As far as bug reporting goes, I doubt they'll prioritize stuff that's not relevant to their expected console architecture. Issues like, "Hey, I have dual monitors and steam blacks one out and it never comes back" are going to be pretty well ignored because the console is unlikely to support dual monitors.
Which is ironic as this was a complain (dual monitor support) that was addressed on the latest update, I was surprised that they did some effort on that, many games my not work well on dual monitor setup, but steam and valve games have been updated for that.
I wish I knew this before buying a quad core A6 laptop, their graphics card driver is abysmal compared to nVidia, which is increasing the performance of their drivers even more.
AMD is doing a very risky bet, the ARM64 has not been well tested in real server workloads, it may as well flop and take the company with it, their opteron line was excellent for virtualization thanks to the many cores, hardware virtualization support and a good performance/price point this new ARM64 has only the low power utilization and low heat as main selling point.
While is nice to have better control over this features we need to first get them working reliably, I still can't get KDE to start with max the laptop monitor max resolution, it will always go back to a 1280x768 and I have to change it manually.
In the end we get back to the same old problem with Linux graphics, driver support. I remember back a couple of years having a nvidia card with the binary blob, most stuff worked as I wanted but screen adjusting and multimonitor had to be done via nvidia tools, but in the end of the day it works. Now I have an ATI card and I cannot get multimonitor working properly even with its own tools, on a more powerful card with more memory.
For quite a while I think there has been no real interest on doing this overhaul as most of those features would not work releably on most systems.
I had a "white box" server back in 2004 with slackware, a very puny 256mb pentium 4 with tailor made (compiled) kernel, and for around 5 years it kept going very well serving a small PHP app with MySQL and email, it runned like a champ, we tried to keep it up to date but then we forgot about it for a couple of years, then a few changes to the hosted app needed an upgrade again and there is where disaster struck, never upgrade more than 2 versions up, we screwed glibc update.
In the end we reinstalled debian to lower maintance overhead while keeping it updated, but once you configure slackware it runs smoothly until the end of the hardware itself.
Wayland requires a few things that are Linux specific, for example, Kernel Mode Setting (which there seems to be some effort to port it to FreeBSD), Direct Rendering Manager drivers and supporting components (which Intel drivers are ported but others are not), and udev, as far as I can see in the FreeBSD forums there isn't much urgency to get in the Wayland wagon, Xorg will be around for quite a long time.
I don't really see much of a case of throwing the house out just to get "butter smooth" GUI, as far as I can tell linux GUIs has been good enough since quite some time, I have yet to see tearing or any graphical problems with firefox like in the "old" days even with many tabs open. While its nice to optimize the stack we loose a few things, first we distance linux yet again from all other Unix-like systems (BSD, like with ALSA vs OSS), then there is driver support, as far as I can see there is no planned support for Wayland from Nvidia or AMD on their proprietary drivers, we are back to square one, with an "exotic" architecture with no full support for modern graphics hardware (OSS vs Proprietary aside), way to go.
As a coder and enthusiast Wayland sounds fantastic, but the reality is that wayland has long long way to go, I personally don't see the need for it.
They should just increase operations in emerging economies, Best Buy in Mexico is doing quite well as far as I know, the Guadalajara store payed off in 1 and a half years when the expected best case scenario was 4 years.
In the U.S. they should just decrease brick and mortar stores and move to online retailing.
I can complain a lot about their lack of support of modern X stack, xrandr, etc. But my next card will be nVidia, unless performance is not an issue at all (in which case integrated Intel is more than perfect).
Unless AMD put its stuff together and starts either releasing quality closed drivers or pumping some extra effort (money, more docs, help) onto OSS drivers, I don't see any threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment.
I do not think Intel will try to get head to head on the performance GPU market and thus they do not represent a serious threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment too.
As others have commented, the wiki is not very clear on all implications on this, but as far as my use of linux (12 years now), I have never had to reboot for any kind of update or security patch that is not kernel related or glibc, that is why I use Linux, because once it works it just keeps working, I really hated the times when even installing an application on Windows would reboot the entire system, WTF?
Seems to me that the upper level of the Linux desktop stack is getting more and more complex and more and more fragile, needing now this kind of "kludges" (in my personal opinion) to keep stuff running.
