I can name some of them, but others I'd have to do some research on because it's been a while since I've used them. I know Mandrake has Anaconda, Harddrake and DrakConf; SuSE has YaST and SaX; RedHat has Anaconda (and others that I can't remember). If someone can fill in the blanks I'll add this information to the article.
Yeah okay so it's a shameless plug, but I really do listen when readers have corrections or requests, and I work really hard to make my site as excellent as I can.
Lots of my reviews have made Slashdot, and I can tell you that no matter how good you are, people are going to complain that you didn't accomodate them. Generally I offer to run tests for people if they request it, thereby eliminating some of the griping and as an intentional side-effect, it helps people in the process.
I agree; most reviews suck. That's why I started my own site. I could really use the traffic, so why don't you at least come by and check it out? www.thejemreport.com
I have reviews of various versions of many Unix OSes: Solaris, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux (Gentoo, Lindows, SuSE) and a lot of software for x86. More are on the way, as always.
If you think my reviews suck and tell me about it (specifically), I'll do my best to edit the review or improve future reviews.
I think it's time for a regime change at Sun. They need someone in charge who is willing to let go of the 1980s software business mentality and adapt to the modern world.
You can't sell proprietary UNIX when others can get it for free. You can't sell StarOffice when you can get OO.org for free. You can't sell $8000 UltraSPARC workstations when you can build more powerful AMD64 machines for an 1/8th the price. You can't lock down a programming language that people want to use when there are so many other competing technologies that they can turn to.
It seems to me that Java is going to be dead within the next couple of years if it doesn't open up and become a Free standard.
Wouldn't it suck if Sun went under and Microsoft bought up all of their assets, including Java, and then killed it all? Don't laugh; it could happen.
A while back I had a phone interview with the product manager of Solaris. I asked him if Solaris would ever be Free Software (or at least open-source) someday. He said that you can get the Solaris source if you need it, but it can never be under the GPL or similar Free Software licenses because they use so much code from other companies that contain trade secrets and otehr things that Sun hasn't the right to "give away." He specifically listed Kodak as one example because Solaris 9 includes code that Kodak wrote and licensed to Sun -- it had something to do with color matching or something like that.
I guess they could GPL Solaris minus the third-party proprietary code, whatever it may be, but then you're not getting the real Solaris anymore.
Novell ran into this problem when they bought the rights to the UNIX SVR4 source. There was some talk at the time of making it GPL, but there were so many agreements with vendors like Intel and Sun that prohibited opening up the code that it was impossible to accomplish.
Sun should have opened up Solaris years ago, if it were possible. Then people could have manipulated the source according to their needs and Sun would have sold more hardware as a result. Solaris adds value to Sun hardware -- that's its sole purpose -- and Sun missed the chance to really capitalize on that.
Here's an article for you if you don't care about licensing. Honestly, do you agree to Adobe's license? If you don't -- or if you don't care and manage to violate the agreement out of igornace -- you are committing a felony under US criminal law (not to mention the civil penalty as well). Adobe wants to make you into an unemployable, scum-of-the-earth, dirty, lying criminal for violating their unreasonably restrictive license.
Everyone who doesn't care about licensing should be required to face the wrath of the BSA. Mayve then you'll see the beauty of Free Software despite its flaws?
I have everything -- Word 2003, TextMaker, LyX, StarOffice 7, OO.org 1.1.1, Lotus Word Pro 9.8, WP 12, WP Linux... others that I can't even remember... for writing, I do almost all of my work in StarOffice 7. I'd use OpenOffice if I didn't have that. TextMaker is a very close second place. They work well, deal with Word.DOC files well, and aren't expensive to buy.
The worst of the bunch -- the program I never ever use? Word 2003. First of all I need to have Windows to use it, secondly it isn't all that stable and I don't trust it... third, the writing tools *SUCK* because they're all tied to the web and the paid Encarta service. So if I'm offline I can't have access to everything I need.
