NVidia is one of the biggest usability hurdles on the open source desktop. When you tell someone that after doing their security updates (kernel), they will have to reconfigure their graphics driver, they simply don't understand it. Of course, kernel updates don't happen that often and the nvidia installer is quite good, but it is a royal pain in the ass.
Meanwhile, most ATI cards now have open source drivers with 3D acceleration and that presents a much better overall usability picture for the average user. They just do their updates and get the latest and greatest with no effort on their part.
A race to the bottom is on and the slashdot crowd will cheer at this.
USA/Europe to India to Ethiopia to Uganda to...
And the wages are lowered each step of the way....
To all the mindless people parroting useless corporate cliches, think about what you are saying, because you may be selling your and your family's future short.
The parent makes a compelling argument and lays bare the propaganda that the US military as it is currently constituted serves any other purpose than to advance an imperial foreign policy of occupation.
The numbers he offers are compelling and the sources check up. It would suck for this respone to get lost. So, mods do the right thing, even if you disagree with the overall promise, he argued his case well.
My experience with ECS motherboards has been that they are of the worst quality. They used to sell under a variety of other brands that I have now gladly forgotten.
In my experience, ECS motherboards are the most unreliable crap that you could ever buy and they provide bios upgrades for a very, very short time.
Get a real motherboard: Tyan, Supermicro, Intel are brands I know and trust.
This is why most windows techs are adamant about not giving people a choice. If most of their "clients" were on Linux, their bloodline of "spyware and virus" infestations woudl be cut and they would have to develop real skills.
I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to intervene -and sometimes I do- when a CompUSA "tech" is lying through his teeth to some guy. He is not just abusing this guy's trust, but damaging the reputation of anyone who works in IT as in the end we are all painted with the same brush.
That's what's going on here, my friends.
Fight the Best Buy, CompUSA clueless crowd with all you got!
Yes, I looked at HP's site. And HP's site shows that that printer is not supported on Mac OS 10.1, which is what that computer had on it.
So, now, pray tell me how I should be so thankful to Apple or HP for their proprietary drivers?
The reality is that I am at their mercy and I have never experience this sort of forced obsolescence in linux land. Hardware generally continues to work from one version to the next and more hardware works today in Linux than it does in OS X. I would love to see you dispute those facts, particularly in light of the architecture switch that Apple has planned for OS X. I wonder how many peripherals are not going to work anymore.
So, besides, insulting me, do you have anything to refute my earlier claim that Linux supports more hardware out of the box and that it continues to do so into the future?
Slashdot was a little nicer before the OS X crowd took over and for what is worth I think OS X is a very good OS to do certain tasks.
Pick any random hardware out there today and Linux is a hell of a lot more likely to support it than OS X.
How do I know? Well, there was no way to get an HP-Photosmart 1000 printer going in OS X just this past weekend. Linux, plug and play.
Same thing for a bunch of old scanners that were donated at the community center where I work in the weekends.
With regards to XP, let's just say that I was buy a Brother Laser printer this weekend and have the people at the store were complaining about how they have this scanner that used to work in Windows 2000, but now doesn't work with XP.
The store monkey's response? Get a new scanner. Some other lady in line before me is buying upwards of $120 in virus scanners, spyware removals and firewall bullshit. Yeap, XP is a usability dream.
For what is worth, Linux support for digital cams is quite good. And another note, a very small percentage of people are doing video editing these days. It's still word processing, email, web and some mp3s for most folks, but don't let me stop you from spouting the delusional party line.
I am so sick of hearing this trite. Linux changes every six months. If you have not used it in the last year, you have no clue about the huge gains in usability that have been made.
I wouldn't use anything else unless I was really forced to do so.
You obviously have not used a recent distribution. Install Kubuntu/Ubuntu or Suse 9.3 and then talk.
And there is plenty of things to like about Apple, but there's plenty to dislike such as their proprietary hardware/software combination, the fact that all the useful software that I like on Linux doesn't have a free software equivalent on OS X. Everything from small utilities to usenet news clients becomes yet another expense. And upgrading to the latest and greatest is not just the cost of a DVD or CD, it is quite expensive.