Fortunately the server side is very different and I hope this does not extend to the server stack, having to reboot because you updated apache, postgresql, php or whatever your stack includes; a good amount of server software is designed to keep working with minimum downtime, even on updates, like nginx that can reload itself without loosing connections (by keeping an instance to finish its work and exit when done while giving the new request to the new reloaded instances), even ssh can be updated without loosing you current session.
nVidia is probably the best option for performance discrete graphics on Linux, I already tried ATI and was deeply dissapointed, while nVidia drivers for my 4-5 year old laptop handle perfectly connecting to my external 1080p monitor my new (few months old) laptop with ATI graphics (A6 APU) totally fails to even drive the monitor over 1440x1024, even tough the ATI card has way more memory available to it.
nVidia propietary drivers work and are well tested, while ATI drivers sort of work most of the time but they are filled with glitches here and there.
Of course, not everything is pink and ponies on the nVidia side, the downside with nVidia is the little to no support to modern X stack and linux graphics standards, xrandr? fuck that use the nVidia panel or no dual monitor for you, KMS? hell no, its all or nothing, ATI is just only a tad better but still useless to me.
On the OSS side of the cards drivers the ATI drivers sort of work, KMS and basic stuff is solid but for modern cards you get mostly no acceleration for anything, which is just a waste of all that silicon, Noveau drivers are the same, basic stuff working but thats all, but Noveau developers have it harder as they have to reverse engenieer all, with no docs at all or help from manufacturer and they have been around less time than ATI devs.
I have seen Accounting firms using OpenOffice Calc where I live (Mexico), that was about 3 years ago, not bad given the "utter" dominance of MS Office in this country. OO.org even comes bundled with many computers sold by small computer builders.
"Web Application" Companies of course, good hosting is cheap, self-hosting is cheaper with OSS, tools are top-notch (Django, Ruby on Rails, etc), and the client does not care what the backend is running if it shows in their browser and works well.
Once I was at a library looking for a book, it caught my attention that the computers had Linux (Mandriva) and they called between stores via skype, the point of sale was a text based application (think ncourses).
You should try Mandriva where KDE is top priority (the default desktop environment). They have, in my opinion, the most polished and usable KDE4 available, they did it in the past with KDE3 they keep up with the latest KDE.
I own the Neuros OSD, which is compact and looks good, simple to use and powerful, however, by todays standards it is a bit outdated, without support HD videos, MKV format, H.264, etc.
It would be fantastic if they did a Neuros OSD Reloaded, with support for new codecs and features (more powerful hardware), but with the same form-factor, this new thing is not as attractive as the OSD, and for what it is (a media PC) I think they would need to add more value.
I think Samba is an excellent replacement for windows server for simple filesharing, is usually easy to setup and some distros even drop in powerful GUI configuration tools.
I have used samba in a small office (around 10-15 office workers), with a few shared folders (around 5 GB of documents), at first the company didn't trust our use of Linux, they had a windows 2000 server which was badly managed (and filled with virus/malware and being used as spam relay), we gave them a 1 month complete guarantee that the system will keep up without any problems or we give their money back and install w2k server back.
They are quite happy now as once of properly configured you don't need to mess with it, we even added virus scanning (via clamav and hourly cron, samba clamav plugin taked a noticeable performance hit and was not straightforward to configure) and reporting via email (plus the email system running on the same server).
The difference between distros is in the details, having a regression is not good for a distro like Mandriva famed for being stylish, very usable and that "Just Works".
I would like to congratulate the Mandriva team as working around these issues is unavoidable and the sooner we get to it the better.
So yeah, I'm downloading it right now and will upgrade (clean install), I'm a bit critic of the latest changes but Mandriva has always been my distro of choice and will stick to it (and will start sending/* spam */ bug reports), there is also good parts of this release that will really benefit everybody (better hw support, wifi, boot speed, etc).
I gave a spin to 2009-RC2 and I found it very lacking in many aspects, including general theme, while KDE4 implementation of the mandriva theme was mostly there small details (but important ones) like desktop icons where left out, if you look at the 2009 errata outstanding issues where not handled, like multimedia keyboard support on KDE4, it reasonably works on 2008.1 why should it stop working in 2009?, passing the blame to kmilo is no way to handle it (they would be better of with KDE3 for now).
