Will you watch movies through VNC or FreeNX and get sound with pulseaudio networking? Can it even keep up with SNES games? This is pointless.
What you may want to be doing is to run that HTPC as a "diskless workstation" so the OS and his files reside on the basement server. ltsp-pnp (i.e. the latest versions of ltsp) and its default fat client mode makes it easy (it even uses NBD networking so you don't have to worry about NFS and samba crap). Plus you get to access local media.
if your contract expires, do you get any new real incentive to change your phone overnight? you'll find out smartphones will be actually maturing and this madness will have to end. we don't upgrade our PC when the ISP contract is 2 year old or 2*n year old, we only upgrade it when we want to.
I don't know how much the US market is still crooked but here in France we have a provider that separates service and phone financing. it's still very new though. in the US I don't know why carriers bundling is even needed since everyone seems to have a credit card
replying to myself I mean ubuntu as a bare text install where you apt-get further packages yourself. a default debian squeeze might do if you update the crappy old firefox version.
MS-DOS teaches a command line and is so dead simple. contrary to a bash prompt it rewards you with high quality games (though they run their own stuff and DOS is a few KB of shit waiting for them to terminate). there's even Qbasic, which is more or less hated for goto spaghetti (though it has while loops) but it's unique, well-known and comes with comprehensive hypertext documentation. Qbasic was the only form of programming for the masses ever after 8-bit computers!, barring modern project known by a few geeks and thus not reaching the masses..
There's no shortage of greatness, such as Indiana Jones adventure games and the Incredible Machines. these are games that made you read or think. even the original Prince of Persia was nice and can still be played today, The only boring part is, while it runs on every PC from 1981 to 2012, you may need an ISA slot and ISA sound card for sound compatibility, especially adlib. getting a packet driver for a random network interface is easier. I had a port of Lynx, ssh client but did not find a VNC client sadly.
a DOS machine is too limited of course, you could set up a dual boot, ubuntu 12.04 with a crappy desktop such as iceWM where he can has the multimedia and web and boring things.
putting the network drive in/etc/fstab is probably easier that trying to use "helper" apps.
btw "Gigolo" does work, the end user only has to know it's not a program about porn or ordering escort boys, and know if their file manager uses "GVFS".
every five years, freeze a set of "extremely important libraries" and "critical interfaces" and what have you (stuff named like libc, glibc and any libgrujdsrfr01 that 0.01% people know they exist but are needed for common applications ; and whatever kernel features). maybe some toolkit version and stuff. support them forever, even if that needs some kind of chroot or wrappers or something.
that way commercial software, unmaintained or dead software, and software made by a single person, often good games and unique or nice freeware, can be run on linux. the show can go on for high profile maintained open source and server stuff, these things can still chase the permanent upgrade treadmill if they can afford to.
one of my first experiences with tinkering under linux was trying to get ttyquake running. needless to say I was pissed when I found out it was totally incompatible because it was 7 or 8 year old. try running a Loki game, those games were a classic argument to make people believe you can game on linux : every single one of them is probably dead, forever incompatible.
a good example is console emulators. there are some under linux, mainly zsnes. 95% other ones are for windows and are small program made in 2004, 2007, 2002 or more recent. most linux versions have sound glitches or no GUI.
wasn't PAE a feature introduced on the Pentium Pro? so most 32bits processors should support it. (of course there could be old VIA CPUs or something, or artificial disabling on some Intel models, or what have you). not that 32bit systems with over 4GB memory would be exactly common (you might need a pentium 4 variant with artificially disabled 64bit support and a ddr2 motherboard, or max out some rare high end x86 server from before the transition.)
I was pretty amazed that I could read floppies from the 80s and very early nineties flawlessly, those were 5.25". I was collecting crap back then so I ended up with an Apple II and a PC/AT (where I added a VGA card, and a null modem cable for transfers).
3.5" were at least more physically robust, though you could bend the metal latch and at worst destroy the drive when you get it stuck in it. but, it was so incredibly unreliable! back then too, a home computer was only useful for gaming and the floppies were used for piracy. no used had a modem or used a BBS, because the costs would have been prohibitive. it was a US thing. as a kid I really wondered where these cracked versions of games were coming from.
