The Fedora team chose to include Gnome 2.6. EVERY package in Fedora FC2 is Fedora's responsibility NOT the original maker of that package. And that would be the case even if they didn't add their own patches to a single thing.
Choosing stable versions of packages which don't have significant bugs or usability problems, or patching away those bugs and/or usability problems is Fedora's responsibility. So yes, having included Gnome 2.6 is the fault of every distro that includes Gnome 2.6 not the Gnome team.
I use distributions, if there are any problems, it's the Distro people I complain to. They in turn need to take care of complaining to the individual projects like Gnome (unless of course I upgraded or installed package X on my own).
Mod parent up to a 5. I hear this principle stated far too often, and Occam's Razor is used to blindside many possibly correct but more complex theories.
Yes but we don't have any evidence or basis for believing their collapsed stars in the first place AFAIK. That's just a guess.
AFAIK we've never actually seen a star collapse and a black hole appear... that wouldn't even be proof but it certainly would be the least of what we'd need to see before claiming that IS how they are formed. Rather, it's just our best guess of what could create this thing we call black hole.
Again AFAIK, the closest thing to evidence we have of this are computer simulations which... assuming we haven't botched a variables and all other relevant GUESSES are correct shows that the collapse of a star COULD cause the formation of a black hole.
That means it's theoretically possible... not that it's an exclusive contract or even that it's likely enough to actually happen in reality. Lot's of things are theoretically possible.
For example, it's theoretically possible (and probably can be proven via a controled computer simulation designed for that purpose) a gust of wind could blow through a crack in your window. The gust could shift the air currents in such a way that it pins a paper on your desk against your monitor and rolls it up reasonably tightly. Then the wind shifts and pops the roll off your desk onto your chair standing upright on end. And then in the morning when still sleepy you sit down for your morning coffee without noticing and ream yourself.
So you see damn near anything is theoretically possible. And if it's theoretically possible it can be proven via computer simulation, we control the initial variables. We set the computer to try different initial gusts until one works. But more importantly, our world works the way it really works, but in the simulation physics work the way WE THINK they work. Potentially a very big difference there.
Swap does NOT improve performance on a system with enough memory for the tasks it performs. THIS can be trivially demonstrated.
How could you possibly argue swap improving performance in this scenerio. Swap letting you use ram for most often needed memory does NOT make things faster, it makes things faster in a swapping world.
In a world without swap everything commonly accessed IS ALREADY in memory, you don't need swap to do this. Guess what, everything NOT commonly accessed is also ALREADY in memory so swap doesn't slow down those accesses. ALL the memory accesses are as fast as they can be within the limits of your physical hardware and the software controlling it (kernel).
"After all, we're not searching the entire set of knowlege about the universe, which you seem to imply; the fact that I don't know the weather on a planet on the other side of the galaxy does nothing to make FTL possible. The vast sum of knowlege is entirely irrelevant. We're searching a rather narrow domain, and we're running out of places to look."
I suppose we simply disagree. I don't really see any argument in your post, just your own view.
Personally I don't believe we've uncovered either the smallest or largest building block which constructs the fabric of the universe. I believe there are forces, dimensions and simply scales of looking at things which we have not yet found. While knowing the weather on planet X tommorow won't make warp type engines or macro teleportion possible, any of these things being uncovered may.. or may not;)
It's worth noting your a bit dated on teleportion, now we've scaled up to teleporting laser beams. Warp might be quite a stretch from where we are now without some major discovery. But that doesn't mean other similar ideas won't surface and become realities either.
With teleportion we already know how it works and understand it, we simply lack the computing power now to track all the individual elements needed to teleport more complex elements. I see that as inevitable advancement, not impossible.
You should do a little more reading on Quantum teleportion as well. Your a bit muddled on the details but I won't go into all that here.
Breaking the sound barrier is one thing. But teleportation is another impossible thing we've conquered through a basic discovery in quantum physics.
We know alot, there is still a great deal we don't know and VAST amount we are guessing at and the evidence is straws stacked on top of guesses which may or may not be any better.
We like to pretend physics as we know it is all based around a simple set of guesses which have proven true again and again. Reality is that although there are an initial set of guesses almost everything which "proves" them has been another set of guesses which are intentionally chosen to fit within their parameters.
