We are talking about normal users, that means forget SRPMS exist. Mandrake doesn't use the standard redhat names for any rpm that comes on the cd set, since most things depend on one or more of them any rpm designed for redhat (read pretty much any rpm) doesn't not work properly. Doing a nodeps is NOT something that should ever be required. If it requires more than rpm -Uvh or rpm -i, it doesn't work.
"Personally, I take the view that humans are pretty smart."
Take me to your leader, he must be one dumb SOB... I'll take over your planet in less than a week while I've got him chasing the imaginary shiny thing under the table (same technique I use with most of those "pretty smart" humans you speak of).
Nope I signed no agreement. We actually run an ISP an I have a direct untapped wireless link. I have a dsl connection as well, but their connections are all considered "business class" and so there are no blocked ports, my bandwidth is fixed and guaranteed. The only restriction I have is that I can't resell any bandwidth on that link.
First of all I don't spam, or setup any servers that DO spam. The company I work for is an ISP, the boss wanted to content filter out the arse. Luckily we talked him out of it. Our customers are PAYING for x amount of bandwidth and the right to use it for all the internet has to offer. That includes the right to have a mailserver and send out email without us nosing into it.
In fact since we also have a monopoly in central Illinois we are generally the same people who build their networks including the mailservers and generally set them up with encrypted email. For a small to medium sized business 99% of the reason for having their own mailserver to begin with is so that neither the ISP nor anyone else they have no authorized can read their confidential correspondance with their customers. They could be sending them spam (although we would not willingly setup a mailserver for this purpose), or trading porn or whatever else they damn well please. It's their mailserver, they are using THEIR bandwidth they purchased from us. We purchased that bandwidth from AT&T and you know what? It's none of THEIR damn business what WE do with it either. Now of course if we disrupted their service that would be different... but since we have paid for a link of x speed and have every right to max out that link 24/7 (just like our customers) with blaster traffic or whatever else we want that's not likely.
As for signing a contract, I signed none, I have a direct uncapped wireless link to our T3. I control my own terms of service.
Sure third party rpms work if you get the SRPMS, but we are talking about new users here. SRPMS are not even close to being in their realm anymore than installing RPMS at the CLI is or adding a new lib path.
In many cases the only thing standing between Mandrake and redhat is the names of their packages, since 99% of rpms require at least one or two system rpms THEY DON'T WORK. Everybody and their dog builds their rpms for redhat, nobody bothers with mandrake or the other distro's out there. Since rpm doesn't care if the actual content of the rpm it depends on is installed, and craps out saying the rpm isn't there... that qualifies as doesn't work. In some cases you can force, but you should NEVER have to force an rpm.
As for hardware detection, on my own system it detects just fine, along with any close to redhat distro. But then I have a system I've built to be compatible with linux. It's when installing for friends that there have been issues. As an example, a friend of mine has a pretty simple setup, dual display using an nvidia geforce2 and an ati radeon 8500 I believe it was. For internet he uses a linksys usb nic hooked up to his cable modem which uses regular old dhcp. I was walking him through the setup, he has an ASUS board but not sure what model off the top of my head. Basically nothing special, he shouldn't have had any problems with basic hardware detection and getting up to the gui with one display at least.
After a default install, his nic was not detected (good old redhat kudzu picks up this nic effortlessly.) the setup picked up on his radeon video card and monitor, exactly the right models, but X?? Nope, no X at all. Crapped out with the font warning. restarted XFS, attempted to startx, crapped out again gripping about the radeon 8500. Downloaded the ATI driver and attempted to install it, alas it crapped out failing to detect the system had x libs and wouldn't install with nodeps or forced.
Redhat on this same configuration booted up to the gui on the default install with internet working out of the box. Sound worked out of the box. Every piece of hardware worked out the box. The only thing we had to do was install the nvidia and ati drivers and setup his dual display. Installed apt from freshrpms, added two more respositories (which gives you MOST of the useful "third-party rpms" as well as the system rpms) and synaptic.
My only grip is the mixed case in the repositories, it's every bit as horrid as the vast quanitities of idiots out there who use mixed case in variable and function names.
