Damn it, another article on the main page to rack up 900 posts of people screaming about DRM and why linux is so much better and why microsoft is evil. This article becomes flamebait the second it's link is posted here.
So in keeping with what I saw the other day, place all comments not about how DRM and microsoft are evil below this line:
Or does anyone feel almost betrayed by Linspire? Alright, maybe not betrayed, but bamboozled. Initially, they said they were going to revolutionize linux and make it easy for everyone and thus promote linux as a whole as a real competitor to windows and mac os.
But they had problems with their name that was clearly to rip off windows. They promised full compatibility with windows apps, but that never mounted to much that crossover and I guess wine can't do. Their software distribution is a pay for free software system. They charge $100 a year for free software. All their system provides is an easier Apt-get. Now they're catering to the AOL crowd. That's not so much as a negative, more like a joke, but I find it funny nonetheless.
They charge what? $130 for Linspire? I may be wrong, but I know it's up there. Shit, oem windows adds roughly $40 to a computer. I use linux, but I'd almost recommend people who want a cheap computer buy one with windows and let me secure it with firefox, adaware, and norton.
Maybe some people really like Linspire, but I always get the feeling they just repackaged debian with little innovation and are trying to pass it off as something revolutionary.
Anyone else feel the same or know of stories about people who bought these walmart computers with this OS preloaded?
Well it depends on where they live. When I'm at my apartment at college, I rely on my cell phone that gets great coverage.
When I'm home, however, I get shoddy coverage at best. In order to check my voicemail I have to go outside and walk around until I get a signal. What makes it worse is that I'm in the most densely populated state, but there's a huge friggen mountain between me and the tower.
When cell coverage gets better, people will consider dropping their lines. But until it's 99% reliable, people won't.
All that does is just add support for the device though. It doesn't control how it's used to is able to adjust it's settings. Enabling USB mass storage doesn't mean I can plug in a pen drive and expect it to automount and work.
No. This is still an idea. I would like to see developers discuss this idea and figure out how to do it first. There is a lot to this that I haven't thought of, but discussing it with people would fix those problems.
If someone tried to take something like this on their own and just start coding, they'd get no where.
Yeah one part is a driver. The other part is a control method such as a collection of scripts that's unified across a larger platform.
For example, all digital cameras should have several standard functions. Download the pictures, add pictures, delete pictures. The manufacturer or someone in their spare time as it seems to be would set up their device to do that and only that.
Scanners also have similar actions. I'm sure that for the existing drivers, these already exist. I can use digikam that uses gphoto and it does this well. But if I'm a manufacturer I have to decide what how to get the camera to work with linux. Do I try to get a driver in the kernel? Make one for gphoto or some other project? Give it just to the distros to put in their own camera accessing program? This confusion and complication is what I am trying to help.
I feel it's on topic because some hardware is not compatible with linux because the manufacturers don't want to deal with the complicated process of getting their drivers to work with linux. Anyone who's ever configured an NVIDIA graphics card knows what I'm talking about.
Thank you for clearing that up. My experience with fedora is very limited, but I thought I'd mention it anyway just in case I was right. Bad move on my part I suppose.
No that is too unintuitive for most people. Plus it requires recompiling the kernel and then dealing with installing the kernel and configuring the bootloader. That is way too technical for most people and that's not something they should be expected to do to install USB mass storage so they can use their pen drive.
I'm talking about removing some drivers from the kernel's "menuconfig" and into an interface that people can easily use.
I agree. If the manufacturer has some secret technology that makes my scanner better than the competition and will only release a binary driver, then I'll gladly install it to use it. Take NVIDIA for example, they don't release the source code, but the installer "compiles" a kernel module so the user can take advantage of the 3d acceleration that they bought.
I'd rather see hardware supported by closed source drivers than getting stuck with a $200 paperweight because I bought a camera, and THEN switched to linux.
Binary drivers used to cause a lot of problems with windows. But Microsoft and the manufacturers got better and hence no more BSODs (despite the bad jokes that still exist here).
