... or just keep all your plugins in a separate directory and symlink that to mozilla/plugins! Saves on multiple recursive links at the very least (since mozilla-new/plugins/* <- mozilla-old/plugins/* <- mozilla-older/plugins/* <- mozilla-even-older/plugins/*... and it could get really annoying if you've been occasionally adding in new plugins at different stages!!:)
As for the installer segfaulting... just get the tar.gz and bypass the installer completely! I mean, you're already doing a fresh install by installing to a new directory, so just copy the whole untarred directory to mozilla-new instead. Works fine... there's nothing that moz installs anywhere else, AFAIK, and if there is then I'd still just copy the directory!! The last thing I want is software leaving cruft all over the place...
Most distributions come standard with mozilla, so it's very hard to get a installation without it... making the release a hurdle for practically everyone.
Well, I don't know how you install it, but the easiest way under Linux is to forget all that installer crap and (as root) just replace your old mozilla directory (eg/usr/local/mozilla ) with the un-tarred directory. Don't forget to back-up any global preference files that you've changed (and you'll know if you've done this, because you you have to alter these by hand, as root:) It's much faster (one command vs multiple installer steps) and you know exactly where the software's gone.
Install mozilla this way, and you'll find that there were no problems - at least that's how I installed mozilla 1.2 a week ago and it's been fine!
And judging from the fact that heaps of other users have been posting about using Moz 1.2 without problems, and/. is not the kind of place where people run browsers as root, I'd say I'm not the only one to figure this out:)
But I also think you fail to recognise two issues here.
The first is the philosophy of open source. A big reason why I use linux and open source software is the altruistic nature of it. I strongly believe in an open software world. As a scientist, I see open source software as something akin to research - it is amazing how anyone can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, and just as research builds on an open-knowledge base, I believe that software should build on an open-souce base.
The second is that, at least for some, linux/open source actually provides better software. I require software in a work-related sense for publishing papers and managing large bibliographies, and having had a lot of experience with the MS Word/Endnote solution before starting to use linux, I can say with certainty that LyX-LaTeX/Sixpack works far better for me. For recreation, I program. And here again, open source is what I use - I love having freely available programming environments, and the text editors are far superior in the open source world than the closed source world, IMHO at least.
If what you want a PC for is games then I really can't comment - I play tetris and a few old arcades (Bubble Bobble!!) under linux quite happily, but I'm not a hard core gamer and haven't even looked at a proprietary game written in the last two years - I'm just not interested in that anymore, and don't have the time either.
But that said, I don't think that linux suits everyone. Most people at my work want a computer that they turn on and see nice familiar software staring back at them. They want software that has a rapid learning curve but which is ultimately less powerful or customisable - hell, they can't even understand why I use mozilla... get this - they use netscape 4.x instead!! And why?? Because they're familiar with it.
Linux exists for people who want more customisability and power at the expense of immediate user-friendliness. I happen to prefer that. Most people don't. That doesn't mean that Windows is any better or worse than linux, though - it all depends on what you want from software.
So the set design, the lighting, the directing...all amazing. I'm very surprised that not many people know about it. But the acting of the main character wasn't that great, IMHO-- he had a few good moments, but that was it. I liked most of the other characters more.
Personally, I thought it was Rufus Sewel's finest performance - it's a dark, brooding, panicky nervousness that completely captured me. I still can't get over how good the directing was, the film still sucks me in completely every time I see it. But anyway...
But the enforced usage of it through emacs got me reasonably comfortable with it
Enforced usage of emacs? That surely should be a crime...:) (I've been a vim fan for years, but I've just started playing around with nedit, which is making me wonder why I could have ever used anything else...)
Hmm...you mean something to display apps with, or something to put the pager in, or what?
A display of my running apps. Preferably in one line along the top of the screen. I think it's by far the most useful way to display running apps - and perfect if I'm downloading something and want to check its status with a single eye movement. Sawfish's developers (at least back in 2000, when I was using it) seemed to think that nobody would be using sawfish without gnome and never bothered to give any means of displaying running tasks, IIRC. And I tried to look into lisp to write my own (that was one of the big things about sawfish, wasn't it - it was supposed to be completely customisable and extendable like emacs?) but as I said - lisp makes me retch. Even programming BibTeX styles is better than writing lisp code, imho:)
I've got to admit, the low-latency edge flipping impressed me too.
It does sadden me that most of the software I use on a daily basis is either not included in distros, not installed by default by distros or hidden away with fifty other less-useful apps. The fact that ROX doesn't seem to crop up in any of the recent distros I just can't understand. I keep meaning to put together an "alternative linux" page listing all the software that I find highly useful, but only discovered by some chance mentioning by someone on slashdot:) Maybe I'll get round to it one of these days...
