display, and select your monitor, your driver, and your resolution.
It almost looks like the exact same dialog as Windows, except there are fewer tabs because the other stuff is set elsewhere. You even have the slider to set the resolution.
Again, this has nothing to do with LINUX per se - but with a distro that apparently didn't bother to copy the best way of doing this stuff as used in a dozen other distros or even Windows.
Dump Ubuntu. I'm coming to the conclusion that it is crap. Switch to Mandriva or Novell where you have a real control panel of one sort or another that lets you tweak stuff, instead of a dumbed down philosophy borrowed from Windows...
"learning how to get grub to boot into windows automatically and to hide the grub menu."
Say what?
Try doing the same thing in Windows if you want to see lack of intuitive...let alone the ability to do it at all.
This gets me. Somebody installs Linux, then tries to make it look like Windows by booting into Windows automatically and hiding the boot menu - which is the point of dual-booting.
All because they don't want to hit the down arrow key at boot time and press enter...
Geez, it's a crying shame that somebody has to log in at a network prompt instead of just clicking on the "Welcome" screen...
That's another one...
Then they want dual monitors set up by default perfectly... One of my current clients has a dual monitor setup. I had to futz around with it for half an hour in Windows to get it to display the DESKTOP on the SAME monitor as the goddam system panel...Windows says arrange your monitors on the setup dialog the way they are physically...They WERE...Still didn't work...
Jesus...
There's this clown in alt.comp.freeware who has nothing better to do with his life than install one Linux distro after another on his weird-ass hardware with LS-120 drives, and SCSI hard drives manufactured by God knows who, and all this other custom non-standard crap. And then he comes on ACF and bitches constantly about how nothing works, and how Linux will never be ready for ANYBODY to use until his shit works...
Meanwhile, at LEAST TWENTY-FIVE MILLION people are using Linux on the desktop, if the stats from ten years ago about NINE MILLION people using Linux were at all accurate.
So nobody gives a shit if nine hundred million are using Windows vs twenty-five million on Linux.
Linux WORKS for twenty-five million people.
Does it work perfectly? NO! Can it stand to get major changes? SURE! Are the distros fucking up? YOU BET!
Doesn't mean it doesn't WORK.
I have been running one version of Linux or another for the last year and a half or two years on my nice four-year-old vanilla white box desktop with no significant problems at all (other than some stupidities from Kubuntu that are easily equaled by the stupidities I see on my Windows XP side of the same box.)
Not intuitive, my ass. That has utterly NOTHING to do with it. Linux is no more and no less "intuitive" than Windows XP. I had to learn both Windows and Linux from scratch six years ago. And I'm 58 years old. I had no more trouble learning either of them, nor have I ever seen any significant difference in general usability. NEITHER are the least bit "intuitive". I have little experience on the Mac, but I suspect even the Mac is not all THAT "intuitive".
LEARNING is NOT "intuition".
I have to agree that the following response from an Ubuntu developer launchpad doesn't help very much:
Re: [Bug 22336] Re: laptop overheats when performing CPU intensive tasks. from Scott James Remnant at 2006-10-17 17:15:59 UTC
On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 01:31 +0000, Trae McCombs wrote:
> The only reason I even REMOTELY considered switching to another distro was
> because of this bug. Now I'm stuck. My laptop is broken, and I can't use
> anything else. And Edgy won't be fixed either it seems. This means, it'll
> be a whole nother 6 months I have to wait, and hope this bug is fixed.
>
This mail isn't really very helpful.
Nagging or wailing on a bug doesn't get it fixed.
This bug hasn't not been fixed (urgh, green wiggly lines) because
developers don't believe it's that important.
This bug has not been fixed because the developers have no idea why this
happens, and not enough information to find out. We don't even know
where to begin to ask further questions.
At this point, the most useful thing somebody with this bug can do is
get their laptop in front of a developer. Then the bug can be
demonstrated, and explicitly demonstrated as not occuring with Mandriva
2007.
Also we'd really like to know whether this bug occurs with the pristine
upstream kernel or not.
We can then also try various kernel packages on the laptop, bisecting
until we figure out exactly which line of code causes the behaviour to
occur or go away.
Perhaps somebody could get to UDS-MTV and bring their laptop?
Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
scott@ubuntu.com
I'd say this is an example of what is wrong with distros today (NOT Linux per se): lack of testing, lack of manpower to handle issues that arise, and too much time devoted to "featuritis" rather than nailing down the basics.
OTOH, I have to say that I think this whole notion of controlling the hardware from software in the OS - power, cooling, etc. - is a recipe for disaster. I mean, Windows XP STILL has occasional shutdown problems. Windows 98, 2000 and XP ALL had ridiculous problems with power control for YEARS.
It just doesn't work.
The bottom line: the manufacturers need to take power control OUT of the OS and put it back in the BIOS where it is independent of whatever bugs are introduced by the OS programmers. I don't see why the kernel needs to be concerned about the fan speed or how much power is being consumed by the CPU. That should be AUTOMATED - and not by the kernel, but by the hardware itself.
Either that, or they need to have this stuff programmed by the people who MAKE the hardware and KNOW what the hardware requires to be properly controlled. I don't think that's the case now, based on the screwups that keep happening.
How in hell are OS developers supposed to be able to program a general purpose hardware controller that works with every piece of Taiwan crap that comes out on the market?
It doesn't make any sense.
"He was kind of an Excel guru and used about every function in Excel,
and had 5 years of data in Excel documents. Not all of them converted the right way(tm)."
This is the real problem - people burying critical company data into a format that isn't open, isn't even the right format for long-term storage and analysis, and in many cases, not even the right format for doing the job in the first place (Excel is not a database, nor is it a financial analysis program, no matter how many people use it for that.)
In other words, poor IT management leads to users running amok resulting in vendor lock-in.
Add in the lack of planning for dealing with such issues in an OS migration, and it's not surprising migrations don't always work.
Add in the proprietary software companies who tie everything to Windows even when their software doesn't need to, and it looks hopeless.
The answer of course is for OSS programmers to put the proprietary companies out of business by developing better software. It's not rocket science and OSS programmers could make themselves a nice living by developing open software that does the job and then supporting it.
I'm coming to the conclusion that it's a waste of time even trying to convert most corporations to OSS. Maybe it's better to deal strictly with startups, assist them in doing IT right in the first place, then wait for them to put the dumb corporations out of business. May take twenty or thirty years, but avoiding the fights with corporate idiots might be worth it.
Put all these morons out of business and make the money they're too stupid to save.
I agree - corporations will drive Linux acceptance on the desktop. Slowly, but it will happen as long as Microsoft keeps screwing up.
Corporations will also solve the Linux driver problem. Once corporations start demanding Linux desktops, the peripheral manufacturers will be leaned on by the major retailers and companies like IBM to produce Linux drivers.
Only a matter of time - maybe another ten years, but it will happen.
Or at least, it will happen IF clowns like Ubuntu don't keep screwing up the basics of making an OS that just works...
Like the other poster who does video work, one of my clients is a media conversion company.
Yes, their drives are horribly fragmented, both the NTFS ones and the FAT32 ones (they have both). They have been loading, editing, and unloading large video files probably for the last year or more without defragging. Their disks are showing fragmentation from 40% to 90%. And it impacts their video capture rates.
Speaking of zero size files, try deleting those sometime in Windows. Fun. Windows hasn't a clue what to do with them.
Knoppix 5.1.1. with the ntfs-ng system deletes them with no problem.
The real issue I have with any file copy process is when it can't read one file and just dies. What it should do is continue the copy process, then present a list of files it couldn't copy at the end, so you know what went wrong. Rolling back the copy process is not a good approach, either. I agree, figuring out which files need to be copied then is a pain - but would be better handled if the file copy were alphabetical.
As for modifying the input data during the process, I see no reason why the system can't handle in the same way - skip the missing file and complete the rest of the operation.
This is the difference between the UNIX "do the right thing, and do it quietly" approach vs the Microsoft "dumb down the process and then screw up" approach.
"It's always bad news for a filesystem when its author manages to lose something that way: it tends to hinder development, and make one wonder what else is buried where."
Heh, funny!
Got to agree - the Reiser FS is history unless it's taken totally away from him no matter how the court case turns out. I expect it will be, though whether it will advance much without his vision for it, in comparison with ext4 or whatever, I'm not sure.