But hell, if the choice is between OS X and Windows XP, I guess, pick your poison.
I am having a blast with Kubuntu.
Re:How long is each release officially supported?
on
OpenBSD 3.7 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well, now I know what to expect, which is not much. If there was/is, a third party that offers OpenBSD support for a minimum of three years, I might be interested in that, but I doubt that it would be as economical as going with Debian.
All of this is under consideration currently. I am honestly surprised that it is only a year, but hey, the OpenBSD developers certainly don't own me anything.
How long is each release officially supported?
on
OpenBSD 3.7 Released
·
· Score: 1
I am trying to create a table of open source software with the respective support deadlines and it has proven difficult.
We are a small shop and in no position to do our own security updates for something like OpenBSD once it ceases to be supported. We are also fairly unfamiliar with the code. Nonetheless, I would like to try the OpenBSD waters, but before I do so, I would like to have some reliable info on how long security updates for each release are offered.
BTW: I know that OpenBSD has a very decent security record, which is why I am interested in it, but knowing how long a release is supported is still important to me.
Vidalinux is Gentoo with the Anaconda installer. So there isn't much novelty to this project. In my LUG, the most dangerous users are Gentoo users.
Usually, they have been running Linux for less than six months. They barely understand unix permissions or init levels or any other basic stuff, but are entirely self-complacent because they managed to type enough commands to install Gentoo. They are also terrible open source advocates because they scare away potential users by pretending that there is no other good way to install a Linux system.
Mandrake's and Red Hat's installers are easier, more flexible, faster and produce a working system every time.
2) It were true that standards are not being followed. Free desktop has done wonders for desktop Linux. I have transitioned hundreds of people in small and not some small NGOs to Linux over the past 3 years, particularly the last year and a half. Never have my support problems been so few. Want prove that Linux works as a desktop today? Many of the people who get Linux at work call me asking whether they can get the same stable environment on their home computers. Of the people who have switched their computers at home, only two have asked me to put Windows back on it. Others greet me with hearfelt gratitude, more than it is actually deserved, because they feel like they finally got their computers back after years of fighting the ongoing insecurity and the never ending issues that they used to experience with Windows.
Right on brother. And here are the facts that no one in the Suse camp wants to face up to:
1) Turbolinux, a distribution with a lot less mindshare and less money can afford to ship you a legal DVD player for $69 but somehow Novell cannot do so?
1a) Unless you are a corporate buyer, you see HP's Suse notebook comes preloaded with PowerDVD.
2) Slide two of the Suse silliness presentation is not that they not ship multimedia codecs out of the box. If that were our only problem. Debian, Red Hat and Mandrake do not ship libdvdcss or any of the other codecs, but once you add them, your existing Totem or Kaffeine players play.
2a) But no, Suse has to go way beyond what's required and actually goes into the source code for Xine and Kaffeine and cripples so that even if you add the missing codecs/libraries, it still will not play.
2b) So what do you do? You have to remove kaffeine, xine, xine-libs ad nauseam and then install apt-get and install those programs from a third-party and hope that it doesn't break anything else. Why is this bad?
Because you no longer get updates for those packages from Suse and because mixing apt and yast sources can often leave your system in an inconsistent state.
All of this is a damn shame, because Suse is an awesome distribution with some stupid, stupid, stupid policies that have no legal or logical basis.
Hopefully, this long response will serve as a permanent rebuttal to all of the Suse fanboys. Liking a distribution should not be tantamount to giving them carte blanche to screw you over.
Summary of facts:
1) Suse ships DVD-playing software whenever the hell it pleases it.
2) Other distributions manage to ship a dvd player for $69, yet Suse costs $85-99 or more.
3) Suse cripples standard libraries and thus has disqualified itself from the home market. I will not touch it for these reasons and I have stopped recommending it to friends and clients.
Without his tenacity and know-how, companies will walk all over us. If you think he isn't deserving of these words, consider that he had to spend 40 hours to discover that Fortinet has indeed violating the GPL. Those assholes were using encryption to obfuscate their use of GPL code.