That's a pretty neat nick...This is Shell Beach from the very-cool-imagery Dark City?
Absolutely:) Amazing film, has to be the most under-rated I can think of...
GTK2 is definitely slower at some things (unfortunately, I don't have gtkxft installed, so I'm comparing the no-aatext gtk to the aa gtk2. However, the gtk2 version of Pan, for instance, is *far* slower than the gtk1 version.
Funny - ROX, d4x (downloader for X) and xscreensaver seem equally as snappy compiled as either gtk1 or gtk2 apps. I can't say I've timed them or anything, and on slower hardware maybe there's a difference, but on my Cel. 500 I've never noticed it (never bothered to compile gtk2 for the laptop - I try to keep it as streamlined as possible)
Before I found ROX I was 100% CLI - I found it to be by far the fastest means of file management. The thing I really like about ROX is that it integrates with the CLI perfectly - so I can browse thumbnails, quickly find a document in a folder, easily scroll through large directory lists... and then type *ctrl-x* and up pops an xterm (well, an Eterm actually:) at the same directory. Use the terminal for a while, then when I need to use a file-manager again, I just type in "rox" at the command-line and up pops a filer window at the directory I was working in. It's so fast that it really works well - I could never do this with Konq, even if it had the keybindings, I'm just not prepared to wait more than a second for a filer window to appear. Best of all, I've compiled AVFS (A Virtual File System) into the kernel which makes browsing archives a breeze, they just open as new ROX windows.
I actually used to be a big sawfish (without GNOME) fan before trying IceWM. What really turned me off it were two things - I can't stand lisp, and I could never find a decent taskbar app to use (I think the taskbar was one of the few things Windows got right). What really made me look at IceWM was its speed - I remember trying it out on my P120 laptop and being just blown away: launched in 3 secs, menus were instantaneous, and equally snappy when managing windows. It's definitely got its quirks - configuration is really only text-file based and there's some stupid bugs which I'm currently trying to fix; the default themes are seriously ugly and there's hardly any documentation (and none whatsoever in the code...) But it's also got some neat features like shaped extensions and anti-aliased fonts hidden away that can be turned on when you compile it.
I'm with you completely on GNOME and KDE, although GNOME has become quite a bit faster with GNOME2. As for GTK2, I haven't noticed any difference - on my desktop PC (Cel 500) any apps I've tried as both GTK1 and GTK2 load in around the same time - certainly with no noticable added latency. And if you want the bells and whistles that you seem to, such as aa text, you don't have much choice!
Personally I use a combination of ROX for the desktop and IceWM for the window-manager, both of which work just as fast on my laptop (an ancient P120) as on my desktop - in a word, near instantaneous. They're worth checking out if you like the idea of a desktop environment but don't like the associated crud that comes with GNOME and KDE. (The fact that ROX whips Konq or Nautilus in the file-management stakes is a pretty big reason too, of course:)
As far as X's stability goes, I've only ever seen that keyboard/mouse lock-up situation twice in nearly five years of using linux, so I really can't agree. For me, X has been rock-solid, and even the standard apps I use with X tend to be incredibly stable. Hell, I reckon that the "unstable" GIMP is just about as stable as certain commercial COREL or Adobe products:)
I think the main reason why linux *seems* slower from an end-user perspective is because of KDE (which gets installed as default by just about every distro these days). The first thing the user sees is a rather ugly, unreponsive piece of memory-hogging bloat-ware that has all the features he/she doesn't need (aa text, alpha-blended menus, etc) turned on to make it even slower. "What could be easier than opening the file-manager to find a file", the naive user thinks... whooops! Guess which application takes half a minute to open a directory!
(alright - I got fairly carried away there, I know KDE isn't that bad. But if I knew nothing about the open-source software concept or underlying OS stability, didn't care about pirating software, and was presented with a choice between Windows or KDE... well, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be the one with the penguin on the front:)
Yes it's good and merry to have multiple libraries, multiple differently rendered fonts, multiple choices, etc. But I personally would rather not have to worry about installing 40-50 libraries when I use my nix box.
OK, so... don't install 40-50 libraries!! Use Fluxbox if that's what you like and live happily ever after! Remember, you don't have to install KDE or Gnome (unless you want to use one of the g* or k* apps - but I can't really see why you'd want to).
Linux is about choice, and that by definition means not having a "standardised" window manager. If you want a single, fast window manager, a single set of standard libraries and no options or choice, then use Windows. That's what it's there for. Linux exists for the people who want something just a little bit different.