It's sad really, the best we can do when we find a new piece of data is rather than come up with the most likely reason for it, instead come up with the most likely reason which fits within our existing framework of guesses. Kind of biases the results don't you think?
I guess what I'm saying is that there is more we don't know than we do know, since all that makes this possible or impossible is a fairly fragile lattice I wouldn't bar it as a REASONABLE possiblity (likely would be a stretch, but it's not unreasonable).
Besides like, like our current guesses to explain the world around us... so far we haven't really been able to disprove any star trek technology;P
"burning a copy of the latest Britney CD is not covered"
That's true, copyright grants control over distribution not copying or any other form of use.
Copying the latest Britney CD and giving to a friend is distribution and this is within the copyright holders authority... doing it without their permission isn't illegal, but it is copyright violation (civil not criminal matter).
Since copyright violation isn't theft, it's copyright violation, downloaded materials of course don't count as stolen property... downloaders aren't breaking the law, those sharing the files are (in most cases with p2p your doing both however). But that has nothing to do with fair use either.
Burning a Copy of YOUR OWN Britney CD is use, not distribution and therefore is NOT covered under the ONE conditional time-limited right granted via the copyright.
It's perfectly legal for you to do it because the material in question of course is public property and the copyright holder merely has a contract giving him control of ONE thing and ONLY ONE THING , distribution. You can't distribute to yourself.
Fair use is a list of exceptions to that one thing, fair use defines when you can distribute the work despite the time limited copyright contract.
Check out that features page, it says it includes ATI, NVIDIA and Matrox video cards. Just what I needed, a linux distro that comes with free video cards! woot!
Yeah, that would make perfect sense, except they can determine instantly if the cpu was oem or retail from the serial number on the cpu.
Having or not having the fan doesn't make it any easier or harder for them, anymore than it does for western digital hard drives. Hell WD even has a util on the website that will determine not only if it's oem or retail but the date the warranty started and if the drive is in warranty (which is bunk, they go by the date of manufacture rather than the date of sale).
I suppose it also depends on how much you have to install as well. Just the base system wasn't anywhere near everything I need. At a minimum I use my home system for:
1. Multimedia (XMMS, MPLAYER, XINE, etc) 2. Office and spreadsheet work (Openoffice) 3. Web/ftp/mail/mail filtering/sql (Apache, Squirrelmail, proftpd, postfix, amavis, clamav, spamassassin, and so forth) 4. Windows network PDC (Samba 3) 5. dvdripping (dvdrip, transcode, lots and lots of codecs) 6. cdburning (cdrecord, x-cd-roast and a few other burning applications for various features or behavior I like for certain things) 7. Of course routing and bandwidth shaping 8. Desktop publishing (requires numerous things, including scribus) 9. Gnucash for personal finances 10. Terminal server and Streaming audio to old p1's acting like kiosk type terminals throughout the apartment. 11. Gameplaying (winex). 12. printing/printserver (cups)
At the time (I've upgraded since) I had an athlon XP 2600 with 512mb ram and 2 7200 rpm drives running raid 0. It took a week to compile and install everything. It took about two days of solid compiling just to get me up to the desktop.
Was it difficult? No it was actually fairly easy to get the base system and there were step by step guides to get everything up and running.
Although they neglected to mention that the cd's I downloaded would not allow me to perform the install and that I HAD to have internet connectivity which the install info assumed would be up and running after booting and you have to load the modules, configure the nics by hand the old fashioned way (including manually adding routing entries for the gateway). If they including instructions on that then the guide would be 100% complete.
Between downloading and compiling just a kde or gnome update took HOURS to perform. Yes it's seamless, the packages are there and they don't break things but it takes ETERNITY.
My board died and when I won an auction for my new top of the line asus motherboard to replace it I recieved the top of line p4 board instead. I figured wth I'll try hyperthreading and bought a p4. That of course meant that my highly optimized for athlon gentoo install had to be thrown in the scrap heap along with all the time it took to compile it.
