I'm quite impressed at this distro, and I do realize how hard it is to autodetect the wide range of hardware that Linux supports. However, I still find it humerous that back in the day, the time it took to install BeOS was almost entirely determined by the speed of your CD-ROM drive:)
It's true, you think people would have found PriceWatch by now. I've been using it for years, and I have yet to run into a single problem, and I've saved thousands of dollar, particularly on video cards and CPUs. On top of that, I don't have to deal with clueless salespeople, weird store layouts, or the hassles of having stuff out of stock, etc. I really feel sorry for those people getting charged twice as much for stuff at CompUSA.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Linux has changed yet. And personally, I love KDE. It's not even that a lot of "unenlightened" users are switching to it. It's just that a lot of people come into Linux expecting it to be exactly like Windows, and then complain when its not. They don't respect the culture attached to the OS, and that's what peeves me.
Um, go use a distro like Mandrake that auto-detects sound cards. It was one thing to bitch about this back when no Linux distro autodetected hardware. It's another thing to bitch about advanced distros (Debian) and development code (ALSA).
Re:Same horrible fdisk and disklable process?
on
OpenBSD 3.2 Available
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's also been overrun be newbie users who are trying to turn it into Windows. I'm not saying that new users are bad, and I think it's good that Linux has become succesful, but I just wish that new Linux users would take some time to understand the culture attached OS before trying to change it. It's like they say, when in Rome, do as the Roman's do. Instead, many people are just acting like so-called ugly-Americans.
Not necessarily laziness. In my laptop, for example, I don't HAVE a floppy drive. Haven't used one in years. Of course, I could use the floppy image to boot from a hard drive (yes, it does work, thanks to grub) but that's probably asking just a bit too much...
Framerate isn't a natural phenomenon, it doesn't "occur." Frame-rate is the rate at which your graphics card draws an entire frame of graphics into video memory. It's totally independent of the rate that the monitor redraws the screen contents. The monitor gets its contents from pixel values stored in the frame buffer of the video card. Assuming the video card as power the whole time, you can write an image to that RAM, and the monitor will keep displaying it (at whatever refresh rate you set it to) until you change it. Thus, current desktops do this already. They only update the portion of the screen that's changed at any given time. They write these new changes to the appropriate regions of RAM, and leave all the other portions to whatever they were before.
Even with the 36-bit extension, all current IA-32 processors are still 32-bit, because the 36-bit address space is physical, not virtual. The virtual address space is still 32-bits, and all pointers are still 32-bits, as well as all GPRs.
I'd like to point a gun to your head. Do you honestly believe I won't pull the trigger? Do you have any more reason to believe Microsoft than me? Remember, I haven't screwed over millions of people in the past...
That said, other companies already look through your hard drive. Why should MS be any different?
He he. Some people like the Java/Win32 way of implementing everything under in one set of APIs. They find it cohesive, consistant, and easy to reference. Other people abhor that model, preferring the C/UNIX way of providing a powerful core and depending on third party extensions. They find it cleaner, more accepting of competing implementations, and easier to maintain over time. The first type of people see the second type of API as a hodge-podge of complexity and redundant effort. The second type of people see the first type of API as monolithic, inflexible, and a sure route to bug-heaven.
I'm not going to suger-coat the situation in "I'm okay, you're okay" crap. The second type of people are right. The first style of API has its uses (for example, it's not a terribly bad idea in Java, which is used for end-user applications rather than systems programming) but is overall a crappy idea for a system-level API. Just note the difference between UNIX and Windows. How many API's has Microsoft had over less than two decades? DOS, Win16, Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL,.NET, etc, not to mention all the special purpose APIs like DirectX, Windows Media, etc. Compare this to the situation in UNIX. A UNIX developer circa 1980 could, with a little updating, be right at one in a circa 2002 Linux environment. The UNIX APIs, decades after they were invented, are still clean, while the Windows APIs (and even the Java ones, think about AWT or the initial container classes) are unclean even though each only has a shelf life of 10 years at most. Beyond that, bundling all libraries together discourages competing implementations. In UNIX, there are several libraries for every task. Competition breeds libraries that are better than others for particular uses. Lack of competition leads to a "One True Library (TM)" for each purpose that really isn't optimal for any given situation.
It's an academic thing. Windows might be a commercially successful platform, but from an academic point of view, it's ugly. One look at Win32 is enough to see that it is a utilitarian API, not a clean, elegant one. Sure, Windows development may pay well, and I don't mean to slight Windows developers in the least, but there is a difference between a VB code monkey and a professor of computer science. In most people's minds, Windows and UNIX are representative of that distinction. Is this view arrogant? Undoubtedly. However, that arrogance is not entirely unjustified, and may be useful in pushing people to a higher standard.