Re:Usability isnt the issue, Quality is the issue.
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Fresco M1 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't agree with the original poster either, but I think his point about window drop-shadows is valid. At least, it's the single most useful aspect of alpha-blended transparency... transparent menus and windows are crud, but those drop-shadows on MacOS X look as though they'd help a lot to distinguish windows on a cluttered desktop.
And I've got to admit, based on 10 minutes playing with OS X, Apple handles the eye-candy pretty damn fast. It certainly impressed the hell out of me, and I've never given MacOS the time of day before.
Currently the only thing preventing Linux from taking the desktop market, is the fact that the currently Linux interface doesnt look polished enough, theres enough programs for grandma, theres games, theres plenty of office apps, the casual user can use Linux, the only reason they wont use Linux is because OSX is better than Linux.
Ummm... as far as I can see, the main reason behind the small market share of Linux is the fact that Windows is almost exclusively installed on new computers and it's also what people use at work. Who wants to use Linux if they feel comfortable using Windows? The thing is, most people barely feel comfortable using Windows and the last thing they want is to have to learn a whole new system, new apps, and be forced to cope with kernel messages scrolling by at start up.
If linux ever does grab more than 1% of the desktop market, it will be if - and only if - it gains acceptance in the workplace and people have to use it at work. X has nothing to do with it - think Windows 3.11 if you don't believe me! MacOS was streets ahead when Win 3.11 was released in terms of being "polished", but that didn't make people use the Mac, did it? Seriously, if you think Fresco or XFree86 5.0 will magically turn Linux into the OS of choice for Joe Average, I think you'll be highly disappointed.
Personally, I use linux exclusively at home and am highly anti-Microsoft, but that doesn't stop me recognising how much happier most people are with Windows. You've just got to accept that it's highly likely that linux will never achieve "world domination"... and it's probably a good thing that it won't.
Well, maybe not when compared to the current crop of processors. But you'll find that the vast majority of PC users are using a processor of similar speed (there was a slashdot poll on this a few months ago, but I can't be bothered searching for it...) and I have no reason to upgrade as every other task I perform is more than fast enough. The problem with OOo is that MS Word (97) launches in under ten secs even using WINE, and in Win32 it's almost instantaneous; while I love the concept of open-source software, I find it difficult to support something that's more bloated than Microsoft.
There's no reason for word-processing software to take half a minute or more to launch on a Cel 500. I was hoping that it was a symptom of something that I had done wrong, rather than of something the OOo programmers had done wrong, is all!
(In any case it doesn't really worry me too much as I'm a big fan of LyX, but it would be nice when reading those pesky Word attachments:)
For people like myself who know all the shortcuts and don't mind an all-text interface, it's superb.
Hell, you don't even need to know a single text command - try using pine in an xterm, or try the Windows version of Pine... using your mouse!! Yep, you can click on any text element, like a message in your inbox, or the command lists down the bottom, or a link and it all works. Of course, it's ten times slower than using the keyboard and a lot more clumsy, but it did make me laugh when I tried it.
I love pine... there's a few things that are annoying just like any reader but for fast an efficient emailing I've never found anything to match it.
Has Open Office - runs slow off the CD - needs to be explained - otherwise a great demo disk
This is a serious question: can you get Open Office to run fast when it's installed? I've never managed to get OOo to start up in less than 30secs or so on a reasonably (cel 500mhz) fast PC, and it's one of the reasons why I generally don't use it (stupid reason perhaps, but it really gets to me)
Is this unusual? Can it start faster? (short of recompiling - I notice LFS has details on the OOo compile: 2hrs on a faster PC and way more harddisk space than I've got to play with)
I'll grant the games argument, but you're kidding about the rest, right? Either that or the last time you tried linux was two or three years ago...
If you think linux is harder than windows to setup, just try Knoppix (a bootable CD - no need to install -, configures itself automatically in 10secs or so, comes with about 2Gig or more of apps)
sure there are some great apps out there that you can just download and either install or compile yourself, but I don't want to have to go out and hunt for what I need, the OS should come with everything I need or it should be extremely easy to find it.
This is fantastic... a linux distro comes with several CDs worth of software as a rule - you don't need to hunt for it or download it or even compile it, it's all there on CD. Compare that to a Windows install CD!!
BTW: GIMP, how do you draw a straight line? Start point -> End Point?
You cant do that without reading the manual. The simplest thing, the first thing every user attempts, is impossible without reading the manual.