Under fedora I can have every service installed/updated/configured and running from a blank hard drive in about 4hrs. When you factor in the fact that I save my conf files so I don't have to edit them all over again it chops it to about 2-3hrs and most of it is downloading the updates/programs that aren't included with the distro but in apt instead.
Yes although between the 4 repositories you get from dag the number of packages included is huge but not compared with gentoo's package database. But if something I need isn't in it (pretty rare), I can build an rpm for it as fast as I can get it from gentoo and thereafter I don't need to worry about it anymore. (I've even considered setting up an apt source on the server at work for these packages, although they are usually added to those repositories within a month of me discovering them not there anyway).
P.S. I realize I'm running too damn much on a single machine (for security reasons, I haven't found performance issues here, with all this running my linux install still runs quake faster than windows). But alas, I can't afford half a dozen pcs to take the load off this one. Moreso I can't afford to maintain and keep hardware updated and functioning in half a dozen pcs.
As I said, Mandrake would be my second choice and it is easier to use.
It would depend on your general level of computer knowledge. For an advanced user, it really doesn't matter, all of them have the power of linux and an advanced user can get any distro where he wants it to be.
For a medium level user, who can answer the question of what a hard drive is, It's probably about 60/30/10, 60% that they will bump into roadblocks with Mandrake and redhat will be the best choice. 30% chance that they will learn what they need to avoid the roadblocks and/or have the paitience to deal with the roadblocks. 10% that some other distro would be right for them.
For the lowest level of computer knowlege, those who think the monitor is the computer and such and that windows is internet explorer. For that level of user, it doesn't much matter as long as someone who knows what they are doing sets everything up for them. If they are going to try to set it up on their own then Mandrake might be their best bet... but they'll probably fail (with ANY OS or distro they'll probably fail without help).
"I generally found that programs which Mandrake contributors do not package are not worth using."
Have you ever considered that nobody really care what you think is worth using? I'd say it's a fair bet that there are literally thousands or even tens of thousands of programs that other people who don't care what you think are worth using use everyday.
"Too bad it's not the redhat standard."
True, but it takes as little or less effort for a clueless user to discover compared to urpmi.
"As the other poster rightfully pointed out, you are talking out your ass."
As I pointed out, he is wrong, urpmi will get dvdrip installed. It will NOT grab all the optionals that make it 100% functional.
True but even the mandrake guy can do it in under an hour. I like Gentoo, I ran it for awhile built from stage 1 or stage 3 or whichever it is that is completely compiled from scratch (which isn't nearly as difficult as anyone makes it out to be, just timeconsuming).
It worked great, the problem is that it is so time consuming. You'll blow a weekend just doing the install, let alone configuration and filling in the holes.
It's called Accounting, any half arsed account package supports repeat billing for fixed lengths of time. Any decent accounting program can handle inventory.
I don't know where the submitter is getting $5000, in 2hrs you can get Quickbooks or Peachtree up and running to do everything you've mentioned with Nice pretty idiotproof forms and restrict access to everything the people filling out those forms shouldn't have access to.
Unfortunately no, there is no open source answer to Quickbooks/Peachtree and such.
Unfortunately most techs aren't accountants and they may know how to fix problems with programs like quickbooks and peachtree but don't have a clue as to their full capabilities or use. Accountants know what they need but depend on the techs to setup the software.
This means there are MANY MANY MANY custom accounting and inventory programs out there, which cost thousands of dollars, probably lock up the data in some proprietary unexportable fashion (at least there is documentation to get data out of either quickbooks or peachtree) for NO valid reason. Yes some things require additional modules but your HIGHLY unlikely to rack up $5k on peachtree or quickbooks modules.
On windows with proprietary software at least accounting/inventory/pos doesn't require a custom application, if quickbooks won't handle it seamlessly then peachtree can.
If a user does what I just said and gets the dag rpm it will automatically setup 4 different repositories and give you an install base FAR FAR larger than Mandrake.
Let's cut the crap, you won't be hard pressed at all to find packages that aren't in EITHER place though. Spend 30 seconds on sourceforge and you'll find dozens regardless of what you search for. 90% of the time the only rpm option (short of building one yourself). Also about 90% of the time there are rpms linked or googlable from the site. Guess which distro those rpms will be aimed at. Unless you get lucky and the rpm was built by someone who knows what their doing it will only install on redhat.