I'm not really saying Mandrakes hardware detection sucks per say, just that it sucks compared with redhat. Redhat Linux has the best hardware detection of any IBM-PC operating system I've ever seen. 90% of the time literally every piece of hardware works out of the box.. when it doesn't like any linux distro it's a major pain in the arse to get working.
It's not fair OR reasonable. I buy x amount of bandwidth from my ISP. If I max out X bandwidth 24/7 365 a year, I'm within my rights, if I use x bandwidth to do ANYTHING I damn well please I'm within my rights, since they've already capped it to the speed I pay for. Yes this even includes spam, kiddie porn etc. Those things are illegal but that is the police's problem NOT the ISP's.
umm RH9 is intended to be a desktop distro, that means made for a linux newbie. It's also easier to setup and use than Mandrake since either way your going to have to tweak, but Mandrake breaks the standard in every respect from kernel name (so until recently modules like nvidia's driver wouldn't work easily) to the filesystem layout. Because of this pretty well all documentation on the web WON'T work in a step by step fashion.
Besides that, redhat always did have a more intuitive (in the sense of you fill in the blanks, click apply and it ACTUALLY WORKS, and said blanks are relatively easy to find) desktop.
Mandrake's hardware detection is also poor compared to the actual redhat release. This is the biggest reason I would never hand a friend a Mandrake CD and tell him to have at it. Linux is a MAJOR pain in the ass if even one piece of hardware doesn't setup out of the box. With redhat that happens 90% of the time. With Mandrake is happens maybe 20% of the time 25% if you've researched and made sure your hardware works with linux... with redhat I generally don't look, I can install on a random pc with reasonable confidence the hardware will work. Of course any other distribution tends to have this problem as well.
Actually no, Mandrake does not follow the standards for things like the filesystem. Mandrake rpms will not usually install properly on redhat and redhat on mandrake... some 3rd party rpms will but not all.
You'll have alot more trouble finding an apt repository for Mandrake as well. If you actually read through the book that comes with it and attempt to follow along step by step you'll soon find many things don't work as described, everything from packages that aren't in the default install to commandline switches/flags that are incorrect or don't exist. 90% of the howto documentation out there that applies to redhat stuff (which is a VERY significant portion of all documentation onthe web that is not maintained at the offical sources) DOES NOT apply as is in such a manner it can be followed by someone who does not already know the material or know which outside sources to go to for the correct info.
Lots of things won't work out of the box, the hardware detection is HORRIBLE, the installer is primative. Oh yeah, and the control applets are user friendly, but only because they offer so few options that 90% of users will never be able to get what they want working correctly.
Other than that, Mandrake kicks ass! Seriously RH9 was thrice the beginner distro that Mandrake ever was!
ok here is a clue then, if there is no rpm and you are going to compile from source anyway. We all know pretty much NOTHING really works with./configure && make && make install and actually detects everything on your system optimizes properly etc.
So since your going to be tweaking ANYWAY, spend 30 seconds and write a spec file for it, and compile it as an rpm. Tada, problem solved. Now you can install rpm's and install anything you can't get an rpm from. If you need something that does come in an rpm setup a little differently in a way that has to be set at compile time, god invented SRPMS just for you. Tweak what you need and compile it back into a RPM file.
That all works fine. My biggest problem with rpm is that once the database gets corrupted beyond the point of a rebuild, your basically screwed. There needs to be a simple way to nuke RPM entirely and install it clean then rebuild your database of installed rpms.
All in all, it works pretty well, I find apt on top of rpm to be very slick, and synaptic on top of that to be even slicker.
The other advantage is that if a project has packaged binaries, their going to have rpm. Anything else is a maybe scenerio.
Nope I've dealt with foreign governments as well, and have yet to see any that wouldn't require ten rems of paper before dispersing a quarter to allow a guest to use a coin operated toilet.
After all, we have to make sure the funds aren't going to be used to fund the creations of WMD or for greedy purposes, or anti-government movement. Can't have any of that now can we?
Even if you believe your lawmakers come up with good laws, it hardly changes the fact that it takes them months or years to do so. If you want rapid action and decision in government you want a monarchy or a dictatorship, and even then you've only accomplished it on the top level of government.