I'd switch to WP for Linux if they made it as good as WP 12. No contest -- WP (version 10 and later) is the best self-contained word processor for creative writing I've ever used. I'm messing with WINE right now trying to get WP 12 to work in FreeBSD.
The HV-1 (high volume) plan is the one I'd need. The shared plans look okay to me under most circumstances, but I'm already on shared hosting on iPowerWeb and they can't accomodate me. While I have ample bandwidth and disk space, the MySQL server isn't configured for lots of traffic. Specifically the max_questions variable is set too low (50000) and it keeps overloading. The web server has no trouble with 1500 simultaneous connections -- it's MySQL that's killing me. I asked them today to increase that to at least 100000, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. Tech support is slow at iPowerWeb.
The HV-1 plan at Pair is $70 per month. That's a good price considering I'd basically be getting my own server (most places are at least $100 for similar plans), but I'm paying $15 per month right now for the same amount of resources at iPowerWeb (with less features and sub-par service), and that's good enough for the other 30 days of the month that I don't get Slashdotted. I'm still thinking it over, but the better features that Pair offers -- you mentioned most of them -- are really attractive. It sucks not being able to use MySQL remotely for backups.
Thanks -- I'll check it out. I already make static copies of each article, but I use JavaScript to redirect them to the "real" database-driven article. In case of Slashdotting, you can jsut turn JavaScript off and get a nice, formatted HTML edition of the article. It's a sloppy way of doing it because if you don't know to disable JavaScript you still won't see the article.
I just use the KDict applet window in my KDE taskbar for definitions. I get information from WordNet and two to three other sources... and it's free.
I agree, it's a really nice feature in WP 12 to have that dictionary built in (if you pay for the concise edition), but KDict is just as effective. What I really truly miss about WP is the synonym suggestion drop-down box in the button bar. Fortunately it's there in WP for Linux.
I agree, Word sucks -- even 2003. WordPerfect and OpenOffice 1.1 (and StarOffice 7) do very well with large documents though. I tested with a 300-plus page book manuscript, although it wasn't heavily formatted (just normal text with a dozen page breaks and italics here and there).
LaTeX is more for technical or academic writers who need lots of weird formatting. Despite its stated purpose, LaTeX causes the writer to have to be concerned about presentation when the focus should be content. WYSIWYG editors allow you to forget presentation and just wing it. Yes, this creates sloppy documents that don't convert correctly (see the article for an example). There are always drawbacks to any program or method.
I have more than a hundred articles and reviews on The Jem Report. I used to do them all in XHTML/CSS but then when I wanted to change the logo or add a menu option I had to edit over 100 pages. Switching to Postnuke make everything a lot easier for me and uses less bandwidth and space, even if under extreme load it kills the MySQL server.
Explain how to do this:
"Regenerate the static content in one go from a database when you change the website HTML template" I answer.
Just turn of JavaScript and go to www.thejemreport.com/software/wplinux.php for the full article in HTML (it bypasses the database, which is now overloaded).
Sorry -- good hosting plans are expensive. I'm looking into moving to Pair if I can afford it. In the meantime, in case this happens I code all of my articles as HTML and then use a JavaScript redirect to the "real" article in the database. So just turn JavaScript off and go to this address:
A while back I interviewed some people at Sun for content related to reviews on JDS and Solaris 9 x86. During one conversation I made the mistake of referring to JDS as a "Linux distribution" and I was quickly corrected:
"Java Desktop System is not a Linux distribution, it is an Operating Environment."
I asked what the difference was, and the response was something I didn't quite understand -- a lot of talk about desktop philosophy and how Sun didn't really want people to think of JDS as having anything to do with the GNU project or Linux in general.
I have here a folder for JDS version 1. It was based on SuSE 8.1 and it didn't work on any of my modern test machines so I only used it once and decided not to review it because it didn't work all that well and I don't like doing negative bash-fest reviews. Nowhere on the folder or at any point during the installation or in the operating environment itself do you ever see the word "Linux."
