I'm in the situation of having ditched Windows completely (when my XP was killed by ZBOT, and then when Windows 7 was quite slow and looked ugly when set up with a regular task bar). One of the main issues was a dual boot doesn't work for me. Why reboot?, why maintain two OSes and their updates, why lose the browser's state, why quit what I was doing etc. I would just run Windows 99.9% of the time, could always alt-tab out of a game or quit it and get back to Firefox, hell I had command line ssh and scp under Windows, ssh server, a slow sshfs variant, wget, less, terminal emulator etc. as long with most of the open source software : gimp, openoffice.org, abiword, evince, ffmpeg (in ffdshow) etc.
Linux gaming, and real games at that (NOT openarena and nexuiz, and I don't like Wesnoth) would allow me to gain gaming back, at the moment I can only play card games on the Internet and run SNES emulation with a sound bug I didn't have on Windows.
Assuming you're installing on a 4GB drive, linux mint 12 lxde is great. Dead simple and not looking bad, it's more like using a full PC than some damn small linux or puppy thing with raw X11 software. A friend has it on eee 901, memory was maxed to 2GB (which I recommend, getting an old SO-DIMM should be cheap) and the / partition was a 4GB ext2 on the whole drive, no swap. The PC has a secondary 8GB drive where/home is mounted, which helps with space for user files but it should be nominally usable with the 4GB drive only.
I tend to open zillion tabs, i.e. open ten slashdot stories with some of their articles, while doing similar raids on forums, google, wikipedia or specific searches. I once counted 19 processes. Also, when I got to about 140% memory usage, even my mouse cursor was slow, freezing for several seconds a time.
You probably need two graphics card from the same vendor and able to run the same driver - and have it supported. When I tried two graphics card I had two X11 graphical sessions runnings, with different panel settings, I could move the cursor from one screen to another but couldn't move windows around.
You also get duplicated entries in Preferences etc. (well, those seem to come from me installing LXDE, Cinnamon only put a shortcut to a control panel). also I'm running Mate, which uses nautilus 2.x (renamed) caja for the desktop window, but the default file manager has changed to Nautilus 3.x. I could change the desktop file manager to Nautilus 3.x in gconf-editor or something, but I reverted back, dunno why (I guess I didn't want to re-arrange the icons)
edit : damn, I should have made clear that you need to run Mint 12 LXDE if you want something really lightweight, else Mint 13 Xfce (will get a 14 version) and Mint 13/14 Mate are great as well and don't require silly shit like OpenGL for windows management.
Wrong, you get a newer Firefox that puts a lower load on the CPU, and various crappy bugs in the Xorg server, the file manager or damn anything are fixed. Drivers improve, sometimes even on older hardware, sometimes not at all. You're always fine if you're at least running pentium 3 level hardware.
It goes both ways, there's no reason to use Xubuntu over XFCE mint. Both are the same OS, the difference is default selection of software, wallpapers, theme and set up of panels and start menu. Arguably Mint is less gimmicky and looks less dated, from screenshots Xubuntu looks like a dark, poor man's OSX rip off whereas Mint Xfce gives you a taskbar on the bottom, a better start menu, is themed white / light gray. It also has LibreOffice instead of Abiword.
The debian edition of mint is usable (though less friendly than ubuntu version) and is a rolling release. It updates slow though and I'm used to distro versions where I can easily know what version I'm running.
If old DOS doesn't run, then FreeDOS doesn't run either. They both target the very same hardware, a 8086 CPU with 80x25 text mode and IBM compatible BIOS that does the I/O (also hardwired into a very old interrupt controller and maybe some minimal other crap). This makes them compatible with PC hardware that doesn't exist yet. Switching to 386 mode, adding disk caching etc. are done by programs you run.
You will find there are many various emulations done by the BIOS, or UEFI emulating itself the BIOS, or the network card's BIOS or the bootloader. So you can use USB keyb/mouse, USB storage (if it was already present before boot), networking using either a hardware specific or universal packet driver (if you booted from PXE), and even iSCSI. DOS does this, still thinking it is in the early 80s.
I'd run FreeDOS by the way but I find it weird (running an installer from a CD, huge "helpful" config.sys/autoexec.bat out of the box?) and am too lazy to learn the differences so when I "need" (rather, want) to run DOS I run Windows 98's DOS (MS-DOS 7.10), which is largely the same as MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.x but with fat32 support.