Apt does everything urpmi does and then some. It's been long established that as far as package management goes there is nothing superior. There is also no graphical manager which is superior to Synaptic.
Yes, hooking up to the dag+included repositories will give you mplayer, DeCSS, all the various codecs and filters you could want, including the win32 ones, etc.
If you do a apt-get install perl-video-dvdrip it can and will install all dozen programs you need for 100% functionality for that as well (pity Mandrake urpmi doesn't).
It's a legitimate question but definately flamebait starting distro religious wars.
To answer though, I'd say fedora is the best choice. You'll definately want to go to the dag site and install the apt rpm and then use that from now on. Also use Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2 is very new and was released extremely buggy.
Next up would be Mandrake, which is a little more user friendly but you'll have alot of trouble installing software. The reason is simple, 90% of rpms out there are made for redhat/fedora and expect the core libraries and such to match up with the names redhat has given them. All the core rpms for mandrake have different entries in the rpm database (even if the rpm is otherwise identical they've changed this for some odd reason).
To the contrary I literally have a family full of schizo's and yes they can turn away from you. But they know things don't quite mesh right, you have to catch them in a moment when they are more clear about things.
Part of what their feeling (at least at first, as time passes without treatment they get worse and less in touch with reality) is very afraid, afraid that their going nuts.
For starters my mother, my grandfather, my uncle, my aunts... it's almost inevitable I'll be able to include myself sometime within the next 5-10yrs.
Once the right medication is found (if they truely have schizophrenia) then they can lead a perfectly normal life so long as they take the meds.
The only affect which remains to any significant degree when taking their medication is that they will come up with excuses not to take the medication. They cannot live alone, there MUST be someone who is with them everyday and makes sure they take the meds everyday.
If they go off the meds for even as little as 24hrs then they will be hearing/seeing/mistranslating? things. So long as they stay on their meds, they might have a moment of strange thought but are generally "there" enough to recognize it for themselves and dismiss it.
What I've seen with my family is that they start out having breaks, something stressful occurs that triggers it and they go... odd (it's hard to explain and only someone who has lived with someone having a schizophrenic break or lived through one really knows what I mean) each day more and more off with reality until they fail to fake it and finally would take them to the hospital. There they would give them meds and have them back to normal within a couple days, sometimes the same day. And of course release them a week or two later.
Since getting them on a proper medical routine in the day to day they are perfectly normal and fine like they were before the first break, but the disease itself has worsened and now they can't go off the meds at all and it doesn't take a stressful event to cause a break, going off the meds is enough.
Makes for some good stories though if you and they can have a sense of humor about it. For instance:
When my mother goes off, she believes she talks to Jesus, she first contacted Jesus through a Ouja board. Shortly after Jesus contacted her directly, applying pressure to her right or left temple for yes and no. Later yet Jesus began vocally communicating with her in her head. Hell at one point Jesus even passed messages for her through me (*shakes his head thinking back on the tricks of a 10yr old who didn't realize yet that first time that his mother was very very sick*).
My Uncle is more interesting. During his worst break he believed he was the prince of egypt and that the Pharoh was trying to assassinate him. He striked pre-emptively and stabbed my grandfather 16 times in bed (that got him 2yrs rather than 2 weeks in a state hospital, my grandfather is schizophrenic also and understands his state at the time, my grandfather testified on his behalf at the trial). Yes grandpa lived although it was pretty hairy for awhile and they had to do some serious surgery to repair the holes in his lungs and stomach.
Both my uncle and my mother are perfectly normal and extremely gentle people on the day to day when they have their meds and you'd never know they had schizophrenia talking to them. They have plenty of friends who know nothing about it.
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The Fedora team chose to include Gnome 2.6. EVERY package in Fedora FC2 is Fedora's responsibility NOT the original maker of that package. And that would be the case even if they didn't add their own patches to a single thing.
Choosing stable versions of packages which don't have significant bugs or usability problems, or patching away those bugs and/or usability problems is Fedora's responsibility. So yes, having included Gnome 2.6 is the fault of every distro that includes Gnome 2.6 not the Gnome team.