Now can you imagine what life would be like if all this red tape and overhead were applied to patches? X has nowhere near the red tape we'd have with government control and at how long it takes for anything to get in if ever!
If copyright law were abolished anyone could freely decompile those binary and run them through an asm2c grinder and distribute as is. Certainly less than perfect but it would apply to EVERYTHING.
Under this system or any other in which copyright were abolished, indeed the GPL would lose it's might. But that is a moot point since the GPL would lose it's purpose as well. In a world where everything is in the Public domain there is no longer any risk of a corporation closing it up since their derivative would also be in the public domain.
Under this system the GPL would not longer be needed since everything would be in the public domain there is no risk of a corporation stealing it an closing it up.
"When the means of production are owned by the state, then we will create a paradise for programmers and other creative artists."
I think the middle step is definately neccesary. The state is grossly inefficient at anything it does. The state funding something is one thing, if they just write a check and walk away (which they never do, they attach 10,000 forms and piles of red tape on anything they touch), but actually controling it? My god no, tech moves slow enough as is without the government at the reigns!
Not true, MOST cd's only have ONE song worth owning. When digital sales can only slightly beat album sales it will prove a very strong point. Album content sucks and they need to get their arses in gear.
You seem to have missed the point, before itunes the arguement was that sales were down because there wasn't a cheap modern alternative to cd's and the content sucked arse. The few options out there were either cost prohibitive or had no selection. This has proved that was true, now that something is finally available it has outpaced cd sales in a VERY short period of time.
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We are talking about normal users, that means forget SRPMS exist. Mandrake doesn't use the standard redhat names for any rpm that comes on the cd set, since most things depend on one or more of them any rpm designed for redhat (read pretty much any rpm) doesn't not work properly. Doing a nodeps is NOT something that should ever be required. If it requires more than rpm -Uvh or rpm -i, it doesn't work.
"Personally, I take the view that humans are pretty smart."
Take me to your leader, he must be one dumb SOB... I'll take over your planet in less than a week while I've got him chasing the imaginary shiny thing under the table (same technique I use with most of those "pretty smart" humans you speak of).
Nope I signed no agreement. We actually run an ISP an I have a direct untapped wireless link. I have a dsl connection as well, but their connections are all considered "business class" and so there are no blocked ports, my bandwidth is fixed and guaranteed. The only restriction I have is that I can't resell any bandwidth on that link.
First of all I don't spam, or setup any servers that DO spam. The company I work for is an ISP, the boss wanted to content filter out the arse. Luckily we talked him out of it. Our customers are PAYING for x amount of bandwidth and the right to use it for all the internet has to offer. That includes the right to have a mailserver and send out email without us nosing into it.
In fact since we also have a monopoly in central Illinois we are generally the same people who build their networks including the mailservers and generally set them up with encrypted email. For a small to medium sized business 99% of the reason for having their own mailserver to begin with is so that neither the ISP nor anyone else they have no authorized can read their confidential correspondance with their customers. They could be sending them spam (although we would not willingly setup a mailserver for this purpose), or trading porn or whatever else they damn well please. It's their mailserver, they are using THEIR bandwidth they purchased from us. We purchased that bandwidth from AT&T and you know what? It's none of THEIR damn business what WE do with it either. Now of course if we disrupted their service that would be different... but since we have paid for a link of x speed and have every right to max out that link 24/7 (just like our customers) with blaster traffic or whatever else we want that's not likely.
As for signing a contract, I signed none, I have a direct uncapped wireless link to our T3. I control my own terms of service.
Sure third party rpms work if you get the SRPMS, but we are talking about new users here. SRPMS are not even close to being in their realm anymore than installing RPMS at the CLI is or adding a new lib path.
In many cases the only thing standing between Mandrake and redhat is the names of their packages, since 99% of rpms require at least one or two system rpms THEY DON'T WORK. Everybody and their dog builds their rpms for redhat, nobody bothers with mandrake or the other distro's out there. Since rpm doesn't care if the actual content of the rpm it depends on is installed, and craps out saying the rpm isn't there... that qualifies as doesn't work. In some cases you can force, but you should NEVER have to force an rpm.
