My condolences. I know this doesn't solve your immediate problems, but you might want to consider a move to Mandriva. The paid packs include all the drivers (ndiswrapper, etc, and deal with them automatically), and the *drak tools offer all the convenience of YaST without over-writing hand-configs. Plus, I offer free email/IM support to all Slashdot-reading Mandriva users.
Are you thick in the head? Google will crawl your pages unasked if anyone links to them, as will every other major search engine, and if you want them to stop you need to put up a robots.txt file. Why should books be any different?
The best simple solution is Horde and its Kronolith calendaring application. Lets you set up shared calendars and set editing permissions. Doesn't automatically figure out when meeting times will work for everyone, but it's easy and it will do your email, tasks, and time-tracking as well. If you need any help setting it up, check the mailing lists or just email me (I worked on Horde for my Summer of Code project).
If you want user-friendly, use a real desktop distro, that's why there are different distros in the first place. If you try with Mandriva, you'll find that what you say just isn't true. It autodetects hardware about as well as Knoppix these days, and the configuration questions are dead simple, with sensible defaults.
Assuming the earth is a perfect sphere, describe the solution set of points where you can go 1 mi south, 1 mile east, and 1 mile north and return to your starting point. Hint: the cardinality of the set is R cross Z + 1 (and yes, I know that's equal to R, but expanding it makes it a more effective hint). Feel free to email me for more hints.
First of all, the device only adds a moderate amount to the weight of the pack--the 40lb doing the work is the weight of things you are already carrying, and you get a modest benefit in the form of decreased bounciness of the load as well.
As far as total weights are concerned, I think it just depends who you are. A pack with no/very flexible frame of more than 10-15lb will get very old for me, but I'm comfortable carrying my hib-belted external frame pack all day over moderate to steep terrain with up to 70lb of gear. I don't think it's just a matter of fitness (I'm not in the world's best shape, I'd probably pant heavily to run an 8 minute mile) but also bone structure and sheer size--I weigh about 200lb.
By the way, congrats on the through-hike...I've done most of the VA, MD, and PA trail and would like to through-hike someday, though I'm not sure how I'll ever find the time. Spent two weeks in the Sangre de Christo Rockies a couple of years ago, that was awesome too; very different from the AT.
First, I wasn't suggesting that new *nix users need to or should know these terms, and that's precisely why the fellow shouldn't have used them in his article, as if they would help people make an informed choice.
Second, I think you underestimate the degree to which config files interact in a typical linux installation. The user downside of the developer dream of "do one thing, do it well" per program is that you need to get each program in the series working right for the system to work. This is the beauty of tools like SuSE's YaST, Mandriva's *drak tools, and/or even Webmin: they diddle all the requisite files at the same time per the GUI instructions.
I think, therefore, that opening up the CLI right away with some minimal instruction set is more likely to be frustrating than helpful.
what's this got to do with open source?
on
KOffice 1.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1) Yeah, and middle-schoolers still probably laugh about "hard drives" and "floppy drives" too. But, erm, GIMP is a proper noun, not the English word "gimp." So people can get over it.
2) New users will naturally refer to the name of the distribution, most of which are marvelously easy to pronounce.
3-4) If you're confused by this, you're probably not using a CLI mail client. I mean, hello, this is 2005! Also, does "Eudora" just scream email to you? How about "Outlook"?
5) Does "Opera" just scream web-browser to you? Is "Accord" some kind of word for car in your language? Has that hurt Accord sales?
6) Why is this bad?
7) Do they sue you if you capitalize the name by mistake? Do people get confused? If not, then what's the problem?
8) I hear there's this massive commercial website catering mostly to Windows users called news.com.com.
The CLI is for experienced users and scripting. For those purposes, short command names are important, and there are only so many full words that you can make out of 3-4 letters, especially descriptive ones.
New users should hit the K menu to do something, and there all the programs are neatly labeled with full descriptions. Shocking, I know.
Well, here's what I did. First, install the X version that Thac wants manually, I think that's the only thing that urpmi absolutely won't do. And then ask urpmi to grab something like the config file or whatever, which has all the basic KDE packages as dependencies. I think this is counter-intuitive and Thac should write a how-to, but I guess he figures if you can't figure it out you shouldn't be on the bleeding edge. Anyway, KDE 3.4 rocks my world. If you can't get it to work, feel free to email me for help.
But it doesn't say hardly anything meaningful about the various distros. Let me pick on his treatment of Mandriva, just because it's the one I know the most about, but the rest struck me as equally shallow.