Since the kernel is open, I think it could be easier for manufacturers to develop drivers as opposed to writing them for windows.
I had this idea the other day and I'm going to rehash it on this thread. Maybe it's redundant or overreaching, but I'll try and relate it in words anyway.
A set of standards called "Desktop Linux". From a PHB and marketing viewpoint, it makes sense. Nothing to do with servers or embeded systems or that old 486 dhcp server sitting in someone's basement. It's just a concept that represents the computer that sits in people's homes and cubical.
So the idea I'm kicking around is a set of standards. As far as the end user is concerned, the heart of this is a GUI interface similar to what distros include in their base install. The Mandrake control center comes to mind, but I hear YaST and Yum (I may be wrong on that one) are similar to this. I'm proposing a common "control center" where all the hardware that the user is concerned with such as scanners, cameras, mice, printers, graphics card, monitor, USB drives, Firewire drives, etc can be controlled and configured from. Hardware other than that like IDE controllers, USB controllers, internal hard drives, and other devices people generally don't have to worry about that are either hidden or not existent in this at all. This control center is independent of window mangers so gnome, kde, and icewm for example would not have to worry about it directly, just interfacing with it.
The goal is to be able to walk into a store like best buy, see a little sticker on the box of a printer that says "Desktop Linux Compliant" and to purchase it knowing it's promised to work with their computer. So they take it home, out of the box, plug it in and something in the background like hotplug detects it first. It passes that information along to the control center. The control center informs the user of it's detection and either downloads the driver or asks for the CD the manufacture included.
I know that sounds too good to be true, but let's pretend it's still possible.
The manufacturer doesn't have to worry about supporting all linux distros and platforms, just the "Desktop Linux" standard. Their drivers are just modules in this control center. Printer modules can then connect up to something like cups to do the rest of the work.
What makes this special is that as long as distros and manufacturers are compliant with these standards, everything should work properly. Drivers can be compiled for i386 or some other low common denominator or just delivered as source for simplicity.
Same idea for a usb flash drive. It's inserted and the control center mounts it and opens up a konqueror window and displays it's contents. It's up to KDE to provide that part. The control center just gets the information from hotplug, mounts it, and tells the window manager to open a window.
This whole concept is where open source should try to be. Central and enforced standards. The control center is probably just a bunch of interfaces for the distro, hardware maker, kernel, and window manager. But the goal is to bring them all together in one central location that's easy to use.
I'm not suggesting to rewrite hotplug, cups, samba, or sane, but just to agree on a simple yet powerful interface for the user to trust. Hardware makers could develop modules for the control center that would be standard across all platforms and window managers.
This still preserves one of the initial goals of linux to be customizable and compact. If someone doesn't want "Desktop Linux" then they don't have to install it. But distros would like this idea so they don't have to repeat the work SuSE and Mandrake did to get a scanner working. It also allows people to use lighter window managers because the hardware controlling ability in KDE is a reason I use it.
So that's the idea I'm kicking around. Comment as you wish. I'll admit I don't know the technical difficulties this might entail, but distributing it across hardware, distros, and window managers could make it feasible.
Gentoo 2004.2 isn't much different than 2004.0 as far as I can tell. Some updated packages and a little better hardware support. Remember that with Gentoo, official releases aren't that important because of how it's designed. At any time anyone can run some commands to completely update their system. When people complain about how difficult it is to install, you have to keep in mind that you'll only need to do it once.
And it's not difficult to install, it just takes time.
I was just basing that on the bling fact of those peak transfer rates. I have that oxford chip in mine IIRC. It was an optional upgrade for a few bucks and I guess it was a good purchase.
Re:Depnds on the time for which you want to store
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 2
Just out of curiosity, why do you say tape drives are good for long term backups? What about them makes them last longer? I would have chosen good optical discs for long term storage as long as they're kept in dark dry places.
Maybe I'm just operating on past experience with floppies and I don't trust anything magnetic and plastic for long periods of time.