And the license agreement governing the whole product is much like the one for Solaris except for the parts that are already under other licenses. No, JDS is not even close to being Free Software, but then again Red Hat EL is along the same lines. I don't see anyone making a bad guy out of them.
The rules changed regardng the.ORG registration requirements. Years ago you could get a 1 or 2 letter.ORG domain, but once those domains expire they cannot be renewed because of the new rules.
The.ORG extension doesn't allow two-letter domain names. I think the minimum is three letters for.ORG. In fact there are only very few international domain extensions that allow two-letter registrations.
Do I have to do everything for you? Click on the "Sales" tab.
"All refurbished cars are "built to order" using only quality, rust-free (while the stainless bodies will never rust, the frames are prone to it, particularly in the Northeastern states) cars, using our years of expertise and our vast supply of original and correct DeLorean parts. By doing it the right way, we can offer a six month, six thousand mile limited warranty on our refurbished cars. It's as close as you can get to a brand new DeLorean, and for about the same price as you'd have paid for one when it was new!"
Why hasn't anyone put forth the idea that maybe the product made the sale more than the salesman did? Microsoft should be studying the strengths of GNU/Linux and how to properly counter them with solutions instead of sales and marketing.
The only difference between the Titanic and Microsoft is, the Titanic had a band.
Slashdot Mirror
I can name some of them, but others I'd have to do some research on because it's been a while since I've used them. I know Mandrake has Anaconda, Harddrake and DrakConf; SuSE has YaST and SaX; RedHat has Anaconda (and others that I can't remember). If someone can fill in the blanks I'll add this information to the article.
-JemI read your post and then wrote this article to try to fill that gap.
If you still have questions, let me know how I can improve it.
-JemYeah okay so it's a shameless plug, but I really do listen when readers have corrections or requests, and I work really hard to make my site as excellent as I can.
Lots of my reviews have made Slashdot, and I can tell you that no matter how good you are, people are going to complain that you didn't accomodate them. Generally I offer to run tests for people if they request it, thereby eliminating some of the griping and as an intentional side-effect, it helps people in the process.
I agree; most reviews suck. That's why I started my own site. I could really use the traffic, so why don't you at least come by and check it out? www.thejemreport.com
I have reviews of various versions of many Unix OSes: Solaris, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux (Gentoo, Lindows, SuSE) and a lot of software for x86. More are on the way, as always.
If you think my reviews suck and tell me about it (specifically), I'll do my best to edit the review or improve future reviews.
-JemI think it's time for a regime change at Sun. They need someone in charge who is willing to let go of the 1980s software business mentality and adapt to the modern world.
You can't sell proprietary UNIX when others can get it for free. You can't sell StarOffice when you can get OO.org for free. You can't sell $8000 UltraSPARC workstations when you can build more powerful AMD64 machines for an 1/8th the price. You can't lock down a programming language that people want to use when there are so many other competing technologies that they can turn to.
It seems to me that Java is going to be dead within the next couple of years if it doesn't open up and become a Free standard.
Wouldn't it suck if Sun went under and Microsoft bought up all of their assets, including Java, and then killed it all? Don't laugh; it could happen.
-JemA while back I had a phone interview with the product manager of Solaris. I asked him if Solaris would ever be Free Software (or at least open-source) someday. He said that you can get the Solaris source if you need it, but it can never be under the GPL or similar Free Software licenses because they use so much code from other companies that contain trade secrets and otehr things that Sun hasn't the right to "give away." He specifically listed Kodak as one example because Solaris 9 includes code that Kodak wrote and licensed to Sun -- it had something to do with color matching or something like that.
I guess they could GPL Solaris minus the third-party proprietary code, whatever it may be, but then you're not getting the real Solaris anymore.