No, I'm sorry, but I worked it out instantly - you use the pencil or the paint tool, click at the start point and hold down shift... you see the outline that shows you where the line is with a cross at the pointer... then click again and you've drawn a line. But it gets better! Hold down shift again and you'll get a straight line from the last point... and you can keep doing this all day if you want.
Now, you say this isn't intuitive? But then how do you select a block of files in a file manager? You select the start point, hold down shift and select the end point, and all the files in between are selected. How do you select a block of text? You click the start point, hold down shift and click the end point, and all the characters in between are selected. So what more obvious way to paint all the pixels between two points than to use click, shift-click? How could it be easier?
(Don't know where you got that stuff about the alt key from, btw... alt gives you the colour picker tool...:)
BTW - how do you change the dpi of a graphic in Photoshop? Ever tried it? Or tried looking it up in the help system, either? Did that make sense to you any less than drawing a straight line in the Gimp?
Each to his own, I guess, and if you're happy paying thousands of dollars for photoshop then it's your loss. (mind you, I also don't see why you'd use VI when there's a far better and open-sourced editor called VIM, so maybe you just like closed-source software or something...:)
I've used omni-remote (which achieves everything this device claims, as far as I can see... apart from the auto-on when you pick the thing up:) with my Palm IIIx to achieve the same thing, and you're absolutely right - touch screens are not very useful when it comes to remotes because you want to be looking at the TV instead, not looking down at the silly remote to check that you didn't accidentally press "record" instead of "play"...
In fact, the only decent way I found to do it was to map various buttons to the hardware keys of the Palm Pilot, but this over-priced gadget doesn't even have buttons you can map functions to! The really crazy thing is this - if you bought a Palm and a licence for omni-remote (or similar software) then you wouldn't be paying much more than the 70 pounds this thing costs, and you'd get all the advantages of a Palm Pilot (and all the advantages of having buttons you can use with a remote control, too:)
I mean, you kind of wonder who's going to buy something like this...
At least with Linux, try AVFS (A Virtual File System) - it's a kernel module that treats archives transparently as folders and handles a huge number of formats (not just gz/bz2 but also zip/rpm/cpio etc) The web page claims it's alpha software, blah blah blah, but I've been using it for a year now without a single problem.
The only drawback is that it currently doesn't support adding files to an archive. But they're supposedly working on that one...
I wasn't implying that TWM was inadequate - only that (AFAIK) it is not being actively developed (correct me if this is wrong, but I cannot find any information on the internet that suggests that it is, and on the contrary, a lot of information that suggests that it is not!) Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you'll have to fix any bugs yourself and as X gets more developed you'll probably find yourself losing some functionality. Such as not supporting MWM hints, for eg (try running xmms or any desktop environment - they won't be borderless)
My main gripe with TWM is the lack of virtual workspaces and the above-mentioned ignorance of window hints. I also like having short-cut keys for launching apps when I'm using a laptop, which is one of the reasons for my choice of IceWM. But I'll admit, TWM is a much nicer fallback than having no WM:)
Incidentally, I wouldn't be too sure that TWM will always be around - I notice with amusement that Mandrake 9.0 does not install xterm by default (the package is there, but rxvt gets installed instead, at least for a minimal install!).
First, ditch KDE and grab a lighter-weight window manager like BlackBox or TWM. Better yet, if possible, ditch X altogether and use the console.
Actually, E and IceWM work as fast as any on slow hardware. I spent most of 2001 travelling in Europe and took an ancient P120 laptop with me - I tried various "light-weight" window managers (KDE took 5 mins to start up from the login screen (I timed it!) so it wasn't an option) such as blackbox, IceWM, TWM and FVWM, and as far as I was concerned it was E and IceWM that won the day. (IceWM was extremely impressive, starting in just under 3 secs from login in its 'light' form; E took maybe 10 secs, but was still extremely acceptable)
The interesting thing about both of these WMs though is that they're still being used on current, fast hardware as well - unlike TWM - and are actively being developed (although, I don't know if you could say E is being developed "actively":)
Damn! I spent ages with Prince of Persia randomly guessing letters and writing down each correct guess (there's only so many words that it asks you...) until I had a complete table:) (I didn't have a manual to photocopy)
Great game, though - it was worth every minute spent defeating that damn copy protection:)
Mandrake 9.0's version of OpenOffice is automatically configured to produce pdfs - just go to print and you'll find a pdf-writer type option (I'm posting this at work using windows, so I can't tell you exactly what it's called) Alternatively, you could just use the OpenOffice spadmin app to set up a pdf-writer printer device. Or you could just print to postscript and use ps2pdf:)
(this is all assuming you're using Linux. If you're not, then try looking into ghostscript - Windows should still print to ps, and I'm assuming ghostscript-for-windows will convert ps to pdf just as it does under linux...)
