It looks like they do check your system to provide the relevant download link. Interestingly, changing your UA doesn't affect this. The relevant code is this:
function getPlatform() {
if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Win32") != -1)
return "Windows";
else if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Linux") != -1)
return "Linux";
else if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mac OS X") != -1)
return "MacOSX";
else if (navigator.platform.indexOf("Mac") != -1)
return "Mac";
return "Other"; }
I guess navigator.platform is independent of UA string. What doesn't make sense is why they use userAgent for OSX.
What also doesn't make sense is why they used client-side Javascript for the rotating screenshot image, when they're already doing server-side scripting to include the latest RSS information, or why they have the screenshot as the background image for a DIV instead of an inline IMG.
Moving on... I would guess the main reason that nobody is willing to invalidate this ludicrous trademark is that they fear it will affect their chances of hosting future Olympics.
SuSE released packages for RC2 the day it came out, and did the same here. They've been really great about updating KDE stuff, even more so in the last few months. Granted, it's in their "supplementary" (i.e. not officially supported) section, but it still works beautifully.
The KDE for RedHat project still has 3.3 packages in "unstable," though from the datestamps it looks as if they are of RC2.
No idea about Mandrake packages... too bad Texstar isn't doing the Mandrake thing anymore.
SuSE now has RC2 Binaries available, complete except for updated bindings and i18n. Packages are also available via apt. The page hasn't been updated, but the 3.3 RC2 RPMs are indeed there.
Still working on downloading everything, so I can't give my impression yet.
For those who were wondering, yes there was an RC1, but they intentionally didn't announce it. Apparently some major bugs were discovered after preparing the tarballs but before making the announcement, so they scrapped that and fixed the bugs to make RC2.
If you've seen Mandrake before, there's nothing new for you. I looked through all of them, and the first half or so of the screenshots were of the installer, followed by the first-run stuff, and the Mandrake Control Center categories. The only new thing I noticed was a user survey, and possibly some changes to the first-run wizards. There was one shot of Konqueror, but other than that no shots of running applications.
If you've never seen Mandrake before, you might want to go ahead and look, but for anybody else it's pretty much a waste of time. Plus it's hell on LinuxBeta's servers.
That said, a quick question for anybody who has installed this beta: Does Mandrake still use devfs, or have they finally moved to udev? That was one of my disappointments when I tried 10 Community.
Heh, I've been getting that for almost a month, but I keep putting off emailing them bitching because I kept telling myself I didn't have anything *that* groundbreaking to say, so it wasn't worth the trouble, and it'd be fixed in a few days anyway.
Yeah. But obviously if this shows up, I've finally been welcomed back. Hooray.
And honestly, I don't really mind the colors at all.
You know, some friends and I actually yelled that out after getting out of Return of the King. Nobody was paying much attention though. I think they were more focused on the huge line in front of them, and how cold it was out.
... it will be interesting to see what happens with Helix payer, now that you have Redhat & Real (two public companies) trumpeting this as the big thiong fro linux desktop - will they throw in the non-gpl codecs so that everything dances perfectly, or will they ship only the shell & support for things like OGG, dissapointing linux converts used to their OS supporting more flavours of multimedia... ?
From the summary (not even the article):
Specifically, Red Hat and Novell will standardize on the 100% open source Helix Player as the leading multimedia framework for their Linux desktops, and will help qualify and distribute the superset RealPlayer 10 with their upcoming Linux desktop offerings.
That said, I still don't see any compelling reason to use Helix. Yes, there needs to be a standard multimedia framework, but why go with one still in its infancy when there are several excellent mature ones available?
That's right, there's TOC and OSCAR. The AIM Express applet uses TOC since it's less complex, and so does Miranda IM (the major reason I never considered it worth my time) but otherwise every other AIM client I can think of uses OSCAR.
I don't know whether the official AIM RPM uses TOC or OSCAR since I've never bothered with it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Having to go to the root menu is too much, IMO. It'd be a bit better if the menu item were immediately visible, such as on the top of the list instead of the bottom, but having to tap the menu button several times then scroll down isn't the most brilliant nor the most obvious way to change the volume.