Novell ran into this problem when they bought the rights to the UNIX SVR4 source. There was some talk at the time of making it GPL, but there were so many agreements with vendors like Intel and Sun that prohibited opening up the code that it was impossible to accomplish.
Sun should have opened up Solaris years ago, if it were possible. Then people could have manipulated the source according to their needs and Sun would have sold more hardware as a result. Solaris adds value to Sun hardware -- that's its sole purpose -- and Sun missed the chance to really capitalize on that.
-JemHere's an article for you if you don't care about licensing. Honestly, do you agree to Adobe's license? If you don't -- or if you don't care and manage to violate the agreement out of igornace -- you are committing a felony under US criminal law (not to mention the civil penalty as well). Adobe wants to make you into an unemployable, scum-of-the-earth, dirty, lying criminal for violating their unreasonably restrictive license.
Everyone who doesn't care about licensing should be required to face the wrath of the BSA. Mayve then you'll see the beauty of Free Software despite its flaws?
-JemI suppose if I hadn't heard it so many times it would be funny.
Glad you liked the article. I hope to have more good ones soon.
-JemI have everything -- Word 2003, TextMaker, LyX, StarOffice 7, OO.org 1.1.1, Lotus Word Pro 9.8, WP 12, WP Linux... others that I can't even remember... for writing, I do almost all of my work in StarOffice 7. I'd use OpenOffice if I didn't have that. TextMaker is a very close second place. They work well, deal with Word .DOC files well, and aren't expensive to buy.
The worst of the bunch -- the program I never ever use? Word 2003. First of all I need to have Windows to use it, secondly it isn't all that stable and I don't trust it... third, the writing tools *SUCK* because they're all tied to the web and the paid Encarta service. So if I'm offline I can't have access to everything I need.
I'd switch to WP for Linux if they made it as good as WP 12. No contest -- WP (version 10 and later) is the best self-contained word processor for creative writing I've ever used. I'm messing with WINE right now trying to get WP 12 to work in FreeBSD.
-JemThe HV-1 (high volume) plan is the one I'd need. The shared plans look okay to me under most circumstances, but I'm already on shared hosting on iPowerWeb and they can't accomodate me. While I have ample bandwidth and disk space, the MySQL server isn't configured for lots of traffic. Specifically the max_questions variable is set too low (50000) and it keeps overloading. The web server has no trouble with 1500 simultaneous connections -- it's MySQL that's killing me. I asked them today to increase that to at least 100000, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. Tech support is slow at iPowerWeb.
The HV-1 plan at Pair is $70 per month. That's a good price considering I'd basically be getting my own server (most places are at least $100 for similar plans), but I'm paying $15 per month right now for the same amount of resources at iPowerWeb (with less features and sub-par service), and that's good enough for the other 30 days of the month that I don't get Slashdotted. I'm still thinking it over, but the better features that Pair offers -- you mentioned most of them -- are really attractive. It sucks not being able to use MySQL remotely for backups.
-JemThanks -- I'll check it out. I already make static copies of each article, but I use JavaScript to redirect them to the "real" database-driven article. In case of Slashdotting, you can jsut turn JavaScript off and get a nice, formatted HTML edition of the article. It's a sloppy way of doing it because if you don't know to disable JavaScript you still won't see the article.
Anyway, I'll take a look at the script.
-JemI just use the KDict applet window in my KDE taskbar for definitions. I get information from WordNet and two to three other sources... and it's free.
I agree, it's a really nice feature in WP 12 to have that dictionary built in (if you pay for the concise edition), but KDict is just as effective. What I really truly miss about WP is the synonym suggestion drop-down box in the button bar. Fortunately it's there in WP for Linux.
-JemYou know, Jem was a perfectly common male name until that damn TV show.
It's short for Jeremy.
-JemYes, Emacs has an extension to open Word .DOC files. It's called antiword.