I don't know if you can get a small board with their chipset but they seem to do well (the dingoo a320, the ben nanonote and later, with a newer SoC the $99 Android 4.0 tablet). very efficient. it's MIPS, though.
it might be disgustingly slow, but then it has real ethernet, not a usb dongle you waste your cpu on. a VGA out too, so you don't need to buy a display ; storage and a lot more USB. is it a piece of crap?, maybe, but you would then find the raspi to be an unusable piece of crap as well.
maybe you'd want to make a startup based on the idea that the consumer does have fiber at home. all kind of new stuff becomes possible, the latency is lower because there's no modem, the upload bandwith is increased a lot, maybe 100x.
the exact applications of this, we maybe don't know all the new scenarios. but it may involve a windows PC with 3D acceleration and sound, or a linux desktop with a 1080p webcam, etc. You can't really test or demonstrate your concept with the end user gear locked in a colo center.
it's pitch black when I switch to a text console, well the monitor thinks the frequency are unknown, then switches off. so, the text mode is a low class citizen already. thanks to the discussion I know it's perhaps about using nvidia driver, and the poor console thing trying to do KMS even though it's unavaible. I'm running ubuntu 12.04 (mint 13 mate)
so, I should configure myself but it's so boring. try vga=normal as kernel boot parameter, I've been told. well, I didn't yet, because I know I'll have to navigate the grub2 dynamic maze after that. I would be fine with real 80x50. which I never got to use by the way on linux, it always was 80x25 until they decided we would get the monitor's max resolution (this isn't very fun on a low end CRT). there wasn't a command like "mode" in DOS/windows, or I was never told about it. I just couldn't care enough to learn guru things that would never matter to anyone else
one redeeming quality for this madness is a video projector can not support the text modes (and graphical 320x200, etc.) ; dunno what happens with TV used as monitor.
wrong, the money is spent by the evil overlord on italian sports cars, gold-plated weapons, home theater, swimming pools etc. while the general population is still enslaved, malnourished, digging in a hole and crushing their backs by carrying undecent amount of rocks. the overlord's hunchmen and the people who built its lavish villa do profit, though.
ironically you maybe should go for a battery that doesn't carry any OEM marks. I looked for batteries for a friend's eeepc, and for a friend's acer (but, we didn't buy any one). the vendor is the company actually making them! (or so is the claim). there are long duration models with twice the battery life. as we're all cash strapped we couldn't sadly test them.
because I was the one installing it, doing all the choice of packages and all desktop environment configuration (autologin, taskbar, wallpaper) and the whole set up was identical to doing it with ubuntu 10.04. squeeze's firmware policy is the biggest difference. I know newbies installing debian the easy way too, it's identical to ubuntu for the most part. a buddy still has an installation of etch or lenny. my main fault was installing some stupid firmware collection and believing it has a 50% chance of working.
not meaning this to be inflammatory but I once installed debian on a computer to give it away, I put a good looking lxde desktop and quite some software (gimp, inkscape, audacity etc.). it was fast and good (a pentium 3 tower with 512MB ram).
only, the guy who took it just couldn't use his usb wifi adapter to pick up a network. I had installed wicd and a generic firmware collection (a package found with apt-cache search, but with little description of what these firmware were). sadly I didn't have the wifi installer during installation. the fact is, with firmware policy the user is fucked when linux guru and concerned hardware aren't in the same place.
so, I'm stuck with ubuntu or mint if installing a computer that I don't manage. ubuntu has the same text mode installer, which allows a similar bare installation with no desktop and then apt-getting the desktop and software is the same (all package names identical). debian has in-place upgrade and the conservative choice of software in stable is not too bad. it would be perfect if we had "apt-get install notcrippledbecauseoffirmware"!
I've always ignored the library. winamp always was the classic player where you drop files and folders from your file managers, not deal with a library that only takes away from your time and never works anyway when you have a lot of tunes named "Track01", duplicate artists because of spaces vs underscores, etc.
I would still use winamp, but run Audacious nowadays (have started to run the GTK UI very lately, because the winamp 2.x clone has a windows management bug that makes it almost unusable)
when I was ten year old I would see ads for syquest drives in magazines, and dreamt of 44MB or 80MB cartridges when I had a 40MB hard disk drive (indiana jones atlantis was taking 10MB from it). same thing when we had a 486 DX/2 66 with a 120MB drive and we had to choose between doom and descent. I didn't realize at the time that a crappy backup drive wasn't meant for even DOS gaming. in retrospect it sucks that we didn't get an old hard drive too (even an old by then 80MB drive) and especially it's a shame we couldn't get four 1MB sticks of memory to play duke3D on that PC.