I use distributions, if there are any problems, it's the Distro people I complain to. They in turn need to take care of complaining to the individual projects like Gnome (unless of course I upgraded or installed package X on my own).
RH9 and FC1 are not even in the same ballpark as RH8. They were quite stable and had no significant bugs... not really sure were your coming from.
All I wanted from FC2 was FC1 with a 2.6 kernel that didn't turn off preemptive kernel and didn't include a patch that breaks the nvidia drivers.
Mod parent up to a 5. I hear this principle stated far too often, and Occam's Razor is used to blindside many possibly correct but more complex theories.
Yes but we don't have any evidence or basis for believing their collapsed stars in the first place AFAIK. That's just a guess.
AFAIK we've never actually seen a star collapse and a black hole appear... that wouldn't even be proof but it certainly would be the least of what we'd need to see before claiming that IS how they are formed. Rather, it's just our best guess of what could create this thing we call black hole.
Again AFAIK, the closest thing to evidence we have of this are computer simulations which... assuming we haven't botched a variables and all other relevant GUESSES are correct shows that the collapse of a star COULD cause the formation of a black hole.
That means it's theoretically possible... not that it's an exclusive contract or even that it's likely enough to actually happen in reality. Lot's of things are theoretically possible.
For example, it's theoretically possible (and probably can be proven via a controled computer simulation designed for that purpose) a gust of wind could blow through a crack in your window. The gust could shift the air currents in such a way that it pins a paper on your desk against your monitor and rolls it up reasonably tightly. Then the wind shifts and pops the roll off your desk onto your chair standing upright on end. And then in the morning when still sleepy you sit down for your morning coffee without noticing and ream yourself.
So you see damn near anything is theoretically possible. And if it's theoretically possible it can be proven via computer simulation, we control the initial variables. We set the computer to try different initial gusts until one works. But more importantly, our world works the way it really works, but in the simulation physics work the way WE THINK they work. Potentially a very big difference there.
Swap does NOT improve performance on a system with enough memory for the tasks it performs. THIS can be trivially demonstrated.
How could you possibly argue swap improving performance in this scenerio. Swap letting you use ram for most often needed memory does NOT make things faster, it makes things faster in a swapping world.
In a world without swap everything commonly accessed IS ALREADY in memory, you don't need swap to do this. Guess what, everything NOT commonly accessed is also ALREADY in memory so swap doesn't slow down those accesses. ALL the memory accesses are as fast as they can be within the limits of your physical hardware and the software controlling it (kernel).
Because god knows, the first thing we want to do if we suspect we've found TNT is shoot at it.
No worries here, under the partiot act the entire case is classified, nobody will even know your fighting until the supreme court makes it decision.
His mistake is assuming the supreme court is actually an instrument of justice anymore.
Obviously you missed it. The officer said the FBI would just come in under homeland security... which requires no warrant.
"After all, we're not searching the entire set of knowlege about the universe, which you seem to imply; the fact that I don't know the weather on a planet on the other side of the galaxy does nothing to make FTL possible. The vast sum of knowlege is entirely irrelevant. We're searching a rather narrow domain, and we're running out of places to look."
;)
I suppose we simply disagree. I don't really see any argument in your post, just your own view.
Personally I don't believe we've uncovered either the smallest or largest building block which constructs the fabric of the universe. I believe there are forces, dimensions and simply scales of looking at things which we have not yet found. While knowing the weather on planet X tommorow won't make warp type engines or macro teleportion possible, any of these things being uncovered may.. or may not
It's worth noting your a bit dated on teleportion, now we've scaled up to teleporting laser beams. Warp might be quite a stretch from where we are now without some major discovery. But that doesn't mean other similar ideas won't surface and become realities either.
With teleportion we already know how it works and understand it, we simply lack the computing power now to track all the individual elements needed to teleport more complex elements. I see that as inevitable advancement, not impossible.
You should do a little more reading on Quantum teleportion as well. Your a bit muddled on the details but I won't go into all that here.
Breaking the sound barrier is one thing. But teleportation is another impossible thing we've conquered through a basic discovery in quantum physics.
;P
We know alot, there is still a great deal we don't know and VAST amount we are guessing at and the evidence is straws stacked on top of guesses which may or may not be any better.