Actually, when I demonstrated Knoppix the windows users here (it's a science reseach lab, and most of them have PhDs, so we're not talking entirely stupid people here) gave the following comments:
So... why is all this stuff free?
They like starting every program name with "g" or "k", don't they?
How come it can't do... [insert various task here, such as instantly browse our network, etc]
Don't get me wrong, my jaw was on the floor when I saw how fast it started up, autoconfigured everything. etc... BUT... it does have a number of problems, and it's far from perfect (try desktop=gnome, for eg)
It's a simple matter of changing unix.js in *mozilla-directory*/defaults/pref/
Here's a diff of the default unix.js file against my customised one - note that there's a size for minimum aa'ing (which I have set at 1, but you could set at 16 if that's what you want), and that you can change the "bluriness" via dark_text.gain/light_text.gain settings.
Also note that this mod works with any version of mozilla - 1.0 or 1.1, you don't need to get 1.2b and you don't need to recompile - and all you have to do is edit this file. (And yes, I was cursing when I found out just how easy it was to enable aa'ing!)
Actually, those problems have been solved ...
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Font HOWTO For Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
Have a look at these XFT/Freetype hacks. The author of these initially started off hacking XFT to remove hinting, then added back an improved "slight-hinting" model, and is now working on making the changes directly to the FreeType library (which has the added advantage of fixing OOo's fonts and making them look decent (finally!)).
I've been using this FreeType hack for a while now and Windows and MacOS look far worse in comparison. Just check out the screenshots on the page if you don't believe me!
Try Mandrake sometime... it's got this great thing called supermount that does all of that. You do not use the mount command at all, and it's one of the main reasons why I always recommend Mandrake to people. You even get the name of the CD-ROM desktop shortcut changing (under KDE or GNOME) to the volume label when you insert a new CD. USB devices, including zip drives, are supposed to work the same way (although, not having any, I haven't tested this).
Xandros may have some nice features, but they're not unique:)
Slashdot Mirror
As for the installer segfaulting ... just get the tar.gz and bypass the installer completely! I mean, you're already doing a fresh install by installing to a new directory, so just copy the whole untarred directory to mozilla-new instead. Works fine ... there's nothing that moz installs anywhere else, AFAIK, and if there is then I'd still just copy the directory!! The last thing I want is software leaving cruft all over the place ...
Well, I don't know how you install it, but the easiest way under Linux is to forget all that installer crap and (as root) just replace your old mozilla directory (eg /usr/local/mozilla ) with the un-tarred directory. Don't forget to back-up any global preference files that you've changed (and you'll know if you've done this, because you you have to alter these by hand, as root :) It's much faster (one command vs multiple installer steps) and you know exactly where the software's gone.
Install mozilla this way, and you'll find that there were no problems - at least that's how I installed mozilla 1.2 a week ago and it's been fine!
And judging from the fact that heaps of other users have been posting about using Moz 1.2 without problems, and /. is not the kind of place where people run browsers as root, I'd say I'm not the only one to figure this out :)
But I also think you fail to recognise two issues here.
The first is the philosophy of open source. A big reason why I use linux and open source software is the altruistic nature of it. I strongly believe in an open software world. As a scientist, I see open source software as something akin to research - it is amazing how anyone can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, and just as research builds on an open-knowledge base, I believe that software should build on an open-souce base.
The second is that, at least for some, linux/open source actually provides better software. I require software in a work-related sense for publishing papers and managing large bibliographies, and having had a lot of experience with the MS Word/Endnote solution before starting to use linux, I can say with certainty that LyX-LaTeX/Sixpack works far better for me. For recreation, I program. And here again, open source is what I use - I love having freely available programming environments, and the text editors are far superior in the open source world than the closed source world, IMHO at least.
If what you want a PC for is games then I really can't comment - I play tetris and a few old arcades (Bubble Bobble!!) under linux quite happily, but I'm not a hard core gamer and haven't even looked at a proprietary game written in the last two years - I'm just not interested in that anymore, and don't have the time either.
But that said, I don't think that linux suits everyone. Most people at my work want a computer that they turn on and see nice familiar software staring back at them. They want software that has a rapid learning curve but which is ultimately less powerful or customisable - hell, they can't even understand why I use mozilla ... get this - they use netscape 4.x instead!! And why?? Because they're familiar with it.
Linux exists for people who want more customisability and power at the expense of immediate user-friendliness. I happen to prefer that. Most people don't. That doesn't mean that Windows is any better or worse than linux, though - it all depends on what you want from software.