As for volume buttons, you should be familiar where they are on most any player after minimal usage. That is, if they're not already in an obvious configuration, i.e. the top one is up and the bottom one is down. Plus, most players will have good response time for just holding down the button for a short time. Much less movement than twirling your thumb around.
I've tried out friends' iPods and store models, and I have a burning question for everybody who talks about its "wonderful interface."
How the hell do you get back to the "Now Playing" screen after going into the menu? You can wait however long for it to automatically do that, but... that's seriously stupid, since you can only change the volume from the Now Playing screen. You should NEVER have to wait for the player to do its thing just so you can change the volume. If there is some way to get back quicker, I've missed it entirely, but until I figure it out, the iPod gets the Seal of Stupidity(TM).
I've also been able to try out a Rio Karma in the store, and I must say it is a pleasure to use. There are actual volume controls, and the thumbstick navigation is pretty nifty.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a demo model of one of the iRiver iHP players yet. Has anybody else come across one, and if so, what store was it?
And honestly, this new player is a lot better looking than the comparable portable video players I've seen in stores.
The wizard is also available from K Menu -> Utilities -> Desktop -> Desktop Settings Wizard. (At least on SuSE. I'm not certain if that's the KDE default location.) Of course, the settings are all available in the KDE Control Center, but that's still not as easily navigable as it ought to be.
So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).
That should be done anyway. It's annoying when I'm searching for information and the Google link goes straight to the Edit page of a Wiki. Yes, I can easily go to the regular page from there, but this will confuse many users, and it just looks tacky.
Funny. Windows doesn't make any claim of being a community-developed product, nor one that will "play nice" with competitors. Interfering with the user's ability to boot Windows just because MS does the same would be stooping to their level.
Fortunately, there's no indication that any such motives were at work here.
But, I also know that if I were releasing a distro, this would be a big issue for a reasonable portion of my consituency.
And that's the crux of the issue right there. I haven't booted Windows in months, mostly because it decided on its own to refuse to boot (or more specifically refuse to load the login screen) and I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. But dual-booting is still very important for many people out there, especially new Linux users.
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro.
*I* have always recommended against RH/Fedora. However, there are plenty of *other* people who are touting it, and thus there will continue to be people unfortunate enough to try Fedora.
At any rate, while I agree that in practice Fedora is nothing more than RHEL Beta, *they* promote it otherwise. The Fedora objectives include "emphasiz[ing] usability and a 'just works' philosophy" and "produc[ing] robust releases."
Fedora gets the abuse because they knew about the problem and chose to let it sit. If it's a kernel problem, that information should have been passed on to the kernel developers. But virtually no buzz about this was made until after the Fedora release. If other distro maintainers knew of the problem as well, then shame on them, but we *know* Fedora dropped the ball.
What does eyecandy have to do with it? Both LILO and GRUB have text and graphical modes.
LILO has its own problems. In my case, I switched to GRUB after LILO one day refused to boot Linux due to the "extended BIOS data area" being too big. I'm happy with GRUB, as kernel updates are much easier.
Maybe Fedora shouldn't have shipped with such a big bug that they had known about and decided was not important.
Whether or not the article author knew how to fix the problem isn't terribly relevant. If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro in hopes of eventually moving away from Windows, and the first thing it does is hose their MBR, they're not going to be happy campers.
BTW, if you're going to use Google results to make a point, it helps to use search terms that don't require you to already know the solution and the website it's on to find... the solution.
...and I don't seem to be able to open data CDs properly. Installing packages from YaST works fine, and I can open DVDs (viewing as a directory and playing in Kaffeine). I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that one.:/
Ok, I'm a retard. I tried several CDs, but they were all the installation CDs, since they were the closest at hand. But the install CDs automatically get mounted elsewhere, for proper YaST operation. Other data CDs work fine.
Slashdot Mirror
What also doesn't make sense is why they used client-side Javascript for the rotating screenshot image, when they're already doing server-side scripting to include the latest RSS information, or why they have the screenshot as the background image for a DIV instead of an inline IMG.
It's still a lovely layout though.