I mainly use my laptop so internal storage is nearly out of the question. Last summer I purchased an external firewire drive. It's basically just an enclosure with a firewire to EIDE connector and a regular 3.5 inch hard drive. This summer I had to upgrade the drive and it was no trouble at all.
My laptop doesn't have USB 2.0, but it did have firewire so that's why I chose firewire. It will work fine in windows and linux. I formatted it as FAT32. Now while that's not the best thing to do for a 160 GB drive, it ensures that windows and linux have no trouble reading it.
USB 2.0 is probably a good alternative if you already have it. I would look around for just an enclosure with the firewire or USB connectors and then get a good hard drive from a reputable manufacturer.
I could see the armed forces buying some of these. When it's 130 degrees F in Iraq, this could go well. I could see someone who's about to die of heatstroke enjoy one of these kept in his gear. I'm sure they wouldn't pack a lot of these since they have to be careful of packing too much, but this could be useful in emergencies.
Wow, slashdot has become waaay too liberal. I quit.
Better yet, I surrender.
Re:Glad to see it's still around
on
Enlightenment Lives
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· Score: 0, Redundant
It may be innovative, but in my opinion it's too ugly to use. I'm sorry if this is trolling or just being a dick, but it's hard to look at. Maybe I'm used to KDE or xfce4, but do people who use it prefer it's default look over the default look of other wm's? Or is that because it's so customizable the default interface is quickly altered to appeal to tastes?
I'm not a big fan of KDE's keramik, but I find this interface too ugly to be usable. Sorry, that's my opinion.
But on the other side, it's good to see small projects like this stay alive. It's good to see how the community can press on even when they're not backed by wealthy investors. So I guess that craps on my complaint. If I don't like it, who gives a shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn it, another article on the main page to rack up 900 posts of people screaming about DRM and why linux is so much better and why microsoft is evil. This article becomes flamebait the second it's link is posted here.
So in keeping with what I saw the other day, place all comments not about how DRM and microsoft are evil below this line:
_______________________________________________
Or does anyone feel almost betrayed by Linspire? Alright, maybe not betrayed, but bamboozled. Initially, they said they were going to revolutionize linux and make it easy for everyone and thus promote linux as a whole as a real competitor to windows and mac os.
But they had problems with their name that was clearly to rip off windows. They promised full compatibility with windows apps, but that never mounted to much that crossover and I guess wine can't do. Their software distribution is a pay for free software system. They charge $100 a year for free software. All their system provides is an easier Apt-get. Now they're catering to the AOL crowd. That's not so much as a negative, more like a joke, but I find it funny nonetheless.
They charge what? $130 for Linspire? I may be wrong, but I know it's up there. Shit, oem windows adds roughly $40 to a computer. I use linux, but I'd almost recommend people who want a cheap computer buy one with windows and let me secure it with firefox, adaware, and norton.
Maybe some people really like Linspire, but I always get the feeling they just repackaged debian with little innovation and are trying to pass it off as something revolutionary.
Anyone else feel the same or know of stories about people who bought these walmart computers with this OS preloaded?
Where's Silent Bob when you need him?
It's nice to see woman visit this site, but please keep those details to a minimum.
Well it depends on where they live. When I'm at my apartment at college, I rely on my cell phone that gets great coverage.
When I'm home, however, I get shoddy coverage at best. In order to check my voicemail I have to go outside and walk around until I get a signal. What makes it worse is that I'm in the most densely populated state, but there's a huge friggen mountain between me and the tower.
When cell coverage gets better, people will consider dropping their lines. But until it's 99% reliable, people won't.
All that does is just add support for the device though. It doesn't control how it's used to is able to adjust it's settings. Enabling USB mass storage doesn't mean I can plug in a pen drive and expect it to automount and work.
No. This is still an idea. I would like to see developers discuss this idea and figure out how to do it first. There is a lot to this that I haven't thought of, but discussing it with people would fix those problems.
If someone tried to take something like this on their own and just start coding, they'd get no where.