"Can have lots and lots of files in the same folder without limit (not so important for everyone I guess)"
Important to me as I have literally thousands of files in some directories. Some are image files, some are Web documents. I try to organize the document files under subdirectories when I get around to it, but the image files tend to be in one directory (although if I have over 2000 or more images of one subject, I break it up into more than one directory.)
One thing I notice about Kubuntu is that it's slower opening directories with over a thousand files in them than Windows is. Under a thousand files I don't really notice it, but significantly over a thousand files and Kubuntu definitely takes more time to open the directory and list the files. You can hear the disk thrash. I suspect it has to write some cached stuff out to bring in the new stuff. Once the new stuff is in, though, subsequently opening the same directory is fast. Perhaps I should up my RAM from 512MB to 1GB and see if that makes a difference in the initial opening.
Yes, I've seen that FS Driver. I need to look into installing it on my Windows side and testing it. I'm just scared of screwing up my Linux partitions from Windows. I installed my Windows XP on FAT32 just to be sure I wouldn't screw up an NTFS partition by writing to it from Linux. Even though the ntfs-ng system is now supposedly safe, I still am nervous about a driver that occasionally refuses to complete an operation because it might corrupt the file system if it did do the operation.
But I should install both and test them anyway. Or go beyond that and just up my RAM and convert my XP into a VM running under VMware Server...
I've got over 200GB of stuff in FAT32 partitions plus the Linux stuff (all backed up for the most part except for very new stuff), so I'm a little more paranoid about file system security than I would be if I only had 20GB of stuff. I had a nightmare issue when my previous Windows 2000/XP/Linux triple boot hosed the partition table due to a Windows 2000 bug a year or two ago, and I'd prefer not to have to reinstall everything AND spend a day or two restoring data from DVDs - especially when I need this machine to do contracted client support.
Well, I run Kubuntu 6.10 on my four-year-old-plus desktop with no significant problems speedwise. The CPU is an AMD 1.67GHz (Intel 2.0GHz equivalent) with 512MB RAM. I don't notice any significant speed differences between it and the Windows XP on the other partition - except that KDE takes longer to open directories with a large number of files in them than Windows does (these are FAT32 file systems for compatability between the OSs except for the main Kubuntu partitions which are ext3).
Boot time definitely seems faster in Kubuntu than Windows XP. Of course, XP gets to the desktop faster, but it's still mostly unusable until all the anti-malware and Windows services stop loading. I haven't timed it precisely, but Kubuntu I'm sure is faster probably by five or ten seconds - and that's even with my large number of image directories that the desktop wallpaper changer has to load before the desktop appears. That's nearly the slowest part of booting on my machine - actually loading the desktop. I do use a wallpaper changer on XP as well, so perhaps that has an equivalent effect.
So I don't know that Ubuntu is more oriented to newer machines, depending on what you consider "newer".
Which article is totally wrong, because practically everything Eugenia describes doing REQUIRED A TWEAK!
Then she labels this distro "mature"!
It's nuts!
Ubuntu with this many bugs and inabilities is a freakin' DISASTER!
I'm switching back to Mandriva or PCLinuxOS rather than upgrading my Kubuntu. Sorry, but Fawn just sounds like a mess.
OTOH, in my case, I don't run on a laptop, nor do I use ANY add-on consumer hardware (except an external USB drive occasionally and my USB key, both of which work fine (now that I have automount working properly!)). So I'm running a vanilla, four-year-old desktop and Kubuntu 6.10 runs fine on it with only a few stupid screwups (and bad design decisions Ubuntu is known for like conflating root and normal user and dumbing down the system control panel - give me back Mandriva Control Center or YAST!) So I could probably upgrade to Fawn without noticing most of the issues Eugenia found. Still, I think it's time to switch distros again...either to Mandriva who presumably has more people to do testing or to PCLinuxOS where the maintainer is seriously interested in making sure things work as advertised for the most part.
What's wrong with this picture?
"I needed to have more information for my laptop's LCD. By manually entering the vertical and horizontal sync in the xorg.conf file it fixed the problem for my 1440x900 screen and I was able to load the LiveCD and finally install Feisty on the hard drive."
"Compiz is now part of Ubuntu although turned off by default because it still has major problems."
"installing new apps is now a breeze. Although Ubuntu has 5 GUI applications that are package-related and that can create some confusion..."