The Gay Games aren't naked though. :/
Moving on... I would guess the main reason that nobody is willing to invalidate this ludicrous trademark is that they fear it will affect their chances of hosting future Olympics.
SuSE released packages for RC2 the day it came out, and did the same here. They've been really great about updating KDE stuff, even more so in the last few months. Granted, it's in their "supplementary" (i.e. not officially supported) section, but it still works beautifully.
The KDE for RedHat project still has 3.3 packages in "unstable," though from the datestamps it looks as if they are of RC2.
No idea about Mandrake packages... too bad Texstar isn't doing the Mandrake thing anymore.
Except that the Genesis was 16-bit, and a direct competitor to the Super Nintendo. Which the article mentions explicitly.
Ha! So it is. Well, their previously featured interview was with Damon, so that's where the goof came from.
SuSE now has RC2 Binaries available, complete except for updated bindings and i18n. Packages are also available via apt. The page hasn't been updated, but the 3.3 RC2 RPMs are indeed there.
Still working on downloading everything, so I can't give my impression yet.
For those who were wondering, yes there was an RC1, but they intentionally didn't announce it. Apparently some major bugs were discovered after preparing the tarballs but before making the announcement, so they scrapped that and fixed the bugs to make RC2.
If you've seen Mandrake before, there's nothing new for you. I looked through all of them, and the first half or so of the screenshots were of the installer, followed by the first-run stuff, and the Mandrake Control Center categories. The only new thing I noticed was a user survey, and possibly some changes to the first-run wizards. There was one shot of Konqueror, but other than that no shots of running applications.
If you've never seen Mandrake before, you might want to go ahead and look, but for anybody else it's pretty much a waste of time. Plus it's hell on LinuxBeta's servers.
That said, a quick question for anybody who has installed this beta: Does Mandrake still use devfs, or have they finally moved to udev? That was one of my disappointments when I tried 10 Community.
Heh, I've been getting that for almost a month, but I keep putting off emailing them bitching because I kept telling myself I didn't have anything *that* groundbreaking to say, so it wasn't worth the trouble, and it'd be fixed in a few days anyway.
Yeah. But obviously if this shows up, I've finally been welcomed back. Hooray.
And honestly, I don't really mind the colors at all.
You know, some friends and I actually yelled that out after getting out of Return of the King. Nobody was paying much attention though. I think they were more focused on the huge line in front of them, and how cold it was out.
... it will be interesting to see what happens with Helix payer, now that you have Redhat & Real (two public companies) trumpeting this as the big thiong fro linux desktop - will they throw in the non-gpl codecs so that everything dances perfectly, or will they ship only the shell & support for things like OGG, dissapointing linux converts used to their OS supporting more flavours of multimedia ... ?
From the summary (not even the article):
Specifically, Red Hat and Novell will standardize on the 100% open source Helix Player as the leading multimedia framework for their Linux desktops, and will help qualify and distribute the superset RealPlayer 10 with their upcoming Linux desktop offerings.
That said, I still don't see any compelling reason to use Helix. Yes, there needs to be a standard multimedia framework, but why go with one still in its infancy when there are several excellent mature ones available?
Umm... what? Yes, you do have to get the Packman packages to play DVDs and the like, but how do you get that apt "barely works?"
Ditto for the "weak" dependency checker in YaST. If a package has dependencies improperly set then yes, it'll choke, but so will any package manager.
That's right, there's TOC and OSCAR. The AIM Express applet uses TOC since it's less complex, and so does Miranda IM (the major reason I never considered it worth my time) but otherwise every other AIM client I can think of uses OSCAR.
I don't know whether the official AIM RPM uses TOC or OSCAR since I've never bothered with it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Having to go to the root menu is too much, IMO. It'd be a bit better if the menu item were immediately visible, such as on the top of the list instead of the bottom, but having to tap the menu button several times then scroll down isn't the most brilliant nor the most obvious way to change the volume.
As for volume buttons, you should be familiar where they are on most any player after minimal usage. That is, if they're not already in an obvious configuration, i.e. the top one is up and the bottom one is down. Plus, most players will have good response time for just holding down the button for a short time. Much less movement than twirling your thumb around.