Yeah one part is a driver. The other part is a control method such as a collection of scripts that's unified across a larger platform.
For example, all digital cameras should have several standard functions. Download the pictures, add pictures, delete pictures. The manufacturer or someone in their spare time as it seems to be would set up their device to do that and only that.
Scanners also have similar actions. I'm sure that for the existing drivers, these already exist. I can use digikam that uses gphoto and it does this well. But if I'm a manufacturer I have to decide what how to get the camera to work with linux. Do I try to get a driver in the kernel? Make one for gphoto or some other project? Give it just to the distros to put in their own camera accessing program? This confusion and complication is what I am trying to help.
I feel it's on topic because some hardware is not compatible with linux because the manufacturers don't want to deal with the complicated process of getting their drivers to work with linux. Anyone who's ever configured an NVIDIA graphics card knows what I'm talking about.
Thank you for clearing that up. My experience with fedora is very limited, but I thought I'd mention it anyway just in case I was right. Bad move on my part I suppose.
No that is too unintuitive for most people. Plus it requires recompiling the kernel and then dealing with installing the kernel and configuring the bootloader. That is way too technical for most people and that's not something they should be expected to do to install USB mass storage so they can use their pen drive.
I'm talking about removing some drivers from the kernel's "menuconfig" and into an interface that people can easily use.
I agree. If the manufacturer has some secret technology that makes my scanner better than the competition and will only release a binary driver, then I'll gladly install it to use it. Take NVIDIA for example, they don't release the source code, but the installer "compiles" a kernel module so the user can take advantage of the 3d acceleration that they bought.
I'd rather see hardware supported by closed source drivers than getting stuck with a $200 paperweight because I bought a camera, and THEN switched to linux.
Binary drivers used to cause a lot of problems with windows. But Microsoft and the manufacturers got better and hence no more BSODs (despite the bad jokes that still exist here).
Since the kernel is open, I think it could be easier for manufacturers to develop drivers as opposed to writing them for windows.
I had this idea the other day and I'm going to rehash it on this thread. Maybe it's redundant or overreaching, but I'll try and relate it in words anyway.
A set of standards called "Desktop Linux". From a PHB and marketing viewpoint, it makes sense. Nothing to do with servers or embeded systems or that old 486 dhcp server sitting in someone's basement. It's just a concept that represents the computer that sits in people's homes and cubical.
So the idea I'm kicking around is a set of standards. As far as the end user is concerned, the heart of this is a GUI interface similar to what distros include in their base install. The Mandrake control center comes to mind, but I hear YaST and Yum (I may be wrong on that one) are similar to this. I'm proposing a common "control center" where all the hardware that the user is concerned with such as scanners, cameras, mice, printers, graphics card, monitor, USB drives, Firewire drives, etc can be controlled and configured from. Hardware other than that like IDE controllers, USB controllers, internal hard drives, and other devices people generally don't have to worry about that are either hidden or not existent in this at all. This control center is independent of window mangers so gnome, kde, and icewm for example would not have to worry about it directly, just interfacing with it.
The goal is to be able to walk into a store like best buy, see a little sticker on the box of a printer that says "Desktop Linux Compliant" and to purchase it knowing it's promised to work with their computer. So they take it home, out of the box, plug it in and something in the background like hotplug detects it first. It passes that information along to the control center. The control center informs the user of it's detection and either downloads the driver or asks for the CD the manufacture included.
I know that sounds too good to be true, but let's pretend it's still possible.
The manufacturer doesn't have to worry about supporting all linux distros and platforms, just the "Desktop Linux" standard. Their drivers are just modules in this control center. Printer modules can then connect up to something like cups to do the rest of the work.
What makes this special is that as long as distros and manufacturers are compliant with these standards, everything should work properly. Drivers can be compiled for i386 or some other low common denominator or just delivered as source for simplicity.
Same idea for a usb flash drive. It's inserted and the control center mounts it and opens up a konqueror window and displays it's contents. It's up to KDE to provide that part. The control center just gets the information from hotplug, mounts it, and tells the window manager to open a window.