-JemI agree, Word sucks -- even 2003. WordPerfect and OpenOffice 1.1 (and StarOffice 7) do very well with large documents though. I tested with a 300-plus page book manuscript, although it wasn't heavily formatted (just normal text with a dozen page breaks and italics here and there).
LaTeX is more for technical or academic writers who need lots of weird formatting. Despite its stated purpose, LaTeX causes the writer to have to be concerned about presentation when the focus should be content. WYSIWYG editors allow you to forget presentation and just wing it. Yes, this creates sloppy documents that don't convert correctly (see the article for an example). There are always drawbacks to any program or method.
-JemI have more than a hundred articles and reviews on The Jem Report. I used to do them all in XHTML/CSS but then when I wanted to change the logo or add a menu option I had to edit over 100 pages. Switching to Postnuke make everything a lot easier for me and uses less bandwidth and space, even if under extreme load it kills the MySQL server.
Explain how to do this:
"Regenerate the static content in one go from a database when you change the website HTML template" I answer.
-JemYou can buy it in the EU...
http://shop.mensys.nl/cgi-bin/db2www/MNS_art2.d2 w/report?artname=&catname=LINUXWP8
-JemJust turn of JavaScript and go to www.thejemreport.com/software/wplinux.php for the full article in HTML (it bypasses the database, which is now overloaded).
-JemSorry -- good hosting plans are expensive. I'm looking into moving to Pair if I can afford it. In the meantime, in case this happens I code all of my articles as HTML and then use a JavaScript redirect to the "real" article in the database. So just turn JavaScript off and go to this address:
http://www.thejemreport.com/software/wplinux.php
Or just turn of JavaScipt and click here
-JemA while back I interviewed some people at Sun for content related to reviews on JDS and Solaris 9 x86. During one conversation I made the mistake of referring to JDS as a "Linux distribution" and I was quickly corrected:
"Java Desktop System is not a Linux distribution, it is an Operating Environment."
I asked what the difference was, and the response was something I didn't quite understand -- a lot of talk about desktop philosophy and how Sun didn't really want people to think of JDS as having anything to do with the GNU project or Linux in general.
I have here a folder for JDS version 1. It was based on SuSE 8.1 and it didn't work on any of my modern test machines so I only used it once and decided not to review it because it didn't work all that well and I don't like doing negative bash-fest reviews. Nowhere on the folder or at any point during the installation or in the operating environment itself do you ever see the word "Linux."
And the license agreement governing the whole product is much like the one for Solaris except for the parts that are already under other licenses. No, JDS is not even close to being Free Software, but then again Red Hat EL is along the same lines. I don't see anyone making a bad guy out of them.
-JemThe rules changed regardng the .ORG registration requirements. Years ago you could get a 1 or 2 letter .ORG domain, but once those domains expire they cannot be renewed because of the new rules.
Google will tell you the details.
-JemThe .ORG extension doesn't allow two-letter domain names. I think the minimum is three letters for .ORG. In fact there are only very few international domain extensions that allow two-letter registrations.
-JemDo I have to do everything for you? Click on the "Sales" tab.
"All refurbished cars are "built to order" using only quality, rust-free (while the stainless bodies will never rust, the frames are prone to it, particularly in the Northeastern states) cars, using our years of expertise and our vast supply of original and correct DeLorean parts. By doing it the right way, we can offer a six month, six thousand mile limited warranty on our refurbished cars. It's as close as you can get to a brand new DeLorean, and for about the same price as you'd have paid for one when it was new!"
-Jemwww.delorean.com (duh!)
-JemIt's not that rare. You can buy a brand new DeLorean from the DMC. Only runs about 30 grand -- not too bad for a "Rare" car, eh?
-JemWhy hasn't anyone put forth the idea that maybe the product made the sale more than the salesman did? Microsoft should be studying the strengths of GNU/Linux and how to properly counter them with solutions instead of sales and marketing.
The only difference between the Titanic and Microsoft is, the Titanic had a band.
-Jem