You know, you just made my day a bit better. Make's me happy to know that there are people around how know stuff. Thanks for teaching me something new. It's little moments like this that keep me coming back to Slashdot:)
It wouldn't have to be a hax0r. The thing is open source, so any code monkey could do it. What most likely happened was that the CD rom burning code was licensed from some other company, and had to be ripped out for the open source release.
I'm sitting on a 2 GHz machine right now, and boy I wish I had a 3 GHz machine so I could run Konqueror faster! Hell, maybe if I had a 3 GHz machine, Konsole wouldn't take so freaking long (over half a second) to start up! Yes, my terminal app isn't fast enough! It used to be that Quake kept me buying faster hardware. Now, its KDE!
The G4 case is probably around $100, and all the other components aren't that great. What isn't mediocre (hard drive, graphics card, etc) is crap (sound card, speakers, etc). The only nice bit is the GigE card, which is less than $50 on PriceWatch.
The only reason the iApps need AltiVec is because that is the only reasonably fast part of the G4. Plain C/C++ code optimized by a good SSE-enabled compiler (Intel C++) would perform just fine, especially given the fact that none of the iApps do anything that would take more than a (by today's standards) ancient 1 Ghz x86 proc anyway.
0) Make sure that you've got Xft anti-aliasing already working in X. There are a lot of HOWTOs on the internet for this.
1) Download the freetype2-current sources from here.
2) Extract the sources, cd to the 'freetype2-current' directory, type 'make' twice to build, 'make install' once to install.
3) Back up any libraries of the form *freetype* in/usr/lib and/usr/X11R6/lib to somewhere safe, and then delete them from those directories.
4) Copy the newly built libraries from/usr/local/lib to/usr/lib.
5) Next, get some nice Type1 fonts. You can find these in a lot of places. I personally got the Adobe Type Basics package ($100 for 65 fonts) which is a very good deal. But the Luxi series of fonts that come with X are also pretty good. If you have any desktop publishing software or any Corel software, you might find some Postscript fonts that come with those. As a last resort, just search the internet for Postscript fonts. The nice thing is that with the new FreeType, all the smarts are in the auto-hinter and ps-hinter, so what the font looks like depends only on the glyph shapes themselves. This is a big step forward from the TrueType world, where the quality of the font depended very heavily the quality of the font's hinting. Since hinting TrueType was an extremely difficult process, only expensive professional fonts were any good for on-screen use. In comparison, there are tons of good Postscript fonts out there, since the hinting required for postscript fonts is rather minimal.
Yeah, it takes a long time to get something release quality. 2.5.44 is already quite usable...if it compiles at all that is. It's that seemingly last little bit (getting all the old drivers updated to new interfaces, polishing up code, last minute bug fixes) that take a long time. Also, there are certain features (like Reiser4) that'll probably sneak in slightly after the feature freeze, because they don't really touch core code. From Kernel Traffic:
Elsewhere, someone said they'd love to test these heading-toward-stable kernels, but didn't want to risk trashing their filesystem. They asked how likely that would be, and Linus replied:
"Personal opinion (and only that): not much chance for a filesystem trashing. There's more chance of something just not _working_ than of disk corruption. Ie you may find that some driver you need doesn't compile because it hasn't been updated to the new world order yet, for example. And people still report problems booting, for example, whatever the reason. So make sure you have a working choice in your lilo configuration or whatever. But from what we've seen lately, there really aren't reports of corrupted disks or anything like that that I've seen. Which is obviously not to say that it couldn't happen, but it's not a very likely occurrence. That said, I can't set other peoples risk bars for them."
About the distro thing, if you're not using a newbie distro, screw you if you have newbie complaints! There is a place for new users on Linux, but if they're not in their place, then they have no right to complain. In light of the first statement, the rest are irrelevent, because many distros (RedHat 8, for example, and Gentoo, even though it's not a newbie distro) do handle fonts correctly.
Now, why can't Linux have this kind of functionality? >>>>>>>>>> It does. Download freetype2-current from ftp.freetype.org/pub/unstable, install it, make sure there are no other freetype libs on your system (rm -rf/usr/lib/*freetype*/usr/X11R6/lib/*freetype*) and get some nice Type1 fonts (only $100 for the 65-font core collection from Adobe) and you'll be in heaven.
Take a look at my post about FreeType2 CVS. I'm in the same situation, and I actually prefer the FreeType rendering these days, even though sub-pixel AA isn't working with FreeType2 CVS (it's a very subtle effect, a lot of ClearType's improvement comes from a better algorithm for AA rather than the sub-pixel rendering).
