Nope. Linus stole from it in a covert ops mission against the USSR, thereby causing the USSR to collapse. The original code was stolen by KGB agents from SCO.
I had a few crashes shortly after installing Debian for the first time. I think it's because the first thing I did once I got X running was to get newer versions of KDE and Gnome (which at that time were very unstable in Sarge and Sid).
When I got fed up with the Woody/Sarge/Sid combination that I couldn't escape, I tried out various other distros. Got fed up with Xandros and Fedora for various reasons, and Slackware gave me enough problems in my attempts to install one package that I gave up on it. The only distro that crashed on me was Libranet. Often. As much as or more than I remember from Windows. Bye-bye Libranet.
"I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM."
No, you cant. Stop spreading FUD.
FUD? Where's the fear? Uncertainty, perhaps, doubt, well, I doubt it, too, but this is closer to propaganda.
For that matter, my gf's 600mhz 128M ram computer running Gnome 2.6 with OpenOffice, Mozilla 1.6, with another WM running in the background with Emacs and ghostviewer runs smoothly. Quick and snappy? Well, no. But smoothly. Most of the time.
XFCE is not a full Desktop Environment. It is a nice compromise between a full DE and a Window Manager. A full DE has a browser, an office suite (though I still don't see what is promising in KDE's office suite, they have one), and a lot of configuration and administration apps which provide a consistent look and feel. XFCE (which I'm using right now) doesn't have this. It has a control panel, yes; a couple applets which are fairly well integrated.
I do find XFCE to be a nice alternative to the Bloated DE's now and again, but I tend to go through phases between UDE, XFCE, and KDE/Gnome depending on how much integration I want. Most of my time is spent in UDE.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that is Bitstream Vera.
Re:Once again, I must complain about fonts
on
GNOME 2.8 Released
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· Score: 1
Shock! Horror! They're using a proportional width font that makes characters like 'i' and 'l' look narrower than 'X' or 'W'!
If you look carefully at the screenshot, you might notice that the diagonal lines in the capital letters 'M', 'N', 'A' are thicker than the vertical lines around them. The letters 'B' and 'D' are too thick in the curves for the vertical spine.
There's no reason to get defensive about bad font rendering, really. It's bad, and until we either get over it or fix it, it will continue being bad. (If we get over it, at least it won't matter any more.)
I'm glad that you like Openbox and XFCE4, but don't assume that only newbies are using Gnome and KDE.
I showed a (marginally computer-illiterate) friend of mine KDE, Gnome, and UDE, and the only one that didn't confuse him was UDE. MS Windows and OSX confuse him. So when it gets time for me to set up a computer for him, I doubt he'll want another MS box, and I know he won't want to spend for an Apple.
Gnome and KDE won't be on his computer, they won't be used. But the UI most different from the MS/Apple paradigms (UDE) will.
...take a quick look at this to see where various distros (including Gentoo) come from. Yes, there are a whole lot (104) of Debian-based distros listed, but Gentoo isn't one of them.
Free Sans and Free Serif are horrid. In OpenOffice and AbiWord, the vertical spacing is (when set to single spacing) is almost identical to Times New Roman and Arial at 1.5 spacing. This is unacceptable. I wish I knew how to fix this sort of thing.
I have one major gripe with the Bitstream Vera family (and other fonts common in the Linux arsenal, such as the Luxi family). There is no italic, even in the Serifed font: Bitstream Vera uses an oblique rather than an italic. The difference is most notable in the miniscule "a", which in an italic looks a cursive letter, and italics often (though not always) have different gravity and internal structure than the humanist ("normal" or "plain") letters. Obliques, on the other hand, are merely humanist forms with a slant.
Times, Palatino, Garamond, and other Roman-style seriffed fonts all have nice italics, but the non-free varieties of these fonts look far better than the free ones. Thryomanes has some good typographic ideas and elegant forms, but is very, very rough around the edges (serifs which don't quite line up with the stems, the italics being totally out of proportion, etc.) and needs a lot of work before it can be a worthwhile replacement for other seriffed fonts.
Sans-serif fonts also look better with an italic (rather than oblique) form, but the only one of these in common circulation is (non-free) Trebuchet. With mono fonts, however, an oblique is definitely preferable to an italic.
Debian because the install stinks and they treat newbies like dirt (yeah yeah, flame me, it's true)
Eh, I won't bother flaming you. The Woody install was a little tough, but I got through it and I was just a poor sap whose win2k installation died irrecoverably. I just happened to have the first two disks of a Debian installation and decided that I wasn't going back to MS. System crashed at 11:00pm and I had a (mostly) working system by 4:30am. No *nix experience before that, though I'd been juggling the idea for a couple weeks (hence the cd's). Yes, I used a little help from my brother (cfdisk!? and what are kernel modules!?), but it really wasn't that hard. And the new installer -- which should be attached to the next release, as it has been attached to Debian Testing for some several months now -- is easy.