1) In what way are Mandrake's/etc files less hackable than Fedora's? Or is this just a bland assertion made because the GUI tools are available? Unlike YAST, the drak tools don't get confused if you hand edit files, which I do all the time.
2) Why does he mention yum and apt-get, but not urpmi which is Mandriva's equivalent. And are there really more apps in Fedora's package trees than Mandrake's?
I think you'd be much better served by distrowatch.
Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.
Clearly libraries or ISPs could always hand over our information to the FBI if asked--this isn't the EU, and for better or for worse we don't have data privacy laws. However, it used to be the case that if the library itself valued your privacy, or if the ISP felt that valuing your privacy was more likely to keep you as a customer (see Verizon v RIAA), a subpoena was required to protect THEIR 4th amendment rights against search and seizure. Thus the new developments still threaten to abrogate basic rights.
erm, what happened to Expanded Academic ASAP (the Thomson-Gale full-text product), Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins), and JSTOR? I've always found those to be the three most useful databases of peer-reviewed articles, and all three are most definitely interdisciplinary, covering thousands of journals in dozens of fields.
I think there are different skills involved in distro integration (making sure things play well together) than there are in development of a particular software package. After all, people aren't going with Mandrake because it ships a better openoffice or a better kde, but rather hopefully because it ties things together well. I think the idea is that Joe Cheeks is really good at this, and simply ripping off his code from Lycoris wouldn't do them much good since many of the problems there might already have been solved by Mandriva, and/or he wouldn't be coding toward their projects like urpmi and the *drak system of utilities.
I've had awful experiences with the community editions, but the "official" edition of 10.1 runs very smoothly for me, even on 128mb of ram. The trick is to upgrade to the Thac package of KDE3.4, which goes a lot easier on the ram usage.
As for the dependencies, I reccommend using "easyurpmi" (just Google for it if you don't know what I'm talking about, it really is easy), and add the PLF sources and such, and then you'll be fairly set as far as dependencies go.
Concur. Boston (and it looks like several other cities) has had Dining In for some time, and their list of restauants is huge. Now granted, most of the places are overpriced and so I just order my pizza and chinese over the phone anyway, but it's there, and I sure do get their fliers in the mail.
If you go with Mandriva, which I'd reccommend for someone starting out, feel free to email me for tech support. Seriously. It does almost everything automatically (including sleep on my laptop!), but what it doesn't I've by-and-large learned to flog into line over the course of several machines. If you want good support for non-Free codecs (real and java, especially), you'll want to get a subscription or a box set, however, as they work like shit on the Free version.
I just spent $470 a month ago on a Dell C610 off of Ebay, my second Ebay laptop purchase (the previous being an HP4150 three years ago, which finally died...). I wouldn't buy from just a person off the street with that kind of money, but for off-corporate-lease with 90 day warranty, I'm very, very happy. Reliability is excellent, hardware is corporate grade, so it's got better software support and fewer random failures, laptop is light, but powerful with 512M ram...and heck, it's even got 85% of its battery life left, which is a miracle, but the HP had even more! So I'd say make the leap, you won't regret it...
I take it you've never used a modern distro like Mandriva. Installed on my Dell laptop, complete with suspend/hibernate support, with no commandline tricks from me. Installing software? K menu--software installer, browse the categories, click the package you need, done. There are thousands of packages in the categories, dependencies are computed automatically.
Now there are still a couple of problems, I'd say. (1) is the 'random hardware' problem, though this is getting much better: *nix handled my Canon digicam much better than the gf's win2k does, and Mandriva detected and uses my Winmodem, which blew me away. (2) the 'random software' problem. Random downloads, which practicably means anything not in the distribution repositories, whether because a more recent version or non-Free or whatever, is beyond painful to set up. Kaffeine isn't playing realmedia for me despite an hour's work, nor is realplayer installing despite two hour's work. So that's a problem. But installing Firefox? Easier than Windows.
I think laptops in the 14-15" range will continue to exist because they appeal strongly to many of the major laptop constituencies. Road warriors, who drive much new laptop development, like them because they're reasonably light, fit in airline spaces, and have decent battery life, but have big enough screens and keyboards to work productively. Also, despite attending a university where cost is no object for most students, almost all laptops I see are of the 14-15" variety, because who wants to drag a 17-19" monster to class, starbucks, or the library? Yet at the same time, if you're taking notes every day in class, you want a laptop with a usably sized keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
My condolences. I know this doesn't solve your immediate problems, but you might want to consider a move to Mandriva. The paid packs include all the drivers (ndiswrapper, etc, and deal with them automatically), and the *drak tools offer all the convenience of YaST without over-writing hand-configs. Plus, I offer free email/IM support to all Slashdot-reading Mandriva users.