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I'm quite impressed at this distro, and I do realize how hard it is to autodetect the wide range of hardware that Linux supports. However, I still find it humerous that back in the day, the time it took to install BeOS was almost entirely determined by the speed of your CD-ROM drive :)
It's true, you think people would have found PriceWatch by now. I've been using it for years, and I have yet to run into a single problem, and I've saved thousands of dollar, particularly on video cards and CPUs. On top of that, I don't have to deal with clueless salespeople, weird store layouts, or the hassles of having stuff out of stock, etc. I really feel sorry for those people getting charged twice as much for stuff at CompUSA.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think that Linux has changed yet. And personally, I love KDE. It's not even that a lot of "unenlightened" users are switching to it. It's just that a lot of people come into Linux expecting it to be exactly like Windows, and then complain when its not. They don't respect the culture attached to the OS, and that's what peeves me.
Um, go use a distro like Mandrake that auto-detects sound cards. It was one thing to bitch about this back when no Linux distro autodetected hardware. It's another thing to bitch about advanced distros (Debian) and development code (ALSA).
It's also been overrun be newbie users who are trying to turn it into Windows. I'm not saying that new users are bad, and I think it's good that Linux has become succesful, but I just wish that new Linux users would take some time to understand the culture attached OS before trying to change it. It's like they say, when in Rome, do as the Roman's do. Instead, many people are just acting like so-called ugly-Americans.
Not necessarily laziness. In my laptop, for example, I don't HAVE a floppy drive. Haven't used one in years. Of course, I could use the floppy image to boot from a hard drive (yes, it does work, thanks to grub) but that's probably asking just a bit too much...
Framerate isn't a natural phenomenon, it doesn't "occur." Frame-rate is the rate at which your graphics card draws an entire frame of graphics into video memory. It's totally independent of the rate that the monitor redraws the screen contents. The monitor gets its contents from pixel values stored in the frame buffer of the video card. Assuming the video card as power the whole time, you can write an image to that RAM, and the monitor will keep displaying it (at whatever refresh rate you set it to) until you change it. Thus, current desktops do this already. They only update the portion of the screen that's changed at any given time. They write these new changes to the appropriate regions of RAM, and leave all the other portions to whatever they were before.
Even with the 36-bit extension, all current IA-32 processors are still 32-bit, because the 36-bit address space is physical, not virtual. The virtual address space is still 32-bits, and all pointers are still 32-bits, as well as all GPRs.
I'd like to point a gun to your head. Do you honestly believe I won't pull the trigger? Do you have any more reason to believe Microsoft than me? Remember, I haven't screwed over millions of people in the past...
That said, other companies already look through your hard drive. Why should MS be any different?
He he. Some people like the Java/Win32 way of implementing everything under in one set of APIs. They find it cohesive, consistant, and easy to reference. Other people abhor that model, preferring the C/UNIX way of providing a powerful core and depending on third party extensions. They find it cleaner, more accepting of competing implementations, and easier to maintain over time. The first type of people see the second type of API as a hodge-podge of complexity and redundant effort. The second type of people see the first type of API as monolithic, inflexible, and a sure route to bug-heaven.
.NET, etc, not to mention all the special purpose APIs like DirectX, Windows Media, etc. Compare this to the situation in UNIX. A UNIX developer circa 1980 could, with a little updating, be right at one in a circa 2002 Linux environment. The UNIX APIs, decades after they were invented, are still clean, while the Windows APIs (and even the Java ones, think about AWT or the initial container classes) are unclean even though each only has a shelf life of 10 years at most. Beyond that, bundling all libraries together discourages competing implementations. In UNIX, there are several libraries for every task. Competition breeds libraries that are better than others for particular uses. Lack of competition leads to a "One True Library (TM)" for each purpose that really isn't optimal for any given situation.
I'm not going to suger-coat the situation in "I'm okay, you're okay" crap. The second type of people are right. The first style of API has its uses (for example, it's not a terribly bad idea in Java, which is used for end-user applications rather than systems programming) but is overall a crappy idea for a system-level API. Just note the difference between UNIX and Windows. How many API's has Microsoft had over less than two decades? DOS, Win16, Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL,
Actually, you can also read the statement as in "Programming Linux - to do something". In that case, the title is entirely valid.
It's an academic thing. Windows might be a commercially successful platform, but from an academic point of view, it's ugly. One look at Win32 is enough to see that it is a utilitarian API, not a clean, elegant one. Sure, Windows development may pay well, and I don't mean to slight Windows developers in the least, but there is a difference between a VB code monkey and a professor of computer science. In most people's minds, Windows and UNIX are representative of that distinction. Is this view arrogant? Undoubtedly. However, that arrogance is not entirely unjustified, and may be useful in pushing people to a higher standard.
This article appeared in The Register, and another guy at Palm said that there *was* BeOS code in there. So its a matter of debate.