We like to pretend physics as we know it is all based around a simple set of guesses which have proven true again and again. Reality is that although there are an initial set of guesses almost everything which "proves" them has been another set of guesses which are intentionally chosen to fit within their parameters.
It's sad really, the best we can do when we find a new piece of data is rather than come up with the most likely reason for it, instead come up with the most likely reason which fits within our existing framework of guesses. Kind of biases the results don't you think?
I guess what I'm saying is that there is more we don't know than we do know, since all that makes this possible or impossible is a fairly fragile lattice I wouldn't bar it as a REASONABLE possiblity (likely would be a stretch, but it's not unreasonable).
Besides like, like our current guesses to explain the world around us... so far we haven't really been able to disprove any star trek technology
Dunno, I think I've found the right files, just can't figure out how to extract the cards from the pc...
"burning a copy of the latest Britney CD is not covered"
That's true, copyright grants control over distribution not copying or any other form of use.
Copying the latest Britney CD and giving to a friend is distribution and this is within the copyright holders authority... doing it without their permission isn't illegal, but it is copyright violation (civil not criminal matter).
Since copyright violation isn't theft, it's copyright violation, downloaded materials of course don't count as stolen property... downloaders aren't breaking the law, those sharing the files are (in most cases with p2p your doing both however). But that has nothing to do with fair use either.
Burning a Copy of YOUR OWN Britney CD is use, not distribution and therefore is NOT covered under the ONE conditional time-limited right granted via the copyright.
It's perfectly legal for you to do it because the material in question of course is public property and the copyright holder merely has a contract giving him control of ONE thing and ONLY ONE THING , distribution. You can't distribute to yourself.
Fair use is a list of exceptions to that one thing, fair use defines when you can distribute the work despite the time limited copyright contract.
Check out that features page, it says it includes ATI, NVIDIA and Matrox video cards. Just what I needed, a linux distro that comes with free video cards! woot!
Yeah, that would make perfect sense, except they can determine instantly if the cpu was oem or retail from the serial number on the cpu.
Having or not having the fan doesn't make it any easier or harder for them, anymore than it does for western digital hard drives. Hell WD even has a util on the website that will determine not only if it's oem or retail but the date the warranty started and if the drive is in warranty (which is bunk, they go by the date of manufacture rather than the date of sale).
We have stagnation. If Dell puts all the hardware companies that develop technology out of business what precisely is dell going to sell again?
I suppose it also depends on how much you have to install as well. Just the base system wasn't anywhere near everything I need. At a minimum I use my home system for:
1. Multimedia (XMMS, MPLAYER, XINE, etc)
2. Office and spreadsheet work (Openoffice)
3. Web/ftp/mail/mail filtering/sql (Apache, Squirrelmail, proftpd, postfix, amavis, clamav, spamassassin, and so forth)
4. Windows network PDC (Samba 3)
5. dvdripping (dvdrip, transcode, lots and lots of codecs)
6. cdburning (cdrecord, x-cd-roast and a few other burning applications for various features or behavior I like for certain things)
7. Of course routing and bandwidth shaping
8. Desktop publishing (requires numerous things, including scribus)
9. Gnucash for personal finances
10. Terminal server and Streaming audio to old p1's acting like kiosk type terminals throughout the apartment.
11. Gameplaying (winex).
12. printing/printserver (cups)
At the time (I've upgraded since) I had an athlon XP 2600 with 512mb ram and 2 7200 rpm drives running raid 0. It took a week to compile and install everything. It took about two days of solid compiling just to get me up to the desktop.
Was it difficult? No it was actually fairly easy to get the base system and there were step by step guides to get everything up and running.
Although they neglected to mention that the cd's I downloaded would not allow me to perform the install and that I HAD to have internet connectivity which the install info assumed would be up and running after booting and you have to load the modules, configure the nics by hand the old fashioned way (including manually adding routing entries for the gateway). If they including instructions on that then the guide would be 100% complete.
Between downloading and compiling just a kde or gnome update took HOURS to perform. Yes it's seamless, the packages are there and they don't break things but it takes ETERNITY.