"Without access to the underlying source code, Welte often has to work hard to find out if GPL software is used in a product. In Fortinet's case, the use of GPL software was unusually difficult to verify, because the company had encrypted it, Welte said. It took 40 hours of work to ferret out the information, he said."
And finally, the just reward.
"The court said Fortinet would have to pay a fine of five to 250,000 euros and that employees would face up to 6 months imprisonment for violation of the injunction. In addition, the company is responsible for Welte's legal fees. "
I can't wait to see more of these cases here in the US so that we can slowly build a nice stack of precedents that will serve to solidify even further the legal standing of the GPL.
Thank you for your integrity. It is rarer these days to find people that make corrections like you did and alert enough to answer on Slashdot.
It is refreshing to see this, even if it is unfortunate that the first headline was put in place and it may point to a need to review editorial workflow so that it doesn't happen in the future.
I think what Ian means is that Ubuntu is bad for his Progeny/Componentized Linux. You see, lots of projects, Guadalinex and Linex among them, were using Componentized Linux as their base and have now made Ubuntu their base distribution.
I run Debian on servers and would not change it for anything in the world. I would also like to see each Ubuntu release come out once a year and with 5 years of support, but I doubt that they have the infrastructure to support this. If they did, they would clean up the enterprise, home and SMB markets in a short two to three years.
It surprises me that they don't see the huge market that's awaiting anyone willing to provide security distributions for a distribution very cheaply for more than eighteen months.
KDE and Gnome are now at the stage that they are as usable as their proprietary counterparts if not more. All the ducks are nicely lined up waiting for Canonical to say we are going to continue to ship CDs and if you want security updates beyond the first 18 months, we will charge $50 a year per machine for the service.
This whole article is a troll based on taking someone's words out of context and spinning them to mean whatever FUD is needed against the GPL.
Fact 1: GPL v.3 doesn't exist. Fact 2: Eben Moglen wasn't commenting on this article. Some CEO putting his personal spin on it is all we have. Fact 3: When this is announced either as a public comment period or otherwise, you can bitch. It will not happen.
The FSF is smart as shown by GPL 2 and they will not do anything to damage the good thing they got.
Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory ? and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
I have always wanted to get a definitive statement on how long each FreeBSD release is supported after it comes out, so even though, this is off-topic, I thought I'd ask somebody who seems to have boxes that must have received at least a few years worth of security updates.
We are not talking about your house here, smarty pants.
We are talking about the public square only being accessible by those that wear MicrosoftShoes and have a Microsoft-membership card.
Public government documents must be accessible by the public "ad infinitum" in publicly-documented formats that will not perish if the company that created them dies, vanishes or any other eventuality.
Additionally, the government should not buttress a monopoly by forcing all of its citizens to purchase from that monopoly if they want to communicate with their own government.
You can do whatever the hell you please with your own documents.
They are only calling a limited edition because it will not be sold through retail. Stop spreading FUD that helps nobody. Sometimes, we, in the Linux commmunity do so much damage to ourselves just so that we can prop "arbitrary preferred distribution".
Mandrake 10.1 is a beautiful distribution. Urpmi and easy urpmi, a web site that allows anyone to set up repositories easily, are wonderful. Which other distribution besides Debian gives you 10,000 packages that install perfectly on a box?
And compiling a kernel is super easy if that's what you want to do. All the software, gcc and friends, is a quick urpmi away.
Moreover, Mandrake is moving to smartpm, which you can read more about at smartpm.org. It installs software from any repository (yum, apt-get, urpmi, red carpet).
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense.
NVidia is one of the biggest usability hurdles on the open source desktop. When you tell someone that after doing their security updates (kernel), they will have to reconfigure their graphics driver, they simply don't understand it. Of course, kernel updates don't happen that often and the nvidia installer is quite good, but it is a royal pain in the ass.
Meanwhile, most ATI cards now have open source drivers with 3D acceleration and that presents a much better overall usability picture for the average user. They just do their updates and get the latest and greatest with no effort on their part.