You know, you just made my day a bit better. Make's me happy to know that there are people around how know stuff. Thanks for teaching me something new. It's little moments like this that keep me coming back to Slashdot :)
It wouldn't have to be a hax0r. The thing is open source, so any code monkey could do it. What most likely happened was that the CD rom burning code was licensed from some other company, and had to be ripped out for the open source release.
I'm sitting on a 2 GHz machine right now, and boy I wish I had a 3 GHz machine so I could run Konqueror faster! Hell, maybe if I had a 3 GHz machine, Konsole wouldn't take so freaking long (over half a second) to start up! Yes, my terminal app isn't fast enough! It used to be that Quake kept me buying faster hardware. Now, its KDE!
The G4 case is probably around $100, and all the other components aren't that great. What isn't mediocre (hard drive, graphics card, etc) is crap (sound card, speakers, etc). The only nice bit is the GigE card, which is less than $50 on PriceWatch.
The only reason the iApps need AltiVec is because that is the only reasonably fast part of the G4. Plain C/C++ code optimized by a good SSE-enabled compiler (Intel C++) would perform just fine, especially given the fact that none of the iApps do anything that would take more than a (by today's standards) ancient 1 Ghz x86 proc anyway.
I love the Gentoo install guide. It's so detailed and verbose, anyone could follow it in their sleep!
Windows people are sheeplike.
Linux people are unsociable and scruffy.
Mac people are just plain creepy.
0) Make sure that you've got Xft anti-aliasing already working in X. There are a lot of HOWTOs on the internet for this.
/usr/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib to somewhere safe, and then delete them from those directories.
/usr/local/lib to /usr/lib.
1) Download the freetype2-current sources from here.
2) Extract the sources, cd to the 'freetype2-current' directory, type 'make' twice to build, 'make install' once to install.
3) Back up any libraries of the form *freetype* in
4) Copy the newly built libraries from
5) Next, get some nice Type1 fonts. You can find these in a lot of places. I personally got the Adobe Type Basics package ($100 for 65 fonts) which is a very good deal. But the Luxi series of fonts that come with X are also pretty good. If you have any desktop publishing software or any Corel software, you might find some Postscript fonts that come with those. As a last resort, just search the internet for Postscript fonts. The nice thing is that with the new FreeType, all the smarts are in the auto-hinter and ps-hinter, so what the font looks like depends only on the glyph shapes themselves. This is a big step forward from the TrueType world, where the quality of the font depended very heavily the quality of the font's hinting. Since hinting TrueType was an extremely difficult process, only expensive professional fonts were any good for on-screen use. In comparison, there are tons of good Postscript fonts out there, since the hinting required for postscript fonts is rather minimal.
Yeah, it takes a long time to get something release quality. 2.5.44 is already quite usable...if it compiles at all that is. It's that seemingly last little bit (getting all the old drivers updated to new interfaces, polishing up code, last minute bug fixes) that take a long time. Also, there are certain features (like Reiser4) that'll probably sneak in slightly after the feature freeze, because they don't really touch core code. From Kernel Traffic:
Elsewhere, someone said they'd love to test these heading-toward-stable kernels, but didn't want to risk trashing their filesystem. They asked how likely that would be, and Linus replied:
"Personal opinion (and only that): not much chance for a filesystem trashing. There's more chance of something just not _working_ than of disk corruption. Ie you may find that some driver you need doesn't compile because it hasn't been updated to the new world order yet, for example.
And people still report problems booting, for example, whatever the reason. So make sure you have a working choice in your lilo configuration or whatever. But from what we've seen lately, there really aren't reports of corrupted disks or anything like that that I've seen. Which is obviously not to say that it couldn't happen, but it's not a very likely occurrence.
That said, I can't set other peoples risk bars for them."
About the distro thing, if you're not using a newbie distro, screw you if you have newbie complaints! There is a place for new users on Linux, but if they're not in their place, then they have no right to complain. In light of the first statement, the rest are irrelevent, because many distros (RedHat 8, for example, and Gentoo, even though it's not a newbie distro) do handle fonts correctly.
Now, why can't Linux have this kind of functionality? /usr/lib/*freetype* /usr/X11R6/lib/*freetype*) and get some nice Type1 fonts (only $100 for the 65-font core collection from Adobe) and you'll be in heaven.
>>>>>>>>>>
It does. Download freetype2-current from ftp.freetype.org/pub/unstable, install it, make sure there are no other freetype libs on your system (rm -rf
Take a look at my post about FreeType2 CVS. I'm in the same situation, and I actually prefer the FreeType rendering these days, even though sub-pixel AA isn't working with FreeType2 CVS (it's a very subtle effect, a lot of ClearType's improvement comes from a better algorithm for AA rather than the sub-pixel rendering).