Re:Someone needs to give this distro the bullet..
on
Slackware 7.1 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
Yes, if you tell it to install everything, it will install KDE, but you can choose whether or not to install just about anything, plus the installer lets you choose your default window manager, which is pretty cool. I prefer FVWM myseld. And for the people who say slackware is for advanced users only, it's really not any more difficult to install than the other distributions, you just pop in the cd, reboot, and follow the on-screen instructions. The install script will let you configure the basic settings with a menu-based configuration, then after you are done, reboot, and you have yourself a working Linux distribution. you are pretty much on your own from here. I would recommend people who have never used Linux before to get a book. O'Reilly has an excellent book called "Running Linux", which is good for beginners as well as expert users. I also like the way Slackware has left most of the configuration up to the user. Just about every other distribution these days has some sort of proprietary centralized configuration tool that tries to configure everything. This is not good. How the hell are they supposed to keep up with standards?
The following file types, in my opinion, should not be on the list.
.BAS Visual Basic Class Module. - Pretty much the VB equivalent of a.H file in C.
.CRT Security Certificate? - Since when has a security certificate been a security risk ?
.HLP Windows Help File - This made me laugh.
.INF Setup Information File - Just a text file, usually holds setup information for programs, but can also be used as a script. By default, when you execute this file, it just opens up in notepad as a text file. It can't execute anything unless you right click on it and click "Install" from the popup menu. 99 percent of windows users don't know this and would never be able to execute this script.
.LNK Shortcut. - Basically the same thing as a symbolic link in unix, but less powerful. Links to a file ALREADY on your system in the first place.
.PCD Photo CD Image. - Since when could a photo execute any malicious code?
URL - Internet Shortcut hmm, IE is the ONLY browser I know of that someone could build a web site that could damage your computer if you went to it.
I'm sure there are a few more on this list that shouldn't be there either. Instead of blocking certain file types, maybe they should have thought about the security risks in the first place.
Oh I forgot to mention that, sadly, many apps written for windows are now dependant on Windows' integration of IE, so this would create somewhat of an obstacle I guess.
Microsoft claims that they can not remove Internet Explorer from windows because it would cripple the entire operating system. This is false. I don't think it would be very hard to remove IE from windows. Back when I had early versions of Windows95, you didn't need IE. Sure, it came with a browser, but it wasn't integrated into windows. What they've done with IE 4 and 5 is replaced the Shell (pretty much the equivalent of a window manager in X) with Internet Explorer. Windows Explorer, their file manager uses IE to browse files. So I guess what they've done is turned IE into this huge bloated app that can control many parts of the operating system. In a nutshell, they turned IE into Windows, not Windows into IE.
Microsoft "Could" get rid of IE, if they wanted to. I've seen a few sites on the net that show you how to remove IE. They are not very hard to find if you can use a search engine.
I'm thinking that the "special tapes" they are selling are normal vhs tapes, but just a lot longer than the ones we usually see. Normally with a T-120 tape, you'd get 2 hours (120 min) in SP mode, or with a 240, you'd get 4 hours. They are selling DF-420 tapes, which give you 7 hours in SP mode, and 21 hours in the SLP mode. The reason you don't see many tapes this long on normal analog VCR's is because the longer tapes would degrade in quality a lot faster with normal use. Of course, there is not much loss in quality with a digital signal. The major difference between this and DVD's is that with DVD's you can scan to any point on the disc in a matter of seconds. With tapes, you would have to rewind or forward, which would take a while. But then again, this isn't a very big loss since most of us watch our movies in a linear fashion in the first place. This is a great way to back up our "rented" dvd's;-)
I think one of the reasons that you can't install everything from a floppy now is because over time, the packages got bigger, and eventually too big for a floppy, and splitting them up so they fit on a floppy would make it too hard to maintain.
Slackware isn't in the software development business. They are here to provide a good distribution of linux and quality linux software, and in my opinion, they do a damn good job. It doesn't really need to be "developed" in the sense you put it. Probably the hardest thing about creating a distribution is creating the initial distribution, and in slackware's case, it's already been done. After creating a distribution, maintaining it would be pretty easy, and shouldn't require hundreds of volunteers. This is especially true for slackware, since all the packages are simply.tgz files, with paths relative to the root directory, and if you read the man pages for pkgtool, installpkg, etc, they show you exactly how to make your own packages.
How can they lose money if they never had it in the first place? It's not like people are stealing CD's off the shelf. If they lowered the average CD price to, say, $4.99 each, I bet sales would boom. Most people would rather buy a CD for a low price than spend time looking for it on the Internet, downloading it, and then finding out that it was a poor quality cd rip or mp3 encoding. Time also has a value. Maybe my opinion will change when everyone has high speed Internet access. Wouldn't take much time then
Why is it that whenever Intel or AMD or whoever, tries to make progress by making faster chips, Microsoft does the reverse by releasing a shitty OS that requires more CPU speed and more RAM?