Granted, I would find it hard to advise any distro to anyone since I went the route of finding one in advance that appealed to me most (large collection of precompiled binaries, set up for my system, and a more-or-less easy and simple way to install them). The advice I would give is to read the propaganda from the companies and/or distributors you're considering, check out the forums, pick something, and learn it.
Yes, in a matter of speaking, but in order for the output to look nice, the lilypond file has to be checked (at the very least). It's been awhile since I've tried Denemo, but I've had no success with Noteedit and marginal success with Rosegarden.
Debian Stable is, well, very stable, if rather boring for the users who want either the newest and shiniest bells and whistles or a newer version of program X because of a distinct technical advantage.
Testing is not generally more stable than Stable, though at times it is similarly stable. In my experience (casual home user), a blend of Testing and Unstable has given me the best results most of the time.
You simply want a button that you're going to use once and never need to use again?
how about having a user configuration at the first bootup which sets these sorts of options (kde does this), and then put the option to change it in an easy-to-use module in the control center?
where is 'here'?
i remember the teachers having to stock paper and pencils on their own because the school would run out long before reordering. the money just wasn't there.
"This institutional license is available for the cost of media only - no other licensing fees apply. All you have to do to obtain a site license is purchase at least one media kit or download the software"
The difference for the school district between OOo (which, if you wanted to buy a cd, would cost around 10USD) and StarOffice (media kit for 25USD) is a matter of the price of the media. They would be able to download both for free.
I personally prefer OOo. I find that it seems to integrate with Debian a bit better (helps that.deb package binaries are available) than SO, and OOo seems faster to me. I notice no difference in usability between the two, and have not found myself needing any of the obscure features that SO has that OOo doesn't. I can definitely understand, though, the desire for an institution to prefer a supported product.
I'd love to say an anti-socialist system works any better. Here in the public schools of Seattle, teachers are paid peanuts, textbooks still refer to the Soviet Union as current politics, the buildings are poorly maintained (in favor of a current rebuilding/remodelling phase which was thirty years overdue), the boys' bathrooms don't have paper towels or doors to the stalls, but (almost) every classroom has at least one nice and shiny Dell with WinXP.
Now there is no problem with paying teachers and administrators more money, but don't you think they should do a better job to earn it?
Sure. But cut their classes in half (from an average of thirty students to an average of fifteen) before judging their teaching ability.
regarding the "approximately 148 files"
"I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party..." (1950)
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Linus stole from it in a covert ops mission against the USSR, thereby causing the USSR to collapse. The original code was stolen by KGB agents from SCO.
When I got fed up with the Woody/Sarge/Sid combination that I couldn't escape, I tried out various other distros. Got fed up with Xandros and Fedora for various reasons, and Slackware gave me enough problems in my attempts to install one package that I gave up on it. The only distro that crashed on me was Libranet. Often. As much as or more than I remember from Windows. Bye-bye Libranet.
FUD? Where's the fear? Uncertainty, perhaps, doubt, well, I doubt it, too, but this is closer to propaganda.
For that matter, my gf's 600mhz 128M ram computer running Gnome 2.6 with OpenOffice, Mozilla 1.6, with another WM running in the background with Emacs and ghostviewer runs smoothly. Quick and snappy? Well, no. But smoothly. Most of the time.
XFCE is not a full Desktop Environment. It is a nice compromise between a full DE and a Window Manager. A full DE has a browser, an office suite (though I still don't see what is promising in KDE's office suite, they have one), and a lot of configuration and administration apps which provide a consistent look and feel. XFCE (which I'm using right now) doesn't have this. It has a control panel, yes; a couple applets which are fairly well integrated.
I do find XFCE to be a nice alternative to the Bloated DE's now and again, but I tend to go through phases between UDE, XFCE, and KDE/Gnome depending on how much integration I want. Most of my time is spent in UDE.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that is Bitstream Vera.
Shock! Horror! They're using a proportional width font that makes characters like 'i' and 'l' look narrower than 'X' or 'W'!
If you look carefully at the screenshot, you might notice that the diagonal lines in the capital letters 'M', 'N', 'A' are thicker than the vertical lines around them. The letters 'B' and 'D' are too thick in the curves for the vertical spine.
There's no reason to get defensive about bad font rendering, really. It's bad, and until we either get over it or fix it, it will continue being bad. (If we get over it, at least it won't matter any more.)
I'm glad that you like Openbox and XFCE4, but don't assume that only newbies are using Gnome and KDE.
I showed a (marginally computer-illiterate) friend of mine KDE, Gnome, and UDE, and the only one that didn't confuse him was UDE. MS Windows and OSX confuse him. So when it gets time for me to set up a computer for him, I doubt he'll want another MS box, and I know he won't want to spend for an Apple.
Gnome and KDE won't be on his computer, they won't be used. But the UI most different from the MS/Apple paradigms (UDE) will.
that link should've been this.
...take a quick look at this to see where various distros (including Gentoo) come from. Yes, there are a whole lot (104) of Debian-based distros listed, but Gentoo isn't one of them.