"I manually installed libdvdcss because this is not included in the restricted list and Totem now refuses to playback any DVD if you try to load it via Totem's menu"
"Please note that Ubuntu mistakenly loads the BCM43xx driver for my Broadcomm/Dell 1390 WiFi card and that resulted in a lot of errors in the terminal by the system (missing firmware?). I had to blacklist the BCM43xx driver before I could successfully install ndiswrapper and finally get WiFi support. [Update: I installed the bcm43xx-cutter package and installed the required firmware and WiFi now works with the open source driver which unfortunately is not stable (I lose connection after a minute or so)"
"Another fine moment is that Ubuntu supports suspend-to-RAM (sleep) on my laptop out of the box, although I noticed that once every 5-6 wake ups some stuff can get screwy (e.g. X dying, network card not responding etc)"
"There were very few the times that I had to pop to the terminal to carry out an important action."
"Some of these problems include: the i810 driver would not playback HD video (Xv crashing) if I would not add the Cachelines option in the Xorg.conf, copy/paste from Firefox does not work if Firefox is then closed down (this was fixed last year for Gnome apps, time to fix Firefox too), Gossip does not connect to anything else but jabber.org (e.g. no gtalk), digicam's RAW files open by default with the wrong applications (only Cinepaint and UFRaw can handle these but they are not set as defaults for the RAW mime types), I have bad AC97 "scratchy" sound with most SDL games (e.g. Neverball, LTris etc), Bluetooth would not work at all here if you don't run "hcitool hci0 reset" before loading the service, there is no option in the gnome-mouse pref panel to disable tap-to-click on touchpads (gsynaptics is really buggy so I prefer to not mess with it), HAL is not built with libsmbios and so the new Gnome "brightness applet" does not support any DELL laptop, FFmpeg is built without AAC (so it's not possible to encode videos for my cellphone) etc. However, these are not problems that I can't live with or not find workarounds."
Excuse me, folks, but this is a litany of screwed up stuff nobody should have to tolerate on ANY OS - even Windows.
Why is it that the distros STILL do not have a database of every commonly used monitor with an effective method of detecting - or EVEN ASKING THE USER - to identify the monitor and installing the correct horizontal and vertical sync? I mean, I can understand it that my old ViewSonic 6 isn't detected properly in every distro, but the latest monitors? NOBODY can get the proper HV sync figures into the hardware database? C'mon!
Why does Ubuntu need FIVE package management programs? That is just ridiculous...I thought Fedora Core 5 was braindead for having TWO! What, we can't get ONE program to function properly, so we cover that up by installing FOUR MORE?
WHY is Totem, the least competent media player, the default? Why is Kaffeine demoted when it obviously can play encrypted DVDs without hosing itself just because libdvdcss is installed?
Why are so many obviously crippled and not ready for primetime packages being included in so many distros - like Compiz? Is it just because of "featuritis" inherited from Microsoft?
And we see that Wi-Fi and laptop hibernation STILL do not work properly? What is this, rocket science? Linux finally got the printer problem licked so that now you just select the printer and
Yes, SIR, getting right on it!
You're absolutely right - I suck at networking. That's my real problem.
I'm definitely inclined to agree.
However, my real issue is lousy marketing on my part. I need to get my Web site up to snuff and make myself appear sufficiently valuable that my clients will perceive me as being WORTHY of more money.
This is something I learned - or didn't learn, actually - from Robert Ringer's "Winning Through Intimidation" years ago. You only get paid what you're PERCEIVED to be worth - not what you actually ARE worth (which is subjective in any case.)
Which is why alpha assholes make the big bucks and the rest of us scrimp by on the leavings.
I definitely agree that only losers want me at this point. I'm just not sure if there are any NON-loser customers out there.
Okay, upgrading fixed the download problem on both Rapidshare and the Corrsmisc site.
.bin extension to every file downloaded! That was the OTHER problem I was having with the downloads.
However, Firefox STILL wants to add a
So it's back to DownThemAll - which does NOT have that problem - until I can figure out why the MIME type detection isn't correct.
I'm still on Firefox 2.0. I suppose I should upgrade. I'll do that now and see if it makes a difference.
If you're not the boss, sometimes you don't get what you need to do it properly the first time.
That IS the problem in most places: management overrides IT without the slightest notion - or care - about the consequences.
You can't do it right the first time if you've been ordered to do it wrong the first time.