Sometimes Free linux opengl support is garbage on recent hardware (e.g. Intel Atom with PowerVR IGP), or just non existent. Any brand new VIA motherboard only supports 3D and video acceleration under Windows (you may get a 2D X11 driver by compiling code from their SVN). It's not only slower-than-atom hardware, they have VIA Nano X2 and X4 boards that take 4 or 8GB memory.
Also non-legacy and a reason for concern is ARM SoC, say you get an Asus Transformer netbook with a Tegra 3 and 1 or 2GB memory (dunno what's out) : lol, you might get OpenGL running on that in 3 years, if ever! Virtual Machines : I've never had 3D acceleration running in Virtualbox. Remote desktop? not wasting a huge lot of CPU cycles on a PC that has a working but slow OpenGL driver?
The end result is not the end of the world, it's only the major "default" desktops that are unusable (and even their well-intentioned offspring, Cinnamon). I'm happy to have linux mint 13 MATE. A desktop set up and configured out of the box is important, so that it doesn't look like garbage and has a few GUI tools ; feel free to do apt-get install fluxbox and get an empty ugly piece of crap with a default gtk theme.
About 1) : it may be not impossible to run a custom OS but if you don't have drivers and end up with unaccelerated 2D framebuffer, no networking and no webcam, then it's not worth it. (what if you buy a high end device with half good optics, or have paid for a 4G plan). In some ways, your OS is open or semi-open but the hardware is so closed off on those mobile platforms, we were better off in some ways when we all ran IBM compatible hardware with Windows.
You may use a file manager that deals with USB sticks, pcmanfm is good for that and is desktop agnostic (depends on gtk and gvfs). Printer queue? lol, I don't know anything else than lpq and lprm *, you could either train the wife to use that or write a lame script that uses zenity. Else, congratulations on running fvwm. I only briefly tried "fvwm-crystal" (a configured out of the box desktop) and ditched it because I didn't know how it works, and couldn't be bothered to hunt for a manual or whatever lousy website.
Wrong, I ran XP on DX6 compliant hardware, and installed a working 3D accelerated driver on a Windows 7 32bit box with DX8 hardware (a radeon 9200), which flies with late 90s/early 00s games.
LOL, reliable web standards. Maybe in 2015 or something like that. Meanwhile I have the impression we're replacing java and flash applets with windows RT, google store and apple store applets.
France does extensive domestic dubbing, Quebec probably dubs a lot too, what happens is there are often both Quebecois and French dubbings so you probably need to import DVD from France or Europe if you want "proper" French dubbing. Subtitles will make you go nuts no matter what, because they have to be trimmed a lot to fit on the screen, words and phrases are too long and English suffers much less from this. You always end up with shorter and simpler words or tournures, and parts of dialog even dumped.
(I hope you have mail notification or something, this story is very interesting but three day old..)
c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore)
Good of consideration is the 32bit version of Windows 7, and maybe Windows 8 (if they didn't remove features). Old hardware such a Pentium 3 1GHz with 1GB ram can run it, most probably limited by hard drive speed, every new hardware can run it too. You still get to keep DOS virtual machine and Win16. It can do a lot of the things a computer under Windows 98 coud do ; if there's incompatible software, it most likely does't work with XP already. Compatibility is about 25 years of applications.
Geforce 8/9 GPUs are dying, netcraft confirms it. Well, they suffer from a hardware manufacturing defect that may manifests after years, I sure had a few crashes with my 8400GS, first when testing OpenArena (this is a game that is worth for testing purpose but is so inferior to Quake 3 it's not worth playing). Hard to tell if just the driver crashed or it's because of the hardware.
It may be worth reading this, iranian are now facing severe food shortages and lack of medicine, this will physically weaken the population and have an actual death toll. Who are we to impose such misery, and why is the EU doing this? It's a shame, and possibily an act of war. The population won't overthrow the regime either, because they're being weakened and growing dependant on the regime for their survival. These sanctions are absurd, abject and only useful if the US/Israel intend to attack the country thereafter.
Slashdot Mirror
wow, go in some place like France or Cuba or whatever place that gets it right, then you'll rather be paying $500-$1000 *per year*, if that.
It's easy : Mint is more popular than Ubuntu on Distrowatch, a website where people come to find distros other than Ubuntu.