I like the few new improvements, boot time is fast, intel wifi works better now, new kpowersave is nice, I can finely set the monitor brightness if supported, however, the damm thing won't suspend when closing the laptop lid.
I think is a good release for a new KDE4 migration, I think I will give the final release a spin but most probably I will stay with 2008.1 which is way more usable today than 2009, just think it.
I would recommend to read the book "Immunology" from Lippincott's Illustrated Review series, is a great comprehensive introduction, covers the topic very well but does not get too complicated or deep.
If you prefer something more deep maybe Basic Immunology from the author Abul K. Abbas, Cellular and Molecular Immunology, of the same author, from Elsevier Saunders. I used the last one on my Immunology course.
Better start talking with your representatives if your country is in the list, have you read the article?, section 3 talks about legal framework for this operation, which would include CRIMINAL SANCTIONS in addition to civil sanctions.
It is very simple, I have a Neuros OSD attached to my TV, when we bought it it could not play MP3s and only played a few videos, we just updated to latest firmware and done, mp3, ogg, more video formats and youtube, although youtube didn't work, a few days leter a fix for youtube was in place and working.
I have already recorded a few shows from TV and quality is top notch, some may miss HD features (HDTV input/output and recording), but how many of you have HDTV anyways?, it is in their TODO list for future products too.
I'm quite amazed at how fast this things get fixes and features from developers an community, everything you need to develop apps for it is documented, the APIs (GUI, audio, video, youtube) everything is there.
It is simple to hack, is just another Linux machine with multimedia hardware (DSP) and APIs thrown in and everything is Open, except for video and audio codecs for the DSP, but the community is already working on replacing those.
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As far as bug reporting goes, I doubt they'll prioritize stuff that's not relevant to their expected console architecture. Issues like, "Hey, I have dual monitors and steam blacks one out and it never comes back" are going to be pretty well ignored because the console is unlikely to support dual monitors.
Which is ironic as this was a complain (dual monitor support) that was addressed on the latest update, I was surprised that they did some effort on that, many games my not work well on dual monitor setup, but steam and valve games have been updated for that.
Time to look at alternatives...
I wish I knew this before buying a quad core A6 laptop, their graphics card driver is abysmal compared to nVidia, which is increasing the performance of their drivers even more.
AMD is doing a very risky bet, the ARM64 has not been well tested in real server workloads, it may as well flop and take the company with it, their opteron line was excellent for virtualization thanks to the many cores, hardware virtualization support and a good performance/price point this new ARM64 has only the low power utilization and low heat as main selling point.
While is nice to have better control over this features we need to first get them working reliably, I still can't get KDE to start with max the laptop monitor max resolution, it will always go back to a 1280x768 and I have to change it manually.
In the end we get back to the same old problem with Linux graphics, driver support. I remember back a couple of years having a nvidia card with the binary blob, most stuff worked as I wanted but screen adjusting and multimonitor had to be done via nvidia tools, but in the end of the day it works. Now I have an ATI card and I cannot get multimonitor working properly even with its own tools, on a more powerful card with more memory.
For quite a while I think there has been no real interest on doing this overhaul as most of those features would not work releably on most systems.
I had a "white box" server back in 2004 with slackware, a very puny 256mb pentium 4 with tailor made (compiled) kernel, and for around 5 years it kept going very well serving a small PHP app with MySQL and email, it runned like a champ, we tried to keep it up to date but then we forgot about it for a couple of years, then a few changes to the hosted app needed an upgrade again and there is where disaster struck, never upgrade more than 2 versions up, we screwed glibc update.
In the end we reinstalled debian to lower maintance overhead while keeping it updated, but once you configure slackware it runs smoothly until the end of the hardware itself.
Wayland requires a few things that are Linux specific, for example, Kernel Mode Setting (which there seems to be some effort to port it to FreeBSD), Direct Rendering Manager drivers and supporting components (which Intel drivers are ported but others are not), and udev, as far as I can see in the FreeBSD forums there isn't much urgency to get in the Wayland wagon, Xorg will be around for quite a long time.