I bought a motorola feature phone a couple of years ago, and it was a piece of crap. I bought it because it had an USB port for charging (and bought the wrong cable at a flea market). the keypad was incredibly bad, worse than toy phones for children. then it just died. they cut too many corners and a Nokia or Samsung feature phone was exponentially better. (the motorola F3 was nice a few years before though, ironically it was meant for the 3rd world and thus that one was high quality)
paying 100 euros for a restrictive license is a bit too much. tied to one computer, and over restrictions - remote use is forbidden unless you've strictly got one user running, for one thing. all so that I can play quake 2 and quake 3 based games, etc. again. or even play a doom source port, which does not even runs correctly under linux - a long time bug prevents from using soundfonts with the timidity synthesizer and the default midi is horrendous crap with missing instruments.
I would like a working ReactOS, this would give a lot of the benefits of a linux Operating System, but with working games! and applications such as Ableton, etc. Really, in the end, the benefit of open source for the end user is it's like you have an unlimited, free pool of Windows Server Enterprise Edition licenses and secondary client access/terminal server licenses. or the fact that you can refurbish old computers. a pentium 3 is better and cheaper than a raspberry pi and runs well with a debian/ubuntu variant with the LXDE desktop ; ReactOS would be a fine alternative. though actually, an old PC (10 years and more) will take windows 7/8 as long as it has 768MB or more memory - if you're willing to either use a cracked version or buy a 100 euro license for a computer that's worth maybe 20 euros.
I used Chrome for a while, but couldn't keep it. was faster at times than firefox, but one process per tab means that with many tabs memory use really goes through the roof, so the browser is actually even more hungry than firefox! now I'm back to firefox, which keeps improving - version 13 added the feature of keeping your old tabs on start up, but not reloading them until you visit them. which makes a totally huge difference.
Chrome was good, barring the spartan UI at times. but to use it I would need to change my motherboard so I can upgrade from 2GB ddr2 to 8GB ddr3.
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Will you watch movies through VNC or FreeNX and get sound with pulseaudio networking? Can it even keep up with SNES games? This is pointless.
What you may want to be doing is to run that HTPC as a "diskless workstation" so the OS and his files reside on the basement server. ltsp-pnp (i.e. the latest versions of ltsp) and its default fat client mode makes it easy (it even uses NBD networking so you don't have to worry about NFS and samba crap). Plus you get to access local media.
if your contract expires, do you get any new real incentive to change your phone overnight? you'll find out smartphones will be actually maturing and this madness will have to end. we don't upgrade our PC when the ISP contract is 2 year old or 2*n year old, we only upgrade it when we want to.
I don't know how much the US market is still crooked but here in France we have a provider that separates service and phone financing. it's still very new though. in the US I don't know why carriers bundling is even needed since everyone seems to have a credit card
.
replying to myself I mean ubuntu as a bare text install where you apt-get further packages yourself. a default debian squeeze might do if you update the crappy old firefox version.
MS-DOS teaches a command line and is so dead simple. contrary to a bash prompt it rewards you with high quality games (though they run their own stuff and DOS is a few KB of shit waiting for them to terminate). there's even Qbasic, which is more or less hated for goto spaghetti (though it has while loops) but it's unique, well-known and comes with comprehensive hypertext documentation. Qbasic was the only form of programming for the masses ever after 8-bit computers!, barring modern project known by a few geeks and thus not reaching the masses..
There's no shortage of greatness, such as Indiana Jones adventure games and the Incredible Machines. these are games that made you read or think. even the original Prince of Persia was nice and can still be played today, The only boring part is, while it runs on every PC from 1981 to 2012, you may need an ISA slot and ISA sound card for sound compatibility, especially adlib. getting a packet driver for a random network interface is easier. I had a port of Lynx, ssh client but did not find a VNC client sadly.
a DOS machine is too limited of course, you could set up a dual boot, ubuntu 12.04 with a crappy desktop such as iceWM where he can has the multimedia and web and boring things.
putting the network drive in /etc/fstab is probably easier that trying to use "helper" apps.
btw "Gigolo" does work, the end user only has to know it's not a program about porn or ordering escort boys, and know if their file manager uses "GVFS".
every five years, freeze a set of "extremely important libraries" and "critical interfaces" and what have you (stuff named like libc, glibc and any libgrujdsrfr01 that 0.01% people know they exist but are needed for common applications ; and whatever kernel features). maybe some toolkit version and stuff. support them forever, even if that needs some kind of chroot or wrappers or something.