Personally, I thought it was Rufus Sewel's finest performance - it's a dark, brooding, panicky nervousness that completely captured me. I still can't get over how good the directing was, the film still sucks me in completely every time I see it. But anyway ...
But the enforced usage of it through emacs got me reasonably comfortable with it
Enforced usage of emacs? That surely should be a crime ... :) (I've been a vim fan for years, but I've just started playing around with nedit, which is making me wonder why I could have ever used anything else ...)
Hmm...you mean something to display apps with, or something to put the pager in, or what?
A display of my running apps. Preferably in one line along the top of the screen. I think it's by far the most useful way to display running apps - and perfect if I'm downloading something and want to check its status with a single eye movement. Sawfish's developers (at least back in 2000, when I was using it) seemed to think that nobody would be using sawfish without gnome and never bothered to give any means of displaying running tasks, IIRC. And I tried to look into lisp to write my own (that was one of the big things about sawfish, wasn't it - it was supposed to be completely customisable and extendable like emacs?) but as I said - lisp makes me retch. Even programming BibTeX styles is better than writing lisp code, imho :)
I've got to admit, the low-latency edge flipping impressed me too.
It does sadden me that most of the software I use on a daily basis is either not included in distros, not installed by default by distros or hidden away with fifty other less-useful apps. The fact that ROX doesn't seem to crop up in any of the recent distros I just can't understand. I keep meaning to put together an "alternative linux" page listing all the software that I find highly useful, but only discovered by some chance mentioning by someone on slashdot :) Maybe I'll get round to it one of these days ...
Absolutely :) Amazing film, has to be the most under-rated I can think of ...
GTK2 is definitely slower at some things (unfortunately, I don't have gtkxft installed, so I'm comparing the no-aatext gtk to the aa gtk2. However, the gtk2 version of Pan, for instance, is *far* slower than the gtk1 version.
Funny - ROX, d4x (downloader for X) and xscreensaver seem equally as snappy compiled as either gtk1 or gtk2 apps. I can't say I've timed them or anything, and on slower hardware maybe there's a difference, but on my Cel. 500 I've never noticed it (never bothered to compile gtk2 for the laptop - I try to keep it as streamlined as possible)
Before I found ROX I was 100% CLI - I found it to be by far the fastest means of file management. The thing I really like about ROX is that it integrates with the CLI perfectly - so I can browse thumbnails, quickly find a document in a folder, easily scroll through large directory lists ... and then type *ctrl-x* and up pops an xterm (well, an Eterm actually :) at the same directory. Use the terminal for a while, then when I need to use a file-manager again, I just type in "rox" at the command-line and up pops a filer window at the directory I was working in. It's so fast that it really works well - I could never do this with Konq, even if it had the keybindings, I'm just not prepared to wait more than a second for a filer window to appear. Best of all, I've compiled AVFS (A Virtual File System) into the kernel which makes browsing archives a breeze, they just open as new ROX windows.
I actually used to be a big sawfish (without GNOME) fan before trying IceWM. What really turned me off it were two things - I can't stand lisp, and I could never find a decent taskbar app to use (I think the taskbar was one of the few things Windows got right). What really made me look at IceWM was its speed - I remember trying it out on my P120 laptop and being just blown away: launched in 3 secs, menus were instantaneous, and equally snappy when managing windows. It's definitely got its quirks - configuration is really only text-file based and there's some stupid bugs which I'm currently trying to fix; the default themes are seriously ugly and there's hardly any documentation (and none whatsoever in the code ...) But it's also got some neat features like shaped extensions and anti-aliased fonts hidden away that can be turned on when you compile it.
Personally I use a combination of ROX for the desktop and IceWM for the window-manager, both of which work just as fast on my laptop (an ancient P120) as on my desktop - in a word, near instantaneous. They're worth checking out if you like the idea of a desktop environment but don't like the associated crud that comes with GNOME and KDE. (The fact that ROX whips Konq or Nautilus in the file-management stakes is a pretty big reason too, of course :)
As far as X's stability goes, I've only ever seen that keyboard/mouse lock-up situation twice in nearly five years of using linux, so I really can't agree. For me, X has been rock-solid, and even the standard apps I use with X tend to be incredibly stable. Hell, I reckon that the "unstable" GIMP is just about as stable as certain commercial COREL or Adobe products :)
I think the main reason why linux *seems* slower from an end-user perspective is because of KDE (which gets installed as default by just about every distro these days). The first thing the user sees is a rather ugly, unreponsive piece of memory-hogging bloat-ware that has all the features he/she doesn't need (aa text, alpha-blended menus, etc) turned on to make it even slower. "What could be easier than opening the file-manager to find a file", the naive user thinks ... whooops! Guess which application takes half a minute to open a directory!