I don't really see much of a case of throwing the house out just to get "butter smooth" GUI, as far as I can tell linux GUIs has been good enough since quite some time, I have yet to see tearing or any graphical problems with firefox like in the "old" days even with many tabs open. While its nice to optimize the stack we loose a few things, first we distance linux yet again from all other Unix-like systems (BSD, like with ALSA vs OSS), then there is driver support, as far as I can see there is no planned support for Wayland from Nvidia or AMD on their proprietary drivers, we are back to square one, with an "exotic" architecture with no full support for modern graphics hardware (OSS vs Proprietary aside), way to go.
As a coder and enthusiast Wayland sounds fantastic, but the reality is that wayland has long long way to go, I personally don't see the need for it.
They should just increase operations in emerging economies, Best Buy in Mexico is doing quite well as far as I know, the Guadalajara store payed off in 1 and a half years when the expected best case scenario was 4 years.
In the U.S. they should just decrease brick and mortar stores and move to online retailing.
Nothing, really!
I can complain a lot about their lack of support of modern X stack, xrandr, etc. But my next card will be nVidia, unless performance is not an issue at all (in which case integrated Intel is more than perfect).
Unless AMD put its stuff together and starts either releasing quality closed drivers or pumping some extra effort (money, more docs, help) onto OSS drivers, I don't see any threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment.
I do not think Intel will try to get head to head on the performance GPU market and thus they do not represent a serious threat to nVidia in the linux perfomance graphics segment too.
As others have commented, the wiki is not very clear on all implications on this, but as far as my use of linux (12 years now), I have never had to reboot for any kind of update or security patch that is not kernel related or glibc, that is why I use Linux, because once it works it just keeps working, I really hated the times when even installing an application on Windows would reboot the entire system, WTF?
Seems to me that the upper level of the Linux desktop stack is getting more and more complex and more and more fragile, needing now this kind of "kludges" (in my personal opinion) to keep stuff running.
Fortunately the server side is very different and I hope this does not extend to the server stack, having to reboot because you updated apache, postgresql, php or whatever your stack includes; a good amount of server software is designed to keep working with minimum downtime, even on updates, like nginx that can reload itself without loosing connections (by keeping an instance to finish its work and exit when done while giving the new request to the new reloaded instances), even ssh can be updated without loosing you current session.
nVidia is probably the best option for performance discrete graphics on Linux, I already tried ATI and was deeply dissapointed, while nVidia drivers for my 4-5 year old laptop handle perfectly connecting to my external 1080p monitor my new (few months old) laptop with ATI graphics (A6 APU) totally fails to even drive the monitor over 1440x1024, even tough the ATI card has way more memory available to it.
nVidia propietary drivers work and are well tested, while ATI drivers sort of work most of the time but they are filled with glitches here and there.
Of course, not everything is pink and ponies on the nVidia side, the downside with nVidia is the little to no support to modern X stack and linux graphics standards, xrandr? fuck that use the nVidia panel or no dual monitor for you, KMS? hell no, its all or nothing, ATI is just only a tad better but still useless to me.
On the OSS side of the cards drivers the ATI drivers sort of work, KMS and basic stuff is solid but for modern cards you get mostly no acceleration for anything, which is just a waste of all that silicon, Noveau drivers are the same, basic stuff working but thats all, but Noveau developers have it harder as they have to reverse engenieer all, with no docs at all or help from manufacturer and they have been around less time than ATI devs.
Just don't let Uwe Boll direct or anyware near the studio and you may get a decent adaptation!
I have seen Accounting firms using OpenOffice Calc where I live (Mexico), that was about 3 years ago, not bad given the "utter" dominance of MS Office in this country. OO.org even comes bundled with many computers sold by small computer builders.
"Web Application" Companies of course, good hosting is cheap, self-hosting is cheaper with OSS, tools are top-notch (Django, Ruby on Rails, etc), and the client does not care what the backend is running if it shows in their browser and works well.
Not only ECC, Virtualization Extensions are mostly guaranteed on all AMD cpus, I can't say the same for Intel ones.
Once I was at a library looking for a book, it caught my attention that the computers had Linux (Mandriva) and they called between stores via skype, the point of sale was a text based application (think ncourses).