that way commercial software, unmaintained or dead software, and software made by a single person, often good games and unique or nice freeware, can be run on linux. the show can go on for high profile maintained open source and server stuff, these things can still chase the permanent upgrade treadmill if they can afford to.
one of my first experiences with tinkering under linux was trying to get ttyquake running. needless to say I was pissed when I found out it was totally incompatible because it was 7 or 8 year old. try running a Loki game, those games were a classic argument to make people believe you can game on linux : every single one of them is probably dead, forever incompatible.
a good example is console emulators. there are some under linux, mainly zsnes. 95% other ones are for windows and are small program made in 2004, 2007, 2002 or more recent. most linux versions have sound glitches or no GUI.
your grandmother's celeron running windows 98 is PAE-capable hardware.
wasn't PAE a feature introduced on the Pentium Pro? so most 32bits processors should support it. (of course there could be old VIA CPUs or something, or artificial disabling on some Intel models, or what have you). not that 32bit systems with over 4GB memory would be exactly common (you might need a pentium 4 variant with artificially disabled 64bit support and a ddr2 motherboard, or max out some rare high end x86 server from before the transition.)
I was pretty amazed that I could read floppies from the 80s and very early nineties flawlessly, those were 5.25". I was collecting crap back then so I ended up with an Apple II and a PC/AT (where I added a VGA card, and a null modem cable for transfers).
3.5" were at least more physically robust, though you could bend the metal latch and at worst destroy the drive when you get it stuck in it. but, it was so incredibly unreliable! back then too, a home computer was only useful for gaming and the floppies were used for piracy. no used had a modem or used a BBS, because the costs would have been prohibitive. it was a US thing. as a kid I really wondered where these cracked versions of games were coming from.
Ingenic, maybe?
I don't know if you can get a small board with their chipset but they seem to do well (the dingoo a320, the ben nanonote and later, with a newer SoC the $99 Android 4.0 tablet). very efficient. it's MIPS, though.
it might be disgustingly slow, but then it has real ethernet, not a usb dongle you waste your cpu on. a VGA out too, so you don't need to buy a display ; storage and a lot more USB. is it a piece of crap?, maybe, but you would then find the raspi to be an unusable piece of crap as well.
maybe you'd want to make a startup based on the idea that the consumer does have fiber at home. all kind of new stuff becomes possible, the latency is lower because there's no modem, the upload bandwith is increased a lot, maybe 100x.
the exact applications of this, we maybe don't know all the new scenarios. but it may involve a windows PC with 3D acceleration and sound, or a linux desktop with a 1080p webcam, etc. You can't really test or demonstrate your concept with the end user gear locked in a colo center.
it's pitch black when I switch to a text console, well the monitor thinks the frequency are unknown, then switches off. so, the text mode is a low class citizen already. thanks to the discussion I know it's perhaps about using nvidia driver, and the poor console thing trying to do KMS even though it's unavaible. I'm running ubuntu 12.04 (mint 13 mate)
so, I should configure myself but it's so boring. try vga=normal as kernel boot parameter, I've been told. well, I didn't yet, because I know I'll have to navigate the grub2 dynamic maze after that. I would be fine with real 80x50. which I never got to use by the way on linux, it always was 80x25 until they decided we would get the monitor's max resolution (this isn't very fun on a low end CRT). there wasn't a command like "mode" in DOS/windows, or I was never told about it. I just couldn't care enough to learn guru things that would never matter to anyone else
one redeeming quality for this madness is a video projector can not support the text modes (and graphical 320x200, etc.) ; dunno what happens with TV used as monitor.
why not send him to cuba, or another south american country.
xfce is CPU and memory hungry, compared to its lightweight reputation. I either use gnome2/MATE or lxde instead.
wrong, the money is spent by the evil overlord on italian sports cars, gold-plated weapons, home theater, swimming pools etc. while the general population is still enslaved, malnourished, digging in a hole and crushing their backs by carrying undecent amount of rocks. the overlord's hunchmen and the people who built its lavish villa do profit, though.
ironically you maybe should go for a battery that doesn't carry any OEM marks. I looked for batteries for a friend's eeepc, and for a friend's acer (but, we didn't buy any one). the vendor is the company actually making them! (or so is the claim). there are long duration models with twice the battery life. as we're all cash strapped we couldn't sadly test them.