My board died and when I won an auction for my new top of the line asus motherboard to replace it I recieved the top of line p4 board instead. I figured wth I'll try hyperthreading and bought a p4. That of course meant that my highly optimized for athlon gentoo install had to be thrown in the scrap heap along with all the time it took to compile it.
Under fedora I can have every service installed/updated/configured and running from a blank hard drive in about 4hrs. When you factor in the fact that I save my conf files so I don't have to edit them all over again it chops it to about 2-3hrs and most of it is downloading the updates/programs that aren't included with the distro but in apt instead.
Yes although between the 4 repositories you get from dag the number of packages included is huge but not compared with gentoo's package database. But if something I need isn't in it (pretty rare), I can build an rpm for it as fast as I can get it from gentoo and thereafter I don't need to worry about it anymore. (I've even considered setting up an apt source on the server at work for these packages, although they are usually added to those repositories within a month of me discovering them not there anyway).
P.S. I realize I'm running too damn much on a single machine (for security reasons, I haven't found performance issues here, with all this running my linux install still runs quake faster than windows). But alas, I can't afford half a dozen pcs to take the load off this one. Moreso I can't afford to maintain and keep hardware updated and functioning in half a dozen pcs.
As I said, Mandrake would be my second choice and it is easier to use.
It would depend on your general level of computer knowledge. For an advanced user, it really doesn't matter, all of them have the power of linux and an advanced user can get any distro where he wants it to be.
For a medium level user, who can answer the question of what a hard drive is, It's probably about 60/30/10, 60% that they will bump into roadblocks with Mandrake and redhat will be the best choice. 30% chance that they will learn what they need to avoid the roadblocks and/or have the paitience to deal with the roadblocks. 10% that some other distro would be right for them.
For the lowest level of computer knowlege, those who think the monitor is the computer and such and that windows is internet explorer. For that level of user, it doesn't much matter as long as someone who knows what they are doing sets everything up for them. If they are going to try to set it up on their own then Mandrake might be their best bet... but they'll probably fail (with ANY OS or distro they'll probably fail without help).
"I generally found that programs which Mandrake contributors do not package are not worth using."
Have you ever considered that nobody really care what you think is worth using? I'd say it's a fair bet that there are literally thousands or even tens of thousands of programs that other people who don't care what you think are worth using use everyday.
"Too bad it's not the redhat standard."
True, but it takes as little or less effort for a clueless user to discover compared to urpmi.
"As the other poster rightfully pointed out, you are talking out your ass."
As I pointed out, he is wrong, urpmi will get dvdrip installed. It will NOT grab all the optionals that make it 100% functional.
True but even the mandrake guy can do it in under an hour. I like Gentoo, I ran it for awhile built from stage 1 or stage 3 or whichever it is that is completely compiled from scratch (which isn't nearly as difficult as anyone makes it out to be, just timeconsuming).
It worked great, the problem is that it is so time consuming. You'll blow a weekend just doing the install, let alone configuration and filling in the holes.
where is xine, cdrecord, etc in that list? I said 100% functionality, not just enough to make dvdrip work at all ;)
It's called Accounting, any half arsed account package supports repeat billing for fixed lengths of time. Any decent accounting program can handle inventory.
I don't know where the submitter is getting $5000, in 2hrs you can get Quickbooks or Peachtree up and running to do everything you've mentioned with Nice pretty idiotproof forms and restrict access to everything the people filling out those forms shouldn't have access to.
Unfortunately no, there is no open source answer to Quickbooks/Peachtree and such.
Unfortunately most techs aren't accountants and they may know how to fix problems with programs like quickbooks and peachtree but don't have a clue as to their full capabilities or use. Accountants know what they need but depend on the techs to setup the software.
This means there are MANY MANY MANY custom accounting and inventory programs out there, which cost thousands of dollars, probably lock up the data in some proprietary unexportable fashion (at least there is documentation to get data out of either quickbooks or peachtree) for NO valid reason. Yes some things require additional modules but your HIGHLY unlikely to rack up $5k on peachtree or quickbooks modules.
On windows with proprietary software at least accounting/inventory/pos doesn't require a custom application, if quickbooks won't handle it seamlessly then peachtree can.