You should try Mandriva where KDE is top priority (the default desktop environment). They have, in my opinion, the most polished and usable KDE4 available, they did it in the past with KDE3 they keep up with the latest KDE.
mencoder and one of its GUI frontends, it is all you need really, audio language selection, subtitles, lots of video/audio codecs, libdecss, etc, etc.
It is a swiss army knife.
I own the Neuros OSD, which is compact and looks good, simple to use and powerful, however, by todays standards it is a bit outdated, without support HD videos, MKV format, H.264, etc.
It would be fantastic if they did a Neuros OSD Reloaded, with support for new codecs and features (more powerful hardware), but with the same form-factor, this new thing is not as attractive as the OSD, and for what it is (a media PC) I think they would need to add more value.
I think Samba is an excellent replacement for windows server for simple filesharing, is usually easy to setup and some distros even drop in powerful GUI configuration tools.
I have used samba in a small office (around 10-15 office workers), with a few shared folders (around 5 GB of documents), at first the company didn't trust our use of Linux, they had a windows 2000 server which was badly managed (and filled with virus/malware and being used as spam relay), we gave them a 1 month complete guarantee that the system will keep up without any problems or we give their money back and install w2k server back.
They are quite happy now as once of properly configured you don't need to mess with it, we even added virus scanning (via clamav and hourly cron, samba clamav plugin taked a noticeable performance hit and was not straightforward to configure) and reporting via email (plus the email system running on the same server).
The difference between distros is in the details, having a regression is not good for a distro like Mandriva famed for being stylish, very usable and that "Just Works".
I would like to congratulate the Mandriva team as working around these issues is unavoidable and the sooner we get to it the better.
So yeah, I'm downloading it right now and will upgrade (clean install), I'm a bit critic of the latest changes but Mandriva has always been my distro of choice and will stick to it (and will start sending /* spam */ bug reports), there is also good parts of this release that will really benefit everybody (better hw support, wifi, boot speed, etc).
I gave a spin to 2009-RC2 and I found it very lacking in many aspects, including general theme, while KDE4 implementation of the mandriva theme was mostly there small details (but important ones) like desktop icons where left out, if you look at the 2009 errata outstanding issues where not handled, like multimedia keyboard support on KDE4, it reasonably works on 2008.1 why should it stop working in 2009?, passing the blame to kmilo is no way to handle it (they would be better of with KDE3 for now).
I like the few new improvements, boot time is fast, intel wifi works better now, new kpowersave is nice, I can finely set the monitor brightness if supported, however, the damm thing won't suspend when closing the laptop lid.
I think is a good release for a new KDE4 migration, I think I will give the final release a spin but most probably I will stay with 2008.1 which is way more usable today than 2009, just think it.
I would recommend to read the book "Immunology" from Lippincott's Illustrated Review series, is a great comprehensive introduction, covers the topic very well but does not get too complicated or deep.
If you prefer something more deep maybe Basic Immunology from the author Abul K. Abbas, Cellular and Molecular Immunology, of the same author, from Elsevier Saunders. I used the last one on my Immunology course.
Better start talking with your representatives if your country is in the list, have you read the article?, section 3 talks about legal framework for this operation, which would include CRIMINAL SANCTIONS in addition to civil sanctions.
A new study reveals that a session of Myst can make the player violent, trow the mouse and keyboard and generally damage things.
However playing FPS of the "Shoot everything that moves" kind does release stress.
It is very simple, I have a Neuros OSD attached to my TV, when we bought it it could not play MP3s and only played a few videos, we just updated to latest firmware and done, mp3, ogg, more video formats and youtube, although youtube didn't work, a few days leter a fix for youtube was in place and working.
I have already recorded a few shows from TV and quality is top notch, some may miss HD features (HDTV input/output and recording), but how many of you have HDTV anyways?, it is in their TODO list for future products too.
I'm quite amazed at how fast this things get fixes and features from developers an community, everything you need to develop apps for it is documented, the APIs (GUI, audio, video, youtube) everything is there.
It is simple to hack, is just another Linux machine with multimedia hardware (DSP) and APIs thrown in and everything is Open, except for video and audio codecs for the DSP, but the community is already working on replacing those.