maybe that's a bit different with a sony..
because I was the one installing it, doing all the choice of packages and all desktop environment configuration (autologin, taskbar, wallpaper) and the whole set up was identical to doing it with ubuntu 10.04. squeeze's firmware policy is the biggest difference. I know newbies installing debian the easy way too, it's identical to ubuntu for the most part. a buddy still has an installation of etch or lenny. my main fault was installing some stupid firmware collection and believing it has a 50% chance of working.
not meaning this to be inflammatory but I once installed debian on a computer to give it away, I put a good looking lxde desktop and quite some software (gimp, inkscape, audacity etc.). it was fast and good (a pentium 3 tower with 512MB ram).
only, the guy who took it just couldn't use his usb wifi adapter to pick up a network. I had installed wicd and a generic firmware collection (a package found with apt-cache search, but with little description of what these firmware were). sadly I didn't have the wifi installer during installation. the fact is, with firmware policy the user is fucked when linux guru and concerned hardware aren't in the same place.
so, I'm stuck with ubuntu or mint if installing a computer that I don't manage. ubuntu has the same text mode installer, which allows a similar bare installation with no desktop and then apt-getting the desktop and software is the same (all package names identical). debian has in-place upgrade and the conservative choice of software in stable is not too bad. it would be perfect if we had "apt-get install notcrippledbecauseoffirmware"!
I've always ignored the library. winamp always was the classic player where you drop files and folders from your file managers, not deal with a library that only takes away from your time and never works anyway when you have a lot of tunes named "Track01", duplicate artists because of spaces vs underscores, etc.
I would still use winamp, but run Audacious nowadays (have started to run the GTK UI very lately, because the winamp 2.x clone has a windows management bug that makes it almost unusable)
when I was ten year old I would see ads for syquest drives in magazines, and dreamt of 44MB or 80MB cartridges when I had a 40MB hard disk drive (indiana jones atlantis was taking 10MB from it). same thing when we had a 486 DX/2 66 with a 120MB drive and we had to choose between doom and descent. I didn't realize at the time that a crappy backup drive wasn't meant for even DOS gaming. in retrospect it sucks that we didn't get an old hard drive too (even an old by then 80MB drive) and especially it's a shame we couldn't get four 1MB sticks of memory to play duke3D on that PC.
I bought a motorola feature phone a couple of years ago, and it was a piece of crap. I bought it because it had an USB port for charging (and bought the wrong cable at a flea market). the keypad was incredibly bad, worse than toy phones for children. then it just died. they cut too many corners and a Nokia or Samsung feature phone was exponentially better. (the motorola F3 was nice a few years before though, ironically it was meant for the 3rd world and thus that one was high quality)
geekwire.com's algorithm served me an article about Darth Vader as an amazing project manager, that is quite telling!
Vader kicks ass, and didn't need to steal software projects or other works when he could implement things himself. Still evil, though.
paying 100 euros for a restrictive license is a bit too much. tied to one computer, and over restrictions - remote use is forbidden unless you've strictly got one user running, for one thing. all so that I can play quake 2 and quake 3 based games, etc. again. or even play a doom source port, which does not even runs correctly under linux - a long time bug prevents from using soundfonts with the timidity synthesizer and the default midi is horrendous crap with missing instruments.
I would like a working ReactOS, this would give a lot of the benefits of a linux Operating System, but with working games! and applications such as Ableton, etc. Really, in the end, the benefit of open source for the end user is it's like you have an unlimited, free pool of Windows Server Enterprise Edition licenses and secondary client access/terminal server licenses. or the fact that you can refurbish old computers. a pentium 3 is better and cheaper than a raspberry pi and runs well with a debian/ubuntu variant with the LXDE desktop ; ReactOS would be a fine alternative. though actually, an old PC (10 years and more) will take windows 7/8 as long as it has 768MB or more memory - if you're willing to either use a cracked version or buy a 100 euro license for a computer that's worth maybe 20 euros.
I used Chrome for a while, but couldn't keep it. was faster at times than firefox, but one process per tab means that with many tabs memory use really goes through the roof, so the browser is actually even more hungry than firefox! now I'm back to firefox, which keeps improving - version 13 added the feature of keeping your old tabs on start up, but not reloading them until you visit them. which makes a totally huge difference.
Chrome was good, barring the spartan UI at times. but to use it I would need to change my motherboard so I can upgrade from 2GB ddr2 to 8GB ddr3.