This whole concept is where open source should try to be. Central and enforced standards. The control center is probably just a bunch of interfaces for the distro, hardware maker, kernel, and window manager. But the goal is to bring them all together in one central location that's easy to use.
I'm not suggesting to rewrite hotplug, cups, samba, or sane, but just to agree on a simple yet powerful interface for the user to trust. Hardware makers could develop modules for the control center that would be standard across all platforms and window managers.
This still preserves one of the initial goals of linux to be customizable and compact. If someone doesn't want "Desktop Linux" then they don't have to install it. But distros would like this idea so they don't have to repeat the work SuSE and Mandrake did to get a scanner working. It also allows people to use lighter window managers because the hardware controlling ability in KDE is a reason I use it.
So that's the idea I'm kicking around. Comment as you wish. I'll admit I don't know the technical difficulties this might entail, but distributing it across hardware, distros, and window managers could make it feasible.
Who cares? So Microsoft is paying for ad space on this website. I'd rather they pay than me. Consider it my return on investment.
Gentoo 2004.2 isn't much different than 2004.0 as far as I can tell. Some updated packages and a little better hardware support. Remember that with Gentoo, official releases aren't that important because of how it's designed. At any time anyone can run some commands to completely update their system. When people complain about how difficult it is to install, you have to keep in mind that you'll only need to do it once.
And it's not difficult to install, it just takes time.
Man, you must have had a rough childhood. I remember doing chores when I was thirteen, but I never had "quotas."
In 8 years Linus is going to make a huge gamble and try to overthrow Microsoft by betting against them in craps.
Informative.
I was just basing that on the bling fact of those peak transfer rates. I have that oxford chip in mine IIRC. It was an optional upgrade for a few bucks and I guess it was a good purchase.
Just out of curiosity, why do you say tape drives are good for long term backups? What about them makes them last longer? I would have chosen good optical discs for long term storage as long as they're kept in dark dry places.
Maybe I'm just operating on past experience with floppies and I don't trust anything magnetic and plastic for long periods of time.
I mainly use my laptop so internal storage is nearly out of the question. Last summer I purchased an external firewire drive. It's basically just an enclosure with a firewire to EIDE connector and a regular 3.5 inch hard drive. This summer I had to upgrade the drive and it was no trouble at all.
My laptop doesn't have USB 2.0, but it did have firewire so that's why I chose firewire. It will work fine in windows and linux. I formatted it as FAT32. Now while that's not the best thing to do for a 160 GB drive, it ensures that windows and linux have no trouble reading it.
USB 2.0 is probably a good alternative if you already have it. I would look around for just an enclosure with the firewire or USB connectors and then get a good hard drive from a reputable manufacturer.
But what do you do when dell ships one format? People aren't going to buy from a different OEM just because of the dvd writer standard.
I could see the armed forces buying some of these. When it's 130 degrees F in Iraq, this could go well. I could see someone who's about to die of heatstroke enjoy one of these kept in his gear. I'm sure they wouldn't pack a lot of these since they have to be careful of packing too much, but this could be useful in emergencies.
Wow, slashdot has become waaay too liberal. I quit.
Better yet, I surrender.
It may be innovative, but in my opinion it's too ugly to use. I'm sorry if this is trolling or just being a dick, but it's hard to look at. Maybe I'm used to KDE or xfce4, but do people who use it prefer it's default look over the default look of other wm's? Or is that because it's so customizable the default interface is quickly altered to appeal to tastes?
I'm not a big fan of KDE's keramik, but I find this interface too ugly to be usable. Sorry, that's my opinion.
But on the other side, it's good to see small projects like this stay alive. It's good to see how the community can press on even when they're not backed by wealthy investors. So I guess that craps on my complaint. If I don't like it, who gives a shit.
Go Enlightenment!
I'm talking about linux on the desktop. I'm sure linux is kicking ass for servers. Does this statistic include servers?