Free Sans and Free Serif are horrid. In OpenOffice and AbiWord, the vertical spacing is (when set to single spacing) is almost identical to Times New Roman and Arial at 1.5 spacing. This is unacceptable. I wish I knew how to fix this sort of thing.
opinions aside, gentoo is definitely not debian-based.
I have one major gripe with the Bitstream Vera family (and other fonts common in the Linux arsenal, such as the Luxi family). There is no italic, even in the Serifed font: Bitstream Vera uses an oblique rather than an italic. The difference is most notable in the miniscule "a", which in an italic looks a cursive letter, and italics often (though not always) have different gravity and internal structure than the humanist ("normal" or "plain") letters. Obliques, on the other hand, are merely humanist forms with a slant.
Times, Palatino, Garamond, and other Roman-style seriffed fonts all have nice italics, but the non-free varieties of these fonts look far better than the free ones. Thryomanes has some good typographic ideas and elegant forms, but is very, very rough around the edges (serifs which don't quite line up with the stems, the italics being totally out of proportion, etc.) and needs a lot of work before it can be a worthwhile replacement for other seriffed fonts.
Sans-serif fonts also look better with an italic (rather than oblique) form, but the only one of these in common circulation is (non-free) Trebuchet. With mono fonts, however, an oblique is definitely preferable to an italic.
Debian because the install stinks and they treat newbies like dirt (yeah yeah, flame me, it's true)
Eh, I won't bother flaming you. The Woody install was a little tough, but I got through it and I was just a poor sap whose win2k installation died irrecoverably. I just happened to have the first two disks of a Debian installation and decided that I wasn't going back to MS. System crashed at 11:00pm and I had a (mostly) working system by 4:30am. No *nix experience before that, though I'd been juggling the idea for a couple weeks (hence the cd's). Yes, I used a little help from my brother (cfdisk!? and what are kernel modules!?), but it really wasn't that hard. And the new installer -- which should be attached to the next release, as it has been attached to Debian Testing for some several months now -- is easy.
Granted, I would find it hard to advise any distro to anyone since I went the route of finding one in advance that appealed to me most (large collection of precompiled binaries, set up for my system, and a more-or-less easy and simple way to install them). The advice I would give is to read the propaganda from the companies and/or distributors you're considering, check out the forums, pick something, and learn it.
don't know if this applies as conveniently to other distros or not, but debian offers a package "emacs-nox".
Yes, in a matter of speaking, but in order for the output to look nice, the lilypond file has to be checked (at the very least). It's been awhile since I've tried Denemo, but I've had no success with Noteedit and marginal success with Rosegarden.
Debian Stable is, well, very stable, if rather boring for the users who want either the newest and shiniest bells and whistles or a newer version of program X because of a distinct technical advantage.
Testing is not generally more stable than Stable, though at times it is similarly stable. In my experience (casual home user), a blend of Testing and Unstable has given me the best results most of the time.
but then we could always use the ol' 'echo "new text" >> filename' trick, now, couldn't we...
No, that's what vim is for.
Now all we need is for some snarky Emacs user to chime in and we're good.
Chime! oh, wait. Who uses those bloated editors anyway? Nano!
> There's no button to turn it off.
You simply want a button that you're going to use once and never need to use again?
how about having a user configuration at the first bootup which sets these sorts of options (kde does this), and then put the option to change it in an easy-to-use module in the control center?
where is 'here'? i remember the teachers having to stock paper and pencils on their own because the school would run out long before reordering. the money just wasn't there.
why do they need to buy or license star office when Open office is FREE
.deb package binaries are available) than SO, and OOo seems faster to me. I notice no difference in usability between the two, and have not found myself needing any of the obscure features that SO has that OOo doesn't. I can definitely understand, though, the desire for an institution to prefer a supported product.
Star Office Education Solution
To quote from the page,
"This institutional license is available for the cost of media only - no other licensing fees apply. All you have to do to obtain a site license is purchase at least one media kit or download the software"
The difference for the school district between OOo (which, if you wanted to buy a cd, would cost around 10USD) and StarOffice (media kit for 25USD) is a matter of the price of the media. They would be able to download both for free.
I personally prefer OOo. I find that it seems to integrate with Debian a bit better (helps that
I'd love to say an anti-socialist system works any better. Here in the public schools of Seattle, teachers are paid peanuts, textbooks still refer to the Soviet Union as current politics, the buildings are poorly maintained (in favor of a current rebuilding/remodelling phase which was thirty years overdue), the boys' bathrooms don't have paper towels or doors to the stalls, but (almost) every classroom has at least one nice and shiny Dell with WinXP.
Now there is no problem with paying teachers and administrators more money, but don't you think they should do a better job to earn it?
Sure. But cut their classes in half (from an average of thirty students to an average of fifteen) before judging their teaching ability.
am i the only one thinking the skin 'slate' is beautifully similar to kde's 'plastik'?
regarding the "approximately 148 files" "I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party..." (1950)
would we still be using coleridge as an example?