A race to the bottom is on and the slashdot crowd will cheer at this.
...
USA/Europe to India to Ethiopia to Uganda to
And the wages are lowered each step of the way....
To all the mindless people parroting useless corporate cliches, think about what you are saying, because you may be selling your and your family's future short.
http://oooconv.free.fr/wikipedia/wikipedia_en.html
The parent makes a compelling argument and lays bare the propaganda that the US military as it is currently constituted serves any other purpose than to advance an imperial foreign policy of occupation.
The numbers he offers are compelling and the sources check up. It would suck for this respone to get lost. So, mods do the right thing, even if you disagree with the overall promise, he argued his case well.
My experience with ECS motherboards has been that they are of the worst quality. They used to sell under a variety of other brands that I have now gladly forgotten.
In my experience, ECS motherboards are the most unreliable crap that you could ever buy and they provide bios upgrades for a very, very short time.
Get a real motherboard: Tyan, Supermicro, Intel are brands I know and trust.
This is why most windows techs are adamant about not giving people a choice. If most of their "clients" were on Linux, their bloodline of "spyware and virus" infestations woudl be cut and they would have to develop real skills.
I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to intervene -and sometimes I do- when a CompUSA "tech" is lying through his teeth to some guy. He is not just abusing this guy's trust, but damaging the reputation of anyone who works in IT as in the end we are all painted with the same brush.
That's what's going on here, my friends.
Fight the Best Buy, CompUSA clueless crowd with all you got!
Yes, I looked at HP's site. And HP's site shows that that printer is not supported on Mac OS 10.1, which is what that computer had on it.
So, now, pray tell me how I should be so thankful to Apple or HP for their proprietary drivers?
The reality is that I am at their mercy and I have never experience this sort of forced obsolescence in linux land. Hardware generally continues to work from one version to the next and more hardware works today in Linux than it does in OS X. I would love to see you dispute those facts, particularly in light of the architecture switch that Apple has planned for OS X. I wonder how many peripherals are not going to work anymore.
So, besides, insulting me, do you have anything to refute my earlier claim that Linux supports more hardware out of the box and that it continues to do so into the future?
Slashdot was a little nicer before the OS X crowd took over and for what is worth I think OS X is a very good OS to do certain tasks.
You are so full of shit, it's not even funny.
Pick any random hardware out there today and Linux is a hell of a lot more likely to support it than OS X.
How do I know? Well, there was no way to get an HP-Photosmart 1000 printer going in OS X just this past weekend. Linux, plug and play.
Same thing for a bunch of old scanners that were donated at the community center where I work in the weekends.
With regards to XP, let's just say that I was buy a Brother Laser printer this weekend and have the people at the store were complaining about how they have this scanner that used to work in Windows 2000, but now doesn't work with XP.
The store monkey's response? Get a new scanner.
Some other lady in line before me is buying upwards of $120 in virus scanners, spyware removals and firewall bullshit. Yeap, XP is a usability dream.
For what is worth, Linux support for digital cams is quite good. And another note, a very small percentage of people are doing video editing these days. It's still word processing, email, web and some mp3s for most folks, but don't let me stop you from spouting the delusional party line.
I am so sick of hearing this trite. Linux changes every six months. If you have not used it in the last year, you have no clue about the huge gains in usability that have been made.
I wouldn't use anything else unless I was really forced to do so.
You obviously have not used a recent distribution. Install Kubuntu/Ubuntu or Suse 9.3 and then talk.
And there is plenty of things to like about Apple, but there's plenty to dislike such as their proprietary hardware/software combination, the fact that all the useful software that I like on Linux doesn't have a free software equivalent on OS X. Everything from small utilities to usenet news clients becomes yet another expense. And upgrading to the latest and greatest is not just the cost of a DVD or CD, it is quite expensive.
But hell, if the choice is between OS X and Windows XP, I guess, pick your poison.
I am having a blast with Kubuntu.