Are you thick in the head? Google will crawl your pages unasked if anyone links to them, as will every other major search engine, and if you want them to stop you need to put up a robots.txt file. Why should books be any different?
The best simple solution is Horde and its Kronolith calendaring application. Lets you set up shared calendars and set editing permissions. Doesn't automatically figure out when meeting times will work for everyone, but it's easy and it will do your email, tasks, and time-tracking as well. If you need any help setting it up, check the mailing lists or just email me (I worked on Horde for my Summer of Code project).
If you want user-friendly, use a real desktop distro, that's why there are different distros in the first place. If you try with Mandriva, you'll find that what you say just isn't true. It autodetects hardware about as well as Knoppix these days, and the configuration questions are dead simple, with sensible defaults.
Assuming the earth is a perfect sphere, describe the solution set of points where you can go 1 mi south, 1 mile east, and 1 mile north and return to your starting point. Hint: the cardinality of the set is R cross Z + 1 (and yes, I know that's equal to R, but expanding it makes it a more effective hint). Feel free to email me for more hints.
First of all, the device only adds a moderate amount to the weight of the pack--the 40lb doing the work is the weight of things you are already carrying, and you get a modest benefit in the form of decreased bounciness of the load as well.
As far as total weights are concerned, I think it just depends who you are. A pack with no/very flexible frame of more than 10-15lb will get very old for me, but I'm comfortable carrying my hib-belted external frame pack all day over moderate to steep terrain with up to 70lb of gear. I don't think it's just a matter of fitness (I'm not in the world's best shape, I'd probably pant heavily to run an 8 minute mile) but also bone structure and sheer size--I weigh about 200lb.
By the way, congrats on the through-hike...I've done most of the VA, MD, and PA trail and would like to through-hike someday, though I'm not sure how I'll ever find the time. Spent two weeks in the Sangre de Christo Rockies a couple of years ago, that was awesome too; very different from the AT.
I don't understand why Slashdot, unlike ever other blog in existence, doesn't use the RSS-feed-links to the stories, as these are no-reg.
Where is the feature, if you don't mind my asking? This is the thing from Konqy that I miss the most...(moved to Moz for the extensions).
First, I wasn't suggesting that new *nix users need to or should know these terms, and that's precisely why the fellow shouldn't have used them in his article, as if they would help people make an informed choice.
Second, I think you underestimate the degree to which config files interact in a typical linux installation. The user downside of the developer dream of "do one thing, do it well" per program is that you need to get each program in the series working right for the system to work. This is the beauty of tools like SuSE's YaST, Mandriva's *drak tools, and/or even Webmin: they diddle all the requisite files at the same time per the GUI instructions.
I think, therefore, that opening up the CLI right away with some minimal instruction set is more likely to be frustrating than helpful.
1) Yeah, and middle-schoolers still probably laugh about "hard drives" and "floppy drives" too. But, erm, GIMP is a proper noun, not the English word "gimp." So people can get over it.
2) New users will naturally refer to the name of the distribution, most of which are marvelously easy to pronounce.
3-4) If you're confused by this, you're probably not using a CLI mail client. I mean, hello, this is 2005! Also, does "Eudora" just scream email to you? How about "Outlook"?
5) Does "Opera" just scream web-browser to you? Is "Accord" some kind of word for car in your language? Has that hurt Accord sales?
6) Why is this bad?
7) Do they sue you if you capitalize the name by mistake? Do people get confused? If not, then what's the problem?
8) I hear there's this massive commercial website catering mostly to Windows users called news.com.com.
The CLI is for experienced users and scripting. For those purposes, short command names are important, and there are only so many full words that you can make out of 3-4 letters, especially descriptive ones.
New users should hit the K menu to do something, and there all the programs are neatly labeled with full descriptions. Shocking, I know.
Well, here's what I did. First, install the X version that Thac wants manually, I think that's the only thing that urpmi absolutely won't do. And then ask urpmi to grab something like the config file or whatever, which has all the basic KDE packages as dependencies. I think this is counter-intuitive and Thac should write a how-to, but I guess he figures if you can't figure it out you shouldn't be on the bleeding edge. Anyway, KDE 3.4 rocks my world. If you can't get it to work, feel free to email me for help.
But it doesn't say hardly anything meaningful about the various distros. Let me pick on his treatment of Mandriva, just because it's the one I know the most about, but the rest struck me as equally shallow.