(alright - I got fairly carried away there, I know KDE isn't that bad. But if I knew nothing about the open-source software concept or underlying OS stability, didn't care about pirating software, and was presented with a choice between Windows or KDE ... well, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be the one with the penguin on the front :)
OK, so ... don't install 40-50 libraries!! Use Fluxbox if that's what you like and live happily ever after! Remember, you don't have to install KDE or Gnome (unless you want to use one of the g* or k* apps - but I can't really see why you'd want to).
Linux is about choice, and that by definition means not having a "standardised" window manager. If you want a single, fast window manager, a single set of standard libraries and no options or choice, then use Windows. That's what it's there for. Linux exists for the people who want something just a little bit different.
And I've got to admit, based on 10 minutes playing with OS X, Apple handles the eye-candy pretty damn fast. It certainly impressed the hell out of me, and I've never given MacOS the time of day before.
Ummm ... as far as I can see, the main reason behind the small market share of Linux is the fact that Windows is almost exclusively installed on new computers and it's also what people use at work. Who wants to use Linux if they feel comfortable using Windows? The thing is, most people barely feel comfortable using Windows and the last thing they want is to have to learn a whole new system, new apps, and be forced to cope with kernel messages scrolling by at start up.
If linux ever does grab more than 1% of the desktop market, it will be if - and only if - it gains acceptance in the workplace and people have to use it at work. X has nothing to do with it - think Windows 3.11 if you don't believe me! MacOS was streets ahead when Win 3.11 was released in terms of being "polished", but that didn't make people use the Mac, did it? Seriously, if you think Fresco or XFree86 5.0 will magically turn Linux into the OS of choice for Joe Average, I think you'll be highly disappointed.
Personally, I use linux exclusively at home and am highly anti-Microsoft, but that doesn't stop me recognising how much happier most people are with Windows. You've just got to accept that it's highly likely that linux will never achieve "world domination" ... and it's probably a good thing that it won't.
There's no reason for word-processing software to take half a minute or more to launch on a Cel 500. I was hoping that it was a symptom of something that I had done wrong, rather than of something the OOo programmers had done wrong, is all!
(In any case it doesn't really worry me too much as I'm a big fan of LyX, but it would be nice when reading those pesky Word attachments :)
Hell, you don't even need to know a single text command - try using pine in an xterm, or try the Windows version of Pine ... using your mouse!! Yep, you can click on any text element, like a message in your inbox, or the command lists down the bottom, or a link and it all works. Of course, it's ten times slower than using the keyboard and a lot more clumsy, but it did make me laugh when I tried it.
I love pine ... there's a few things that are annoying just like any reader but for fast an efficient emailing I've never found anything to match it.
This is a serious question: can you get Open Office to run fast when it's installed? I've never managed to get OOo to start up in less than 30secs or so on a reasonably (cel 500mhz) fast PC, and it's one of the reasons why I generally don't use it (stupid reason perhaps, but it really gets to me)
Is this unusual? Can it start faster? (short of recompiling - I notice LFS has details on the OOo compile: 2hrs on a faster PC and way more harddisk space than I've got to play with)
If you think linux is harder than windows to setup, just try Knoppix (a bootable CD - no need to install -, configures itself automatically in 10secs or so, comes with about 2Gig or more of apps)
sure there are some great apps out there that you can just download and either install or compile yourself, but I don't want to have to go out and hunt for what I need, the OS should come with everything I need or it should be extremely easy to find it.
This is fantastic ... a linux distro comes with several CDs worth of software as a rule - you don't need to hunt for it or download it or even compile it, it's all there on CD. Compare that to a Windows install CD!!
I did read the article but I guess I was biased by the topic heading that claimed "New EL Touchscreen Remote Control" :)
You cant do that without reading the manual. The simplest thing, the first thing every user attempts, is impossible without reading the manual.
No, I'm sorry, but I worked it out instantly - you use the pencil or the paint tool, click at the start point and hold down shift ... you see the outline that shows you where the line is with a cross at the pointer ... then click again and you've drawn a line. But it gets better! Hold down shift again and you'll get a straight line from the last point ... and you can keep doing this all day if you want.
Now, you say this isn't intuitive? But then how do you select a block of files in a file manager? You select the start point, hold down shift and select the end point, and all the files in between are selected. How do you select a block of text? You click the start point, hold down shift and click the end point, and all the characters in between are selected. So what more obvious way to paint all the pixels between two points than to use click, shift-click? How could it be easier?