So, some person (hacker(TM)) caused denial-of-service(TM) to a few sites during the past week. These kind of things happen all the time. It just so happens that the majority of these sites were large E-Commerce(TM) "businesses". Now we have the President(TM) of the U.S(TM) making statements regarding these "attacks", and every news program on television has the same story about how some hacker shut down yahoo.com, cnn.com, buy.com, etc, and how they cost companies millions of dollars, blah blah. Then they go on telling about President Clinon's new Anti-Hack plan. How come the media only uses the term "Hacker" when something "bad", computer-related, happens? The media really does have an effect on people. A few days ago in school, people were asking me if I was the one who hacked Yahoo. What better way to generate support for Clinton's new plan?
Maybe I wasn't paying much attention, but I haven't heard AOL mention why they bought Time Warner. How does this help their customers, or anyone else besides their own pockets? Did they want access to their cable network or something? I'm not very smart, but I don't see cable modems as a very good long term investment. I'm starting to see the AOL "Brand" name on a lot of computer products now. I've seen school backpacks sold with AOL disks in them. AOL has been on a shopping spree for the past 2 years, with their most recent purchase, Time Warner, I wonder who will be next.
I have an Emachines PC, 333i. The hardware on it is pretty much standard, but the WinModem that comes with it stinks. I replaced my modem with a Zoom External, which works fine. It uses a Mini ATX motherboard and an on-board Crystal sound card. The Video card is OK for games like quake, etc. I upgraded to 96 megs of RAM and it improved a lot. These are pretty solid machines, well compared to my old 486 I had just a few months ago.
I keep hearing so much about Web Portals, but still have heard no clear definition about what a portal is supposed to be. All I keep hearing on the news is all these big companies trying to make the latest and best portal site.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if you tell it to install everything, it will install KDE, but you can choose whether or not to install just about anything, plus the installer lets you choose your default window manager, which is pretty cool. I prefer FVWM myseld. And for the people who say slackware is for advanced users only, it's really not any more difficult to install than the other distributions, you just pop in the cd, reboot, and follow the on-screen instructions. The install script will let you configure the basic settings with a menu-based configuration, then after you are done, reboot, and you have yourself a working Linux distribution. you are pretty much on your own from here. I would recommend people who have never used Linux before to get a book. O'Reilly has an excellent book called "Running Linux", which is good for beginners as well as expert users. I also like the way Slackware has left most of the configuration up to the user. Just about every other distribution these days has some sort of proprietary centralized configuration tool that tries to configure everything. This is not good. How the hell are they supposed to keep up with standards?
The following file types, in my opinion, should not be on the list.
.H file in C.
.BAS Visual Basic Class Module. - Pretty much the VB equivalent of a
.CRT Security Certificate? - Since when has a security certificate been a security risk ?
.HLP Windows Help File - This made me laugh.
.INF Setup Information File - Just a text file, usually holds setup information for programs, but can also be used as a script. By default, when you execute this file, it just opens up in notepad as a text file. It can't execute anything unless you right click on it and click "Install" from the popup menu. 99 percent of windows users don't know this and would never be able to execute this script.
.LNK Shortcut. - Basically the same thing as a symbolic link in unix, but less powerful. Links to a file ALREADY on your system in the first place.
.PCD Photo CD Image. - Since when could a photo execute any malicious code?
URL - Internet Shortcut hmm, IE is the ONLY browser I know of that someone could build a web site that could damage your computer if you went to it.
I'm sure there are a few more on this list that shouldn't be there either. Instead of blocking certain file types, maybe they should have thought about the security risks in the first place.
Oh I forgot to mention that, sadly, many apps written for windows are now dependant on Windows' integration of IE, so this would create somewhat of an obstacle I guess.
Microsoft claims that they can not remove Internet Explorer from windows because it would cripple the entire operating system. This is false. I don't think it would be very hard to remove IE from windows. Back when I had early versions of Windows95, you didn't need IE. Sure, it came with a browser, but it wasn't integrated into windows. What they've done with IE 4 and 5 is replaced the Shell (pretty much the equivalent of a window manager in X) with Internet Explorer. Windows Explorer, their file manager uses IE to browse files. So I guess what they've done is turned IE into this huge bloated app that can control many parts of the operating system. In a nutshell, they turned IE into Windows, not Windows into IE.
Microsoft "Could" get rid of IE, if they wanted to. I've seen a few sites on the net that show you how to remove IE. They are not very hard to find if you can use a search engine.