I'm in the situation of having ditched Windows completely (when my XP was killed by ZBOT, and then when Windows 7 was quite slow and looked ugly when set up with a regular task bar). One of the main issues was a dual boot doesn't work for me. Why reboot?, why maintain two OSes and their updates, why lose the browser's state, why quit what I was doing etc. I would just run Windows 99.9% of the time, could always alt-tab out of a game or quit it and get back to Firefox, hell I had command line ssh and scp under Windows, ssh server, a slow sshfs variant, wget, less, terminal emulator etc. as long with most of the open source software : gimp, openoffice.org, abiword, evince, ffmpeg (in ffdshow) etc.
Linux gaming, and real games at that (NOT openarena and nexuiz, and I don't like Wesnoth) would allow me to gain gaming back, at the moment I can only play card games on the Internet and run SNES emulation with a sound bug I didn't have on Windows.
lol, you really think a 9 Watt CPU in a 15" laptop will overheat?
Assuming you're installing on a 4GB drive, linux mint 12 lxde is great. Dead simple and not looking bad, it's more like using a full PC than some damn small linux or puppy thing with raw X11 software. A friend has it on eee 901, memory was maxed to 2GB (which I recommend, getting an old SO-DIMM should be cheap) and the / partition was a 4GB ext2 on the whole drive, no swap. The PC has a secondary 8GB drive where /home is mounted, which helps with space for user files but it should be nominally usable with the 4GB drive only.
I tend to open zillion tabs, i.e. open ten slashdot stories with some of their articles, while doing similar raids on forums, google, wikipedia or specific searches. I once counted 19 processes. Also, when I got to about 140% memory usage, even my mouse cursor was slow, freezing for several seconds a time.
You probably need two graphics card from the same vendor and able to run the same driver - and have it supported. When I tried two graphics card I had two X11 graphical sessions runnings, with different panel settings, I could move the cursor from one screen to another but couldn't move windows around.
You also get duplicated entries in Preferences etc. (well, those seem to come from me installing LXDE, Cinnamon only put a shortcut to a control panel). also I'm running Mate, which uses nautilus 2.x (renamed) caja for the desktop window, but the default file manager has changed to Nautilus 3.x. I could change the desktop file manager to Nautilus 3.x in gconf-editor or something, but I reverted back, dunno why (I guess I didn't want to re-arrange the icons)
I never run a compositor so I guess this requires even fewer CPU resources. Really, I like black backgrounds on my terminals fine.
edit : damn, I should have made clear that you need to run Mint 12 LXDE if you want something really lightweight, else Mint 13 Xfce (will get a 14 version) and Mint 13/14 Mate are great as well and don't require silly shit like OpenGL for windows management.
Wrong, you get a newer Firefox that puts a lower load on the CPU, and various crappy bugs in the Xorg server, the file manager or damn anything are fixed. Drivers improve, sometimes even on older hardware, sometimes not at all. You're always fine if you're at least running pentium 3 level hardware.
It goes both ways, there's no reason to use Xubuntu over XFCE mint. Both are the same OS, the difference is default selection of software, wallpapers, theme and set up of panels and start menu. Arguably Mint is less gimmicky and looks less dated, from screenshots Xubuntu looks like a dark, poor man's OSX rip off whereas Mint Xfce gives you a taskbar on the bottom, a better start menu, is themed white / light gray. It also has LibreOffice instead of Abiword.
The debian edition of mint is usable (though less friendly than ubuntu version) and is a rolling release. It updates slow though and I'm used to distro versions where I can easily know what version I'm running.
If old DOS doesn't run, then FreeDOS doesn't run either. They both target the very same hardware, a 8086 CPU with 80x25 text mode and IBM compatible BIOS that does the I/O (also hardwired into a very old interrupt controller and maybe some minimal other crap). This makes them compatible with PC hardware that doesn't exist yet. Switching to 386 mode, adding disk caching etc. are done by programs you run.
You will find there are many various emulations done by the BIOS, or UEFI emulating itself the BIOS, or the network card's BIOS or the bootloader. So you can use USB keyb/mouse, USB storage (if it was already present before boot), networking using either a hardware specific or universal packet driver (if you booted from PXE), and even iSCSI. DOS does this, still thinking it is in the early 80s.
I'd run FreeDOS by the way but I find it weird (running an installer from a CD, huge "helpful" config.sys/autoexec.bat out of the box?) and am too lazy to learn the differences so when I "need" (rather, want) to run DOS I run Windows 98's DOS (MS-DOS 7.10), which is largely the same as MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.x but with fat32 support.