(Don't know where you got that stuff about the alt key from, btw ... alt gives you the colour picker tool ... :)
BTW - how do you change the dpi of a graphic in Photoshop? Ever tried it? Or tried looking it up in the help system, either? Did that make sense to you any less than drawing a straight line in the Gimp?
Each to his own, I guess, and if you're happy paying thousands of dollars for photoshop then it's your loss. (mind you, I also don't see why you'd use VI when there's a far better and open-sourced editor called VIM, so maybe you just like closed-source software or something ... :)
In fact, the only decent way I found to do it was to map various buttons to the hardware keys of the Palm Pilot, but this over-priced gadget doesn't even have buttons you can map functions to! The really crazy thing is this - if you bought a Palm and a licence for omni-remote (or similar software) then you wouldn't be paying much more than the 70 pounds this thing costs, and you'd get all the advantages of a Palm Pilot (and all the advantages of having buttons you can use with a remote control, too :)
I mean, you kind of wonder who's going to buy something like this ...
The only drawback is that it currently doesn't support adding files to an archive. But they're supposedly working on that one ...
My main gripe with TWM is the lack of virtual workspaces and the above-mentioned ignorance of window hints. I also like having short-cut keys for launching apps when I'm using a laptop, which is one of the reasons for my choice of IceWM. But I'll admit, TWM is a much nicer fallback than having no WM :)
Incidentally, I wouldn't be too sure that TWM will always be around - I notice with amusement that Mandrake 9.0 does not install xterm by default (the package is there, but rxvt gets installed instead, at least for a minimal install!).
Actually, E and IceWM work as fast as any on slow hardware. I spent most of 2001 travelling in Europe and took an ancient P120 laptop with me - I tried various "light-weight" window managers (KDE took 5 mins to start up from the login screen (I timed it!) so it wasn't an option) such as blackbox, IceWM, TWM and FVWM, and as far as I was concerned it was E and IceWM that won the day. (IceWM was extremely impressive, starting in just under 3 secs from login in its 'light' form; E took maybe 10 secs, but was still extremely acceptable)
The interesting thing about both of these WMs though is that they're still being used on current, fast hardware as well - unlike TWM - and are actively being developed (although, I don't know if you could say E is being developed "actively" :)
Great game, though - it was worth every minute spent defeating that damn copy protection :)
Mandrake 9.0's version of OpenOffice is automatically configured to produce pdfs - just go to print and you'll find a pdf-writer type option (I'm posting this at work using windows, so I can't tell you exactly what it's called) Alternatively, you could just use the OpenOffice spadmin app to set up a pdf-writer printer device. Or you could just print to postscript and use ps2pdf :)
...)
(this is all assuming you're using Linux. If you're not, then try looking into ghostscript - Windows should still print to ps, and I'm assuming ghostscript-for-windows will convert ps to pdf just as it does under linux
So ... why is all this stuff free?
They like starting every program name with "g" or "k", don't they?
How come it can't do ... [insert various task here, such as instantly browse our network, etc]
Don't get me wrong, my jaw was on the floor when I saw how fast it started up, autoconfigured everything. etc ... BUT ... it does have a number of problems, and it's far from perfect (try desktop=gnome, for eg)
Here's a diff of the default unix.js file against my customised one - note that there's a size for minimum aa'ing (which I have set at 1, but you could set at 16 if that's what you want), and that you can change the "bluriness" via dark_text.gain/light_text.gain settings.
Also note that this mod works with any version of mozilla - 1.0 or 1.1, you don't need to get 1.2b and you don't need to recompile - and all you have to do is edit this file. (And yes, I was cursing when I found out just how easy it was to enable aa'ing!)
70,74d69
231c226
---
> pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
235c230
---
>
238c233
---
> pref("font.antialias.min", 1);
241c236
---
> pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0");
245a241
> pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/drakfont");
250,251c246,247
---
> pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.always", true);
> pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.min", 1);
255c251
---
> pref("font.scale.aa_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0");
I've been using this FreeType hack for a while now and Windows and MacOS look far worse in comparison. Just check out the screenshots on the page if you don't believe me!
Try Mandrake sometime ... it's got this great thing called supermount that does all of that. You do not use the mount command at all, and it's one of the main reasons why I always recommend Mandrake to people. You even get the name of the CD-ROM desktop shortcut changing (under KDE or GNOME) to the volume label when you insert a new CD. USB devices, including zip drives, are supposed to work the same way (although, not having any, I haven't tested this).
Xandros may have some nice features, but they're not unique :)