As for hardware detection, on my own system it detects just fine, along with any close to redhat distro. But then I have a system I've built to be compatible with linux. It's when installing for friends that there have been issues. As an example, a friend of mine has a pretty simple setup, dual display using an nvidia geforce2 and an ati radeon 8500 I believe it was. For internet he uses a linksys usb nic hooked up to his cable modem which uses regular old dhcp. I was walking him through the setup, he has an ASUS board but not sure what model off the top of my head. Basically nothing special, he shouldn't have had any problems with basic hardware detection and getting up to the gui with one display at least.
After a default install, his nic was not detected (good old redhat kudzu picks up this nic effortlessly.) the setup picked up on his radeon video card and monitor, exactly the right models, but X?? Nope, no X at all. Crapped out with the font warning. restarted XFS, attempted to startx, crapped out again gripping about the radeon 8500. Downloaded the ATI driver and attempted to install it, alas it crapped out failing to detect the system had x libs and wouldn't install with nodeps or forced.
Redhat on this same configuration booted up to the gui on the default install with internet working out of the box. Sound worked out of the box. Every piece of hardware worked out the box. The only thing we had to do was install the nvidia and ati drivers and setup his dual display. Installed apt from freshrpms, added two more respositories (which gives you MOST of the useful "third-party rpms" as well as the system rpms) and synaptic.
My only grip is the mixed case in the repositories, it's every bit as horrid as the vast quanitities of idiots out there who use mixed case in variable and function names.
I'm not really saying Mandrakes hardware detection sucks per say, just that it sucks compared with redhat. Redhat Linux has the best hardware detection of any IBM-PC operating system I've ever seen. 90% of the time literally every piece of hardware works out of the box.. when it doesn't like any linux distro it's a major pain in the arse to get working.
The difference is, the forums there are intended for that purpose. Slashdot is not.
It's not fair OR reasonable. I buy x amount of bandwidth from my ISP. If I max out X bandwidth 24/7 365 a year, I'm within my rights, if I use x bandwidth to do ANYTHING I damn well please I'm within my rights, since they've already capped it to the speed I pay for. Yes this even includes spam, kiddie porn etc. Those things are illegal but that is the police's problem NOT the ISP's.
umm RH9 is intended to be a desktop distro, that means made for a linux newbie. It's also easier to setup and use than Mandrake since either way your going to have to tweak, but Mandrake breaks the standard in every respect from kernel name (so until recently modules like nvidia's driver wouldn't work easily) to the filesystem layout. Because of this pretty well all documentation on the web WON'T work in a step by step fashion.
Besides that, redhat always did have a more intuitive (in the sense of you fill in the blanks, click apply and it ACTUALLY WORKS, and said blanks are relatively easy to find) desktop.
Mandrake's hardware detection is also poor compared to the actual redhat release. This is the biggest reason I would never hand a friend a Mandrake CD and tell him to have at it. Linux is a MAJOR pain in the ass if even one piece of hardware doesn't setup out of the box. With redhat that happens 90% of the time. With Mandrake is happens maybe 20% of the time 25% if you've researched and made sure your hardware works with linux... with redhat I generally don't look, I can install on a random pc with reasonable confidence the hardware will work. Of course any other distribution tends to have this problem as well.
Actually no, Mandrake does not follow the standards for things like the filesystem. Mandrake rpms will not usually install properly on redhat and redhat on mandrake... some 3rd party rpms will but not all.
You'll have alot more trouble finding an apt repository for Mandrake as well. If you actually read through the book that comes with it and attempt to follow along step by step you'll soon find many things don't work as described, everything from packages that aren't in the default install to commandline switches/flags that are incorrect or don't exist. 90% of the howto documentation out there that applies to redhat stuff (which is a VERY significant portion of all documentation onthe web that is not maintained at the offical sources) DOES NOT apply as is in such a manner it can be followed by someone who does not already know the material or know which outside sources to go to for the correct info.