If a user does what I just said and gets the dag rpm it will automatically setup 4 different repositories and give you an install base FAR FAR larger than Mandrake.
Let's cut the crap, you won't be hard pressed at all to find packages that aren't in EITHER place though. Spend 30 seconds on sourceforge and you'll find dozens regardless of what you search for. 90% of the time the only rpm option (short of building one yourself). Also about 90% of the time there are rpms linked or googlable from the site. Guess which distro those rpms will be aimed at. Unless you get lucky and the rpm was built by someone who knows what their doing it will only install on redhat.
Apt does everything urpmi does and then some. It's been long established that as far as package management goes there is nothing superior. There is also no graphical manager which is superior to Synaptic.
Yes, hooking up to the dag+included repositories will give you mplayer, DeCSS, all the various codecs and filters you could want, including the win32 ones, etc.
If you do a apt-get install perl-video-dvdrip it can and will install all dozen programs you need for 100% functionality for that as well (pity Mandrake urpmi doesn't).
It's a legitimate question but definately flamebait starting distro religious wars.
To answer though, I'd say fedora is the best choice. You'll definately want to go to the dag site and install the apt rpm and then use that from now on. Also use Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2 is very new and was released extremely buggy.
Next up would be Mandrake, which is a little more user friendly but you'll have alot of trouble installing software. The reason is simple, 90% of rpms out there are made for redhat/fedora and expect the core libraries and such to match up with the names redhat has given them. All the core rpms for mandrake have different entries in the rpm database (even if the rpm is otherwise identical they've changed this for some odd reason).
To the contrary I literally have a family full of schizo's and yes they can turn away from you. But they know things don't quite mesh right, you have to catch them in a moment when they are more clear about things.
Part of what their feeling (at least at first, as time passes without treatment they get worse and less in touch with reality) is very afraid, afraid that their going nuts.
For starters my mother, my grandfather, my uncle, my aunts... it's almost inevitable I'll be able to include myself sometime within the next 5-10yrs.
Once the right medication is found (if they truely have schizophrenia) then they can lead a perfectly normal life so long as they take the meds.
The only affect which remains to any significant degree when taking their medication is that they will come up with excuses not to take the medication. They cannot live alone, there MUST be someone who is with them everyday and makes sure they take the meds everyday.
If they go off the meds for even as little as 24hrs then they will be hearing/seeing/mistranslating? things. So long as they stay on their meds, they might have a moment of strange thought but are generally "there" enough to recognize it for themselves and dismiss it.
What I've seen with my family is that they start out having breaks, something stressful occurs that triggers it and they go... odd (it's hard to explain and only someone who has lived with someone having a schizophrenic break or lived through one really knows what I mean) each day more and more off with reality until they fail to fake it and finally would take them to the hospital. There they would give them meds and have them back to normal within a couple days, sometimes the same day. And of course release them a week or two later.
Since getting them on a proper medical routine in the day to day they are perfectly normal and fine like they were before the first break, but the disease itself has worsened and now they can't go off the meds at all and it doesn't take a stressful event to cause a break, going off the meds is enough.
Makes for some good stories though if you and they can have a sense of humor about it. For instance:
When my mother goes off, she believes she talks to Jesus, she first contacted Jesus through a Ouja board. Shortly after Jesus contacted her directly, applying pressure to her right or left temple for yes and no. Later yet Jesus began vocally communicating with her in her head. Hell at one point Jesus even passed messages for her through me (*shakes his head thinking back on the tricks of a 10yr old who didn't realize yet that first time that his mother was very very sick*).
My Uncle is more interesting. During his worst break he believed he was the prince of egypt and that the Pharoh was trying to assassinate him. He striked pre-emptively and stabbed my grandfather 16 times in bed (that got him 2yrs rather than 2 weeks in a state hospital, my grandfather is schizophrenic also and understands his state at the time, my grandfather testified on his behalf at the trial). Yes grandpa lived although it was pretty hairy for awhile and they had to do some serious surgery to repair the holes in his lungs and stomach.
Both my uncle and my mother are perfectly normal and extremely gentle people on the day to day when they have their meds and you'd never know they had schizophrenia talking to them. They have plenty of friends who know nothing about it.