Only if you don't have spectrum congestion and are willing to deal with the security hassle.
Sometimes Free linux opengl support is garbage on recent hardware (e.g. Intel Atom with PowerVR IGP), or just non existent. Any brand new VIA motherboard only supports 3D and video acceleration under Windows (you may get a 2D X11 driver by compiling code from their SVN). It's not only slower-than-atom hardware, they have VIA Nano X2 and X4 boards that take 4 or 8GB memory.
Also non-legacy and a reason for concern is ARM SoC, say you get an Asus Transformer netbook with a Tegra 3 and 1 or 2GB memory (dunno what's out) : lol, you might get OpenGL running on that in 3 years, if ever! Virtual Machines : I've never had 3D acceleration running in Virtualbox. Remote desktop? not wasting a huge lot of CPU cycles on a PC that has a working but slow OpenGL driver?
The end result is not the end of the world, it's only the major "default" desktops that are unusable (and even their well-intentioned offspring, Cinnamon). I'm happy to have linux mint 13 MATE. A desktop set up and configured out of the box is important, so that it doesn't look like garbage and has a few GUI tools ; feel free to do apt-get install fluxbox and get an empty ugly piece of crap with a default gtk theme.
About 1) : it may be not impossible to run a custom OS but if you don't have drivers and end up with unaccelerated 2D framebuffer, no networking and no webcam, then it's not worth it. (what if you buy a high end device with half good optics, or have paid for a 4G plan). In some ways, your OS is open or semi-open but the hardware is so closed off on those mobile platforms, we were better off in some ways when we all ran IBM compatible hardware with Windows.
You may use a file manager that deals with USB sticks, pcmanfm is good for that and is desktop agnostic (depends on gtk and gvfs). Printer queue? lol, I don't know anything else than lpq and lprm *, you could either train the wife to use that or write a lame script that uses zenity. Else, congratulations on running fvwm. I only briefly tried "fvwm-crystal" (a configured out of the box desktop) and ditched it because I didn't know how it works, and couldn't be bothered to hunt for a manual or whatever lousy website.
Wrong, I ran XP on DX6 compliant hardware, and installed a working 3D accelerated driver on a Windows 7 32bit box with DX8 hardware (a radeon 9200), which flies with late 90s/early 00s games.
LOL, reliable web standards. Maybe in 2015 or something like that. Meanwhile I have the impression we're replacing java and flash applets with windows RT, google store and apple store applets.
France does extensive domestic dubbing, Quebec probably dubs a lot too, what happens is there are often both Quebecois and French dubbings so you probably need to import DVD from France or Europe if you want "proper" French dubbing. Subtitles will make you go nuts no matter what, because they have to be trimmed a lot to fit on the screen, words and phrases are too long and English suffers much less from this. You always end up with shorter and simpler words or tournures, and parts of dialog even dumped.
(I hope you have mail notification or something, this story is very interesting but three day old..)
c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore)
Good of consideration is the 32bit version of Windows 7, and maybe Windows 8 (if they didn't remove features). Old hardware such a Pentium 3 1GHz with 1GB ram can run it, most probably limited by hard drive speed, every new hardware can run it too. You still get to keep DOS virtual machine and Win16. It can do a lot of the things a computer under Windows 98 coud do ; if there's incompatible software, it most likely does't work with XP already. Compatibility is about 25 years of applications.
Geforce 8/9 GPUs are dying, netcraft confirms it. Well, they suffer from a hardware manufacturing defect that may manifests after years, I sure had a few crashes with my 8400GS, first when testing OpenArena (this is a game that is worth for testing purpose but is so inferior to Quake 3 it's not worth playing). Hard to tell if just the driver crashed or it's because of the hardware.
Wow, I have Wireshark installed (even though I have no use for it) and I had no idea it was a newer version of Ethereal.
Iran Sanctions Now Causing Food Insecurity, Mass Suffering
It may be worth reading this, iranian are now facing severe food shortages and lack of medicine, this will physically weaken the population and have an actual death toll. Who are we to impose such misery, and why is the EU doing this? It's a shame, and possibily an act of war. The population won't overthrow the regime either, because they're being weakened and growing dependant on the regime for their survival. These sanctions are absurd, abject and only useful if the US/Israel intend to attack the country thereafter.