/etc files less hackable than Fedora's? Or is this just a bland assertion made because the GUI tools are available? Unlike YAST, the drak tools don't get confused if you hand edit files, which I do all the time.
1) In what way are Mandrake's
2) Why does he mention yum and apt-get, but not urpmi which is Mandriva's equivalent. And are there really more apps in Fedora's package trees than Mandrake's?
I think you'd be much better served by distrowatch.
Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.
Clearly libraries or ISPs could always hand over our information to the FBI if asked--this isn't the EU, and for better or for worse we don't have data privacy laws. However, it used to be the case that if the library itself valued your privacy, or if the ISP felt that valuing your privacy was more likely to keep you as a customer (see Verizon v RIAA), a subpoena was required to protect THEIR 4th amendment rights against search and seizure. Thus the new developments still threaten to abrogate basic rights.
erm, what happened to Expanded Academic ASAP (the Thomson-Gale full-text product), Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins), and JSTOR? I've always found those to be the three most useful databases of peer-reviewed articles, and all three are most definitely interdisciplinary, covering thousands of journals in dozens of fields.
I think there are different skills involved in distro integration (making sure things play well together) than there are in development of a particular software package. After all, people aren't going with Mandrake because it ships a better openoffice or a better kde, but rather hopefully because it ties things together well. I think the idea is that Joe Cheeks is really good at this, and simply ripping off his code from Lycoris wouldn't do them much good since many of the problems there might already have been solved by Mandriva, and/or he wouldn't be coding toward their projects like urpmi and the *drak system of utilities.
I've had awful experiences with the community editions, but the "official" edition of 10.1 runs very smoothly for me, even on 128mb of ram. The trick is to upgrade to the Thac package of KDE3.4, which goes a lot easier on the ram usage.
As for the dependencies, I reccommend using "easyurpmi" (just Google for it if you don't know what I'm talking about, it really is easy), and add the PLF sources and such, and then you'll be fairly set as far as dependencies go.
Concur. Boston (and it looks like several other cities) has had Dining In for some time, and their list of restauants is huge. Now granted, most of the places are overpriced and so I just order my pizza and chinese over the phone anyway, but it's there, and I sure do get their fliers in the mail.
If you go with Mandriva, which I'd reccommend for someone starting out, feel free to email me for tech support. Seriously. It does almost everything automatically (including sleep on my laptop!), but what it doesn't I've by-and-large learned to flog into line over the course of several machines. If you want good support for non-Free codecs (real and java, especially), you'll want to get a subscription or a box set, however, as they work like shit on the Free version.
I just spent $470 a month ago on a Dell C610 off of Ebay, my second Ebay laptop purchase (the previous being an HP4150 three years ago, which finally died...). I wouldn't buy from just a person off the street with that kind of money, but for off-corporate-lease with 90 day warranty, I'm very, very happy. Reliability is excellent, hardware is corporate grade, so it's got better software support and fewer random failures, laptop is light, but powerful with 512M ram...and heck, it's even got 85% of its battery life left, which is a miracle, but the HP had even more! So I'd say make the leap, you won't regret it...
I take it you've never used a modern distro like Mandriva. Installed on my Dell laptop, complete with suspend/hibernate support, with no commandline tricks from me. Installing software? K menu--software installer, browse the categories, click the package you need, done. There are thousands of packages in the categories, dependencies are computed automatically.
Now there are still a couple of problems, I'd say. (1) is the 'random hardware' problem, though this is getting much better: *nix handled my Canon digicam much better than the gf's win2k does, and Mandriva detected and uses my Winmodem, which blew me away. (2) the 'random software' problem. Random downloads, which practicably means anything not in the distribution repositories, whether because a more recent version or non-Free or whatever, is beyond painful to set up. Kaffeine isn't playing realmedia for me despite an hour's work, nor is realplayer installing despite two hour's work. So that's a problem. But installing Firefox? Easier than Windows.
In Excel, creating a new sheet in a workbook creates a new tab at the bottom of the page, which also goes away when you delete the sheet...
I think laptops in the 14-15" range will continue to exist because they appeal strongly to many of the major laptop constituencies. Road warriors, who drive much new laptop development, like them because they're reasonably light, fit in airline spaces, and have decent battery life, but have big enough screens and keyboards to work productively. Also, despite attending a university where cost is no object for most students, almost all laptops I see are of the 14-15" variety, because who wants to drag a 17-19" monster to class, starbucks, or the library? Yet at the same time, if you're taking notes every day in class, you want a laptop with a usably sized keyboard.
It's in there.