I'm thinking that the "special tapes" they are selling are normal vhs tapes, but just a lot longer than the ones we usually see. Normally with a T-120 tape, you'd get 2 hours (120 min) in SP mode, or with a 240, you'd get 4 hours. They are selling DF-420 tapes, which give you 7 hours in SP mode, and 21 hours in the SLP mode. The reason you don't see many tapes this long on normal analog VCR's is because the longer tapes would degrade in quality a lot faster with normal use. Of course, there is not much loss in quality with a digital signal. The major difference between this and DVD's is that with DVD's you can scan to any point on the disc in a matter of seconds. With tapes, you would have to rewind or forward, which would take a while. But then again, this isn't a very big loss since most of us watch our movies in a linear fashion in the first place. This is a great way to back up our "rented" dvd's ;-)
ftp://ftp.uu.net/tmp/
I think one of the reasons that you can't install everything from a floppy now is because over time, the packages got bigger, and eventually too big for a floppy, and splitting them up so they fit on a floppy would make it too hard to maintain.
Slackware isn't in the software development business. They are here to provide a good distribution of linux and quality linux software, and in my opinion, they do a damn good job. It doesn't really need to be "developed" in the sense you put it. Probably the hardest thing about creating a distribution is creating the initial distribution, and in slackware's case, it's already been done. After creating a distribution, maintaining it would be pretty easy, and shouldn't require hundreds of volunteers. This is especially true for slackware, since all the packages are simply .tgz files, with paths relative to the root directory, and if you read the man pages for pkgtool, installpkg, etc, they show you exactly how to make your own packages.
How can they lose money if they never had it in the first place? It's not like people are stealing CD's off the shelf. If they lowered the average CD price to, say, $4.99 each, I bet sales would boom. Most people would rather buy a CD for a low price than spend time looking for it on the Internet, downloading it, and then finding out that it was a poor quality cd rip or mp3 encoding. Time also has a value. Maybe my opinion will change when everyone has high speed Internet access. Wouldn't take much time then
Why is it that whenever Intel or AMD or whoever, tries to make progress by making faster chips, Microsoft does the reverse by releasing a shitty OS that requires more CPU speed and more RAM?
I think Rambus DRAM will run at this speed. Not sure if this is correct though.
So, some person (hacker(TM)) caused denial-of-service(TM) to a few sites during the past week. These kind of things happen all the time. It just so happens that the majority of these sites were large E-Commerce(TM) "businesses". Now we have the President(TM) of the U.S(TM) making statements regarding these "attacks", and every news program on television has the same story about how some hacker shut down yahoo.com, cnn.com, buy.com, etc, and how they cost companies millions of dollars, blah blah. Then they go on telling about President Clinon's new Anti-Hack plan. How come the media only uses the term "Hacker" when something "bad", computer-related, happens? The media really does have an effect on people. A few days ago in school, people were asking me if I was the one who hacked Yahoo. What better way to generate support for Clinton's new plan?
"Red Hat Linux offers no graphical RAID configuration tools, but its command line tools made RAID configuration easy."
Which is correct?
Maybe I wasn't paying much attention, but I haven't heard AOL mention why they bought Time Warner. How does this help their customers, or anyone else besides their own pockets? Did they want access to their cable network or something? I'm not very smart, but I don't see cable modems as a very good long term investment. I'm starting to see the AOL "Brand" name on a lot of computer products now. I've seen school backpacks sold with AOL disks in them. AOL has been on a shopping spree for the past 2 years, with their most recent purchase, Time Warner, I wonder who will be next.
Speaking of CPU usage, most of the USB stuff I've used, uses more than twice the cpu power of the same thing on the PCI bus
Think they can handle it? ;-)
Hmm, Netscape 4.08 Navigator standalone doesnt die on this page, but the text does appear in the wrong place, I have to scroll down a bit to read it.
Hmm, then why does M$ require you to be registered with Hotmail to use the service?
they use a Samsung CD-ROM drive. The hard drive is a Seagate. I have never seen a Seagate hard drive fail.
I have an Emachines PC, 333i. The hardware on it is pretty much standard, but the WinModem that comes with it stinks. I replaced my modem with a Zoom External, which works fine. It uses a Mini ATX motherboard and an on-board Crystal sound card. The Video card is OK for games like quake, etc. I upgraded to 96 megs of RAM and it improved a lot. These are pretty solid machines, well compared to my old 486 I had just a few months ago.
I keep hearing so much about Web Portals, but still have heard no clear definition about what a portal is supposed to be. All I keep hearing on the news is all these big companies trying to make the latest and best portal site.