Lots of things won't work out of the box, the hardware detection is HORRIBLE, the installer is primative. Oh yeah, and the control applets are user friendly, but only because they offer so few options that 90% of users will never be able to get what they want working correctly.
Other than that, Mandrake kicks ass! Seriously RH9 was thrice the beginner distro that Mandrake ever was!
Yes he is and will notice the difference. Joe is playing 3d games like Dark Ages of Camelot, joe will notice the difference.
Linux can and DOES offer them ALOT of things windows can't.
What it can't offer them right now is a pc that comes with it preloaded and the ability to be "fixed" by every other teenager who walks in.
ok, 80gb vs 60gb drive is meaningless, either is so enourmously huge it makes no difference.
But in what mythical world is a box with mostly identical specs and a celeron processor equal to a machine with identical specs but a P4????
ok here is a clue then, if there is no rpm and you are going to compile from source anyway. We all know pretty much NOTHING really works with ./configure && make && make install and actually detects everything on your system optimizes properly etc.
So since your going to be tweaking ANYWAY, spend 30 seconds and write a spec file for it, and compile it as an rpm. Tada, problem solved. Now you can install rpm's and install anything you can't get an rpm from. If you need something that does come in an rpm setup a little differently in a way that has to be set at compile time, god invented SRPMS just for you. Tweak what you need and compile it back into a RPM file.
That all works fine. My biggest problem with rpm is that once the database gets corrupted beyond the point of a rebuild, your basically screwed. There needs to be a simple way to nuke RPM entirely and install it clean then rebuild your database of installed rpms.
All in all, it works pretty well, I find apt on top of rpm to be very slick, and synaptic on top of that to be even slicker.
The other advantage is that if a project has packaged binaries, their going to have rpm. Anything else is a maybe scenerio.
Nope I've dealt with foreign governments as well, and have yet to see any that wouldn't require ten rems of paper before dispersing a quarter to allow a guest to use a coin operated toilet.
After all, we have to make sure the funds aren't going to be used to fund the creations of WMD or for greedy purposes, or anti-government movement. Can't have any of that now can we?
Even if you believe your lawmakers come up with good laws, it hardly changes the fact that it takes them months or years to do so. If you want rapid action and decision in government you want a monarchy or a dictatorship, and even then you've only accomplished it on the top level of government.
Now can you imagine what life would be like if all this red tape and overhead were applied to patches? X has nowhere near the red tape we'd have with government control and at how long it takes for anything to get in if ever!
If copyright law were abolished anyone could freely decompile those binary and run them through an asm2c grinder and distribute as is. Certainly less than perfect but it would apply to EVERYTHING.
wtf are sealab 2021 and aqua teen hunger force and why on earth would I want to watch either?
Under this system or any other in which copyright were abolished, indeed the GPL would lose it's might. But that is a moot point since the GPL would lose it's purpose as well. In a world where everything is in the Public domain there is no longer any risk of a corporation closing it up since their derivative would also be in the public domain.
In essence this is the ultimate GPL.
Under this system the GPL would not longer be needed since everything would be in the public domain there is no risk of a corporation stealing it an closing it up.
"When the means of production are owned by the state, then we will create a paradise for programmers and other creative artists."
I think the middle step is definately neccesary. The state is grossly inefficient at anything it does. The state funding something is one thing, if they just write a check and walk away (which they never do, they attach 10,000 forms and piles of red tape on anything they touch), but actually controling it? My god no, tech moves slow enough as is without the government at the reigns!
Not true, MOST cd's only have ONE song worth owning. When digital sales can only slightly beat album sales it will prove a very strong point. Album content sucks and they need to get their arses in gear.
You seem to have missed the point, before itunes the arguement was that sales were down because there wasn't a cheap modern alternative to cd's and the content sucked arse. The few options out there were either cost prohibitive or had no selection. This has proved that was true, now that something is finally available it has outpaced cd sales in a VERY short period of time.
except of course for the users, because those vendors would have eventually made native ports fo their drivers and now never will.
I'll let you know as soon as I figure out what they are...
Right, the correct way to phrase it is "Do not call me again" click.
There are absolutely no free speech issues ALLOWING people to engage in unsolicited direct marketing either.