I've tried out friends' iPods and store models, and I have a burning question for everybody who talks about its "wonderful interface."
How the hell do you get back to the "Now Playing" screen after going into the menu? You can wait however long for it to automatically do that, but... that's seriously stupid, since you can only change the volume from the Now Playing screen. You should NEVER have to wait for the player to do its thing just so you can change the volume. If there is some way to get back quicker, I've missed it entirely, but until I figure it out, the iPod gets the Seal of Stupidity(TM).
I've also been able to try out a Rio Karma in the store, and I must say it is a pleasure to use. There are actual volume controls, and the thumbstick navigation is pretty nifty.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a demo model of one of the iRiver iHP players yet. Has anybody else come across one, and if so, what store was it?
And honestly, this new player is a lot better looking than the comparable portable video players I've seen in stores.
The wizard is also available from K Menu -> Utilities -> Desktop -> Desktop Settings Wizard. (At least on SuSE. I'm not certain if that's the KDE default location.) Of course, the settings are all available in the KDE Control Center, but that's still not as easily navigable as it ought to be.
So what's needed is careful set up in the robots.txt file and other HTML clues for the web crawlers to exclude anything but the most current version of a page (and to skip over the other 'action' pages, like edits, etc).
That should be done anyway. It's annoying when I'm searching for information and the Google link goes straight to the Edit page of a Wiki. Yes, I can easily go to the regular page from there, but this will confuse many users, and it just looks tacky.
Funny. Windows doesn't make any claim of being a community-developed product, nor one that will "play nice" with competitors. Interfering with the user's ability to boot Windows just because MS does the same would be stooping to their level.
Fortunately, there's no indication that any such motives were at work here.
But, I also know that if I were releasing a distro, this would be a big issue for a reasonable portion of my consituency.
And that's the crux of the issue right there. I haven't booted Windows in months, mostly because it decided on its own to refuse to boot (or more specifically refuse to load the login screen) and I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. But dual-booting is still very important for many people out there, especially new Linux users.
Then it is YOUR job as a Linux geek to steer that friend to a newbie friendly distro.
*I* have always recommended against RH/Fedora. However, there are plenty of *other* people who are touting it, and thus there will continue to be people unfortunate enough to try Fedora.
At any rate, while I agree that in practice Fedora is nothing more than RHEL Beta, *they* promote it otherwise. The Fedora objectives include "emphasiz[ing] usability and a 'just works' philosophy" and "produc[ing] robust releases."
Fedora gets the abuse because they knew about the problem and chose to let it sit. If it's a kernel problem, that information should have been passed on to the kernel developers. But virtually no buzz about this was made until after the Fedora release. If other distro maintainers knew of the problem as well, then shame on them, but we *know* Fedora dropped the ball.
What does eyecandy have to do with it? Both LILO and GRUB have text and graphical modes.
LILO has its own problems. In my case, I switched to GRUB after LILO one day refused to boot Linux due to the "extended BIOS data area" being too big. I'm happy with GRUB, as kernel updates are much easier.
Maybe Fedora shouldn't have shipped with such a big bug that they had known about and decided was not important.
Whether or not the article author knew how to fix the problem isn't terribly relevant. If someone is making their first shot at installing a Linux distro in hopes of eventually moving away from Windows, and the first thing it does is hose their MBR, they're not going to be happy campers.
BTW, if you're going to use Google results to make a point, it helps to use search terms that don't require you to already know the solution and the website it's on to find... the solution.
REM "It's the End of the World as We Know It"
I'm laughing, but I'm crying on the inside. What the fuck?
You'd be right that Mozilla is an exception - userContent.css works just as well in Mail/Thunderbird.
Santa told me he loved only me. That cheating bastard!
...and I don't seem to be able to open data CDs properly. Installing packages from YaST works fine, and I can open DVDs (viewing as a directory and playing in Kaffeine). I'm going to have to figure out how to fix that one. :/
Ok, I'm a retard. I tried several CDs, but they were all the installation CDs, since they were the closest at hand. But the install CDs automatically get mounted elsewhere, for proper YaST operation. Other data CDs work fine.