Well, now I know what to expect, which is not much. If there was/is, a third party that offers OpenBSD support for a minimum of three years, I might be interested in that, but I doubt that it would be as economical as going with Debian.
All of this is under consideration currently. I am honestly surprised that it is only a year, but hey, the OpenBSD developers certainly don't own me anything.
I am trying to create a table of open source software with the respective support deadlines and it has proven difficult.
We are a small shop and in no position to do our own security updates for something like OpenBSD once it ceases to be supported. We are also fairly unfamiliar with the code. Nonetheless, I would like to try the OpenBSD waters, but before I do so, I would like to have some reliable info on how long security updates for each release are offered.
BTW: I know that OpenBSD has a very decent security record, which is why I am interested in it, but knowing how long a release is supported is still important to me.
Thanks.
Try konqueror. Fast and light and has quickly matured to the point that I no longer come across pages that make me start Firefox.
This is konqueror as shipped by Kubuntu in KDE 3.4
Vidalinux is Gentoo with the Anaconda installer. So there isn't much novelty to this project. In my LUG, the most dangerous users are Gentoo users.
Usually, they have been running Linux for less than six months. They barely understand unix permissions or init levels or any other basic stuff, but are entirely self-complacent because they managed to type enough commands to install Gentoo. They are also terrible open source advocates because they scare away potential users by pretending that there is no other good way to install a Linux system.
Mandrake's and Red Hat's installers are easier, more flexible, faster and produce a working system every time.
I would take you seriously if:
1 22 92122
1) You were not cutting and pasting the same drivel in unrelated stories:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146731&cid=
2) It were true that standards are not being followed. Free desktop has done wonders for desktop Linux. I have transitioned hundreds of people in small and not some small NGOs to Linux over the past 3 years, particularly the last year and a half. Never have my support problems been so few. Want prove that Linux works as a desktop today? Many of the people who get Linux at work call me asking whether they can get the same stable environment on their home computers. Of the people who have switched their computers at home, only two have asked me to put Windows back on it. Others greet me with hearfelt gratitude, more than it is actually deserved, because they feel like they finally got their computers back after years of fighting the ongoing insecurity and the never ending issues that they used to experience with Windows.
Right on brother. And here are the facts that no one in the Suse camp wants to face up to:
1) Turbolinux, a distribution with a lot less mindshare and less money can afford to ship you a legal DVD player for $69 but somehow Novell cannot do so?
1a) Unless you are a corporate buyer, you see HP's Suse notebook comes preloaded with PowerDVD.
2) Slide two of the Suse silliness presentation is not that they not ship multimedia codecs out of the box. If that were our only problem. Debian, Red Hat and Mandrake do not ship libdvdcss or any of the other codecs, but once you add them, your existing Totem or Kaffeine players play.
2a) But no, Suse has to go way beyond what's required and actually goes into the source code for Xine and Kaffeine and cripples so that even if you add the missing codecs/libraries, it still will not play.
2b) So what do you do? You have to remove kaffeine, xine, xine-libs ad nauseam and then install apt-get and install those programs from a third-party and hope that it doesn't break anything else. Why is this bad?
Because you no longer get updates for those packages from Suse and because mixing apt and yast sources can often leave your system in an inconsistent state.
All of this is a damn shame, because Suse is an awesome distribution with some stupid, stupid, stupid policies that have no legal or logical basis.
Hopefully, this long response will serve as a permanent rebuttal to all of the Suse fanboys. Liking a distribution should not be tantamount to giving them carte blanche to screw you over.
Summary of facts:
1) Suse ships DVD-playing software whenever the hell it pleases it.
2) Other distributions manage to ship a dvd player for $69, yet Suse costs $85-99 or more.
3) Suse cripples standard libraries and thus has disqualified itself from the home market. I will not touch it for these reasons and I have stopped recommending it to friends and clients.
Without his tenacity and know-how, companies will walk all over us. If you think he isn't deserving of these words, consider that he had to spend 40 hours to discover that Fortinet has indeed violating the GPL. Those assholes were using encryption to obfuscate their use of GPL code.
"Without access to the underlying source code, Welte often has to work hard to find out if GPL software is used in a product. In Fortinet's case, the use of GPL software was unusually difficult to verify, because the company had encrypted it, Welte said. It took 40 hours of work to ferret out the information, he said."
And finally, the just reward.
"The court said Fortinet would have to pay a fine of five to 250,000 euros and that employees would face up to 6 months imprisonment for violation of the injunction. In addition, the company is responsible for Welte's legal fees. "
I can't wait to see more of these cases here in the US so that we can slowly build a nice stack of precedents that will serve to solidify even further the legal standing of the GPL.
Thank you for your integrity. It is rarer these days to find people that make corrections like you did and alert enough to answer on Slashdot.
It is refreshing to see this, even if it is unfortunate that the first headline was put in place and it may point to a need to review editorial workflow so that it doesn't happen in the future.
I think what Ian means is that Ubuntu is bad for his Progeny/Componentized Linux. You see, lots of projects, Guadalinex and Linex among them, were using Componentized Linux as their base and have now made Ubuntu their base distribution.
I run Debian on servers and would not change it for anything in the world. I would also like to see each Ubuntu release come out once a year and with 5 years of support, but I doubt that they have the infrastructure to support this. If they did, they would clean up the enterprise, home and SMB markets in a short two to three years.
It surprises me that they don't see the huge market that's awaiting anyone willing to provide security distributions for a distribution very cheaply for more than eighteen months.
KDE and Gnome are now at the stage that they are as usable as their proprietary counterparts if not more. All the ducks are nicely lined up waiting for Canonical to say we are going to continue to ship CDs and if you want security updates beyond the first 18 months, we will charge $50 a year per machine for the service.
That would rock!
This whole article is a troll based on taking someone's words out of context and spinning them to mean whatever FUD is needed against the GPL.
Fact 1: GPL v.3 doesn't exist.
Fact 2: Eben Moglen wasn't commenting on this article. Some CEO putting his personal spin on it is all we have.
Fact 3: When this is announced either as a public comment period or otherwise, you can bitch. It will not happen.
The FSF is smart as shown by GPL 2 and they will not do anything to damage the good thing they got.
From their FAQs:
11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?
Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We'll commit when we're ready, okay? Besides, what's so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we're jaded, but we've seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they've been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory ? and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about "a new direction" and "getting back to basics." No thanks, man. We like our freedom.
Nonsense, Mandrake makes a lean and mean server and I have had very good fortune with it.
Mandrake is my preferred platform for egrouwpare. In my testing, it is faster than Suse and it is less complex.
I will admit that Yast, particularly the ncurses interfaces over ssh is really nice.
I have always wanted to get a definitive statement on how long each FreeBSD release is supported after it comes out, so even though, this is off-topic, I thought I'd ask somebody who seems to have boxes that must have received at least a few years worth of security updates.
Thanks.
We are not talking about your house here, smarty pants.
We are talking about the public square only being accessible by those that wear MicrosoftShoes and have a Microsoft-membership card.
Public government documents must be accessible by the public "ad infinitum" in publicly-documented formats that will not perish if the company that created them dies, vanishes or any other eventuality.
Additionally, the government should not buttress a monopoly by forcing all of its citizens to purchase from that monopoly if they want to communicate with their own government.
You can do whatever the hell you please with your own documents.
This works in linux too. Thanks.
Nonsense.
They are only calling a limited edition because it will not be sold through retail. Stop spreading FUD that helps nobody. Sometimes, we, in the Linux commmunity do so much damage to ourselves just so that we can prop "arbitrary preferred distribution".
Mandrake 10.1 is a beautiful distribution. Urpmi and easy urpmi, a web site that allows anyone to set up repositories easily, are wonderful. Which other distribution besides Debian gives you 10,000 packages that install perfectly on a box?
And compiling a kernel is super easy if that's what you want to do. All the software, gcc and friends, is a quick urpmi away.
Moreover, Mandrake is moving to smartpm, which you can read more about at smartpm.org. It installs software from any repository (yum, apt